We sat down with our Customer Success Manager Liz Theakston to discuss her transition from event management to healthcare, the challenges and assumptions to tackle when rolling out a product, and key learnings from working with NHS customers.
“I think that to develop what we can do, we can only do it with the clinicians themselves.
Clinician engagement and having a clinical champion is a massive part of what we need in order to progress as a product and a business.”
Liz Theakson, Customer Success Manager
Can you tell us a little about your background before you joined Feedback Medical?
I worked in event management for 25 years; I started when I was 21 years old and I was working in events all the way up until the pandemic then overnight I lost my job.
I was a freelancer so when in-person events were all cancelled I spent a bit of time thinking about what alternative career I could move into and the kinds of roles I wanted to do in the future. I set up a couple of independent businesses, one connected businesses with charities to undertake conservation days, and the other was a hamper business – it was lockdown so lots of Christmas parties were being held online!
An acquaintance suggested that I go for the role in customer management at Feedback Medical; my experience as an event manager meant looking after important stakeholders such as sponsors, exhibitors and delegates throughout the process and these customer management skills were transferrable to the role.
I had worked on a few medical conferences during my time in events but I had a fair bit to learn about the NHS. In the meantime I focused on what I had learnt about looking after people and making them feel supported, comfortable and happy.
When I started at Feedback my role initially was to look after our primary customer at the time, the Northern Care Alliance. I worked closely with our key contact who conducted the training for our product Bleepa and visited all the different wards with him to understand what people wanted to learn in terms of how to use Bleepa. Not only was I able to teach them about the features and benefits of Bleepa but I also learned a lot about how they were using it on a day-to-day basis.
The idea was to offer support to the clinicians and that’s morphed into what I focus on now – looking after our different customer sites, supporting the clinicians with how to get the best out of Bleepa, working with the digital teams, and helping to implement pathways from beginning to end.
What would you describe as the biggest challenges with working with customers like the NHS?
When I first started, I only really had knowledge of the corporate world; I dealt with people who built shopping centres, ran PR agencies or even ran charities, but they all had that corporate angle.
So, when it came to working with the NHS I made a massive assumption, which I think many members of the public also do.
I assumed that hospitals within a trust would have unifying systems that all talk to each other. However, I quickly realised that every single trust pretty much uses a different set of IT and digital tools, which was surprising and can be a real challenge to navigate round at times.
I’ve learnt that from the start you need to sit down with the customer and map out what they are trying to achieve and what systems they need Bleepa to integrate with. It can depend on the specialty as to what tests they are looking to receive but we can provide a whole host of diagnostic tests, such as MRI, CT, X ray, angiogram, spirometry, blood results, ultrasound and so on.
We’re very lucky because we have real experts like Thomas [Spankie, Head of Integration] in understanding how integrations work to bring all of these systems together.
I’ve worked with some great clinicians but I also recognise how incredibly busy they are and that can be a big challenge. They’re working in hospital buildings that are often quite old and not particularly comfortable places, responding to a huge volume of sick people. They simply don’t have a huge amount of time on their hands.
This means it’s a challenge initially to block out time with clinicians just to sit and speak with them about the system but, once you’re able to have that discussion (and provide some cake), I have found on the whole clinicians to be very responsive, very proactive and very interested in giving us feedback, which is incredibly valuable.
But there’s also a challenge for them in terms of being able to champion and implement new platforms when there are so many systems they’re already using. It can be a real chicken and egg situation where there’s just no downtime for clinicians, which means they’ve got no opportunity to really affect change that could give them back more time because they’re so busy.
How do we work with clients to ensure success when rolling out Bleepa?
The great thing about the way that we work is that we are a collaborative company. All the projects that I’ve ever worked on are very much based around working with the clinicians and the digital team as a strong project working group from the start.
If there’s an agreement that’s been put in place to implement a pathway, for example, we sit with those clinicians and with the digital team and craft the pathway with them. That’s the great thing about Bleepa; it’s very malleable and we’re able to configure things like referral forms and clinical questions to meet customer needs and shape to specific pathways.
Our collaborative process continues from beginning to end; we set up weekly progress meetings and make sure that we essentially work as part of an integrated team with the hospital or other care provider and we stay in that team all the way through roll out.
This continues after a rollout is completed; when it then moves into business as usual, I’ll still be looking after them on a regular basis, continuing to meet as a team and looking at how to develop and change what we’re doing, so the project doesn’t end when the pathway is live.
What have you learnt from customer deployments so far and how are you using those learnings to improve?
I think that in order to explore and develop the extent of what Bleepa can do and how we can support the NHS to improve, we can only achieve this with the clinicians themselves.
Clinician engagement and having a clinical champion is a massive part of what we need in order to progress as a product and a business.
I think communication and honesty are really important; ensuring that we listen to feedback and take that on board and, if we can’t affect change straight away, making sure that it is fed back to the product development team so that they know to reflect it on the road map.
We are constantly listening to our customers. Over the last four years I’ve been with Feedback, what I’ve really understood is that Bleepa has evolved as a product based on our customer feedback.
Whilst clinicians are very busy people, if they’ve got an opinion or an idea, they will say it, and it’s important for us to listen and hear that because they’re effectively the people using our product and seeing what it can do for them. So they’re the people we need to listen to the most.