Last week, we brought dozens of healthcare leaders together in downtown Indianapolis for Voices23, the inaugural Authenticx Summit. Here are some key highlights and takeaways from the event.
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On Tuesday, September 26, the Authenticx team kicked off Voices23, a gathering of client and prospective-client leaders from provider, payer, and life sciences organizations across the country. Over two days at the Bottleworks Hotel in downtown Indianapolis, Authenticx leaders, customers, and visionary guest speakers forged connections and explored the Next Era of Customer Listening.
Each and every session from Voices23 left its mark on the way that the healthcare industry uses AI to listen at scale, capturing conversation-driven insights to drive change. In this post, we’ll provide a play-by-play summary of the summit.
Interested in more Voices content? Check out the event photo gallery and stay connected on planning and opportunities for next year’s summit.
Day 1
Pre-Summit Workshop: Inciting Action Through Data-Backed Storytelling
What forms an effective data-backed story, and how can healthcare leaders use storytelling to communicate insights that motivate and persuade? Authenticx expert storyteller Sally Perkins kicked off Voices23 programming with these questions, facilitating a hands-on morning workshop for CX, marketing, and operations leaders. Guided by a combination of privacy-redacted audio montages from real patient conversations and data from the Authenticx platform, the group explored not only why storytelling matters, but also how to find, craft, and tell stories that drive action in their businesses. Leveraging data-backed storytelling is a lifelong skill that can be developed like any other, stressed Perkins, but it requires intentional structure and practice: the top reason companies cite for not using data-backed storytelling is that they lack people with storytelling skills.
The Next Era of Customer Listening
Authenticx founder and CEO Amy Brown welcomed the summit audience to Voices23 in her opening afternoon keynote, highlighting the power and importance of listening with a historical anecdote about the events leading up to the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. The story of the Challenger and Roger Boisjoly, a mechanical engineer whose strenuous warnings about an impending O-ring system failure went unheard by NASA leadership, prompted Brown to do some deep thinking about the similarly high-stakes healthcare industry. What would it look like for organizations and their customers if we could hear differently or hear more? This paradigm shift, she explained, is already happening: by combining cutting-edge technology that allows us to explore and discover more than ever before with inspired humans on a mission to drive change. Healthcare has entered the Next Era of Customer Listening.
Roundtables: The Next Era of Customer Listening
Following CEO Amy Brown’s keynote call-to-action, Voices23 attendees split up into roundtable groups to further investigate the four pillars of the next era of customer listening: AI for Healthcare, Exploration and Discovery, Data-Backed Storytelling, and Actionable Insights. Attendees formed new connections with leaders both inside and out of their vertical or focus area, collaboratively imagining what problems or risks could be mitigated if the healthcare industry were able to fully embrace this new paradigm. And in true Authenticx fashion, the roundtables proved to be a data-rich exercise: members of the Authenticx Professional Services team facilitated the discussion and collected hundreds of data points to benchmark and inform.
Success Stories: Conversational AI in Action
After wrapping up roundtables, Authenticx VP of Professional Services Susan Brown welcomed four Authenticx clients to the Voices23 stage. Using a TED-style presentation format, each shared their experiences of bringing conversational intelligence to the forefront through partnership with Authenticx.
A patient services quality and compliance executive at a top life sciences manufacturer highlighted the impact of expanding their organization’s listening framework to include AI and machine learning, scaling to over 100 unique services that are actively listened to, monitored and analyzed. A director at a large regional health system shared how her team worked with Authenticx to highlight and solve customer friction points viewed through a single lens across the organization, aiding the centralization of their Nurse Triage Line. At a leading payer organization, a customer experience executive led the initiative to scale Quality programs, bolstering a largely manual QA process with the Authenticx platform to drastically scale listening volume. And the executive overseeing patient support and hub operations at another leading pharmaceutical manufacturer outlined her efforts to use listening to inform vendor quality and onboarding, as well as to identify process-related barriers by focusing on interactions occurring throughout the entire patient journey.
“Our industry is evolving, and we’re collectively no longer just auditors,” noted one client speaker: “We must embrace technology and shift to become insights generators, delivering the information that employees and customers need to be successful.”
