I had the pleasure of sitting down with Laerdal's Mike Evans, Director of Customer Care and Analytics, and Brian Strock, CX Program Manager, to discuss their experience with Sturdy. Laerdal, a multinational company with nearly 2000 employees in 26 countries, develops products and programs for healthcare providers, voluntary organizations, educational institutions, hospitals, and the military worldwide. Laerdal first deployed Sturdy in 2022, then extended its relationship with Sturdy in 2023 and expanded in new divisions and territories, bringing insights to hundreds of their employees daily.
The conversation kicked off with a revelation when Mike shared,
"Before Sturdy, at max, we were getting feedback from 5% of our customer base. What about the other 95%?"
I anticipated a firey follow-up, so I smiled and let Mike continue.
"It doesn't matter what the NPS score is because all the information is scattered everywhere. Everyone relies on surveys and is pointed in the wrong direction entirely. You're seeing a tiny bit of your population. How can you draw objective or quantitatively significant insights from that?"
Naturally, I wanted to know more about the 5% Mike was referring to. He explained that Laerdal has traditionally relied on CSAT and NPS programs for customer feedback. This left Laerdal with a "significant blind spot" in understanding their customers' experiences and identifying product, process, and employee improvement areas. Mike and Brian knew relying on twenty-year-old solutions to modern-day issues wouldn't cut it. Additionally, their employee feedback could have been more reliable as it was subjective and varied significantly between different teams. Brian stated,
"We ran an exercise on a specific enterprise account and asked our client executive, impact manager, and CSM to evaluate how at risk this account was. Their responses were wildly different across the board. We used Sturdy to investigate what's happening and why the three people involved in this account