Product Fireside Chat
Tuesday afternoon’s final Voices23 session brought together Authenticx CEO Amy Brown and Chief Product Officer Eric Prugh to discuss the product innovations that Authenticx is delivering at the forefront of the Next Era of Customer Listening. “The world is constantly changing, and we’re discovering new things by the day,” noted Prugh. “When we think about iterating from a product perspective, there is no ‘done.’ Conversations are infinite in showing us that there are no impossibilities.” Optimism notwithstanding, both Prugh and Brown stressed the importance of responsible skepticism amid the current AI hype cycle. While Authenticx has built the only platform and professional services organization to empower customer- and agent-focused listening at scale for healthcare enterprises, AI isn’t a “magic bullet:” operators must understand the models and logic that power their efforts, as well as the humans who continually train and update those models.
What does that work look like at Authenticx? Prugh unveiled three new innovations that help healthcare leaders marry customer centricity with tangible business outcomes: new elements of a Core Business Toolkit that enables users to leverage both the Eddy Effect™ and conversation summaries anywhere the business needs them; a totally reimagined experience for exploring and discovering conversations; and the release of new proprietary AI models, including Generative AI that can optimize summarization and create content based on unstructured data like calls and chats.
Day 2
The Hidden Motivation Behind Behaviors
After an evening filled with food, networking, and arcade games in Indianapolis’ Bottleworks District, Voices23 programming resumed on Wednesday morning with a guest keynote address from Sparky Witte, who serves as VP of Professional Services at Live Neuron Labs. Working within the framework of applied behavioral science, Witte has spent his career focused on applying scientific research to develop large-scale programs that help people and organizations make better choices and improve their lives, communities, and the world.
Throughout this work, Witte has sought to better understand a universal, uncomfortable truth: Humans do a lot of things that don’t make sense. They skip appointments. They ignore clear procedures. They even ignore medical advice. And none of us are immune. We all struggle to make good choices, even when we know those choices are best for us. The reason for this? Most decisions aren’t driven by rational thought: they’re driven by emotions. Witte used this revelation to guide the Voices23 audience through an exploration of Emotional ROI, the model that he uses to evaluate — and subtly nudge — the emotional pros and cons that drive decisions. Beyond theory, Witte also emphasized action: the group walked through real-life healthcare customer scenarios, highlighting opportunities for improved messaging and tips to overcome “post-hoc rationalization,” or the natural tendency to evaluate behavior after crucial emotional responses have dissolved.
What is Really Causing All Those Eddies?
Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel joined Sally Perkins for a unique afternoon general session at Voices23, in which the pair shared the results of a months-long, data-driven study around customer friction points (here at Authenticx, we call this The Eddy Effect™). Throughout the hundreds of millions of conversations analyzed by Authenticx to date, the Eddy Effect™ is present in about 20% of interactions – meaning that each year, millions of customers find themselves stuck in a recurring problem, often oscillating between confusing or conflicting touchpoints along their care journey. By analyzing a large, statistically valid sample of these conversations, Pagel, Perkins, and the Authenticx team sought to uncover the root causes of this disruption, providing leaders with actionable steps to address and mitigate the far-reaching effects.
Throughout their research, the Authenticx team found that Eddies are typically caused by some combination of three main drivers: people, processes, and technology — but the prevalence of each might surprise you. Processes contribute to the vast majority of healthcare Eddies: in fact, nearly 85% of the study’s friction points were driven by the processes and procedures we collectively create. Further, those process-related Eddies quickly become a people problem, and while technology has the power to help create visibility, it can often compound process disruptions, rather than help alleviate them. And at the end of the day, the Authenticx study found that no matter the healthcare vertical, unresolved Eddies create a high-stakes cycle of friction that disproportionately falls to physicians and patients (i.e., members, for payer organizations).
“We know that we cannot afford to ignore Eddies either in terms of the health of our businesses or the health of those we love,” concluded Pagel. “But we can build on the work that we’ve already started, and we can use conversational data to drive process improvements, transparency, and lasting change.”
Post-Summit Product Workshop
Authenticx wrapped up the Voices23 summit on Wednesday afternoon with a hands-on product workshop session led by Eric Prugh. With laptops in tow and a specialized demo environment configured, participants navigated a variety of product use cases and explored the key pillars of the Authenticx product roadmap, including models that increase HIPAA compliance, workflows to identify and proactively communicate safety events, and search and find topics in conversational data using generative AI.
Interested in joining us next year at Voices? Have an idea for a session or speaker? Stay connected on planning and opportunities for next year’s summit.
About Authenticx
Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes. In 2023, Authenticx was ranked No. 349 on the Inc. 5000 recognized as one of America and Indiana’s fastest-growing private companies.
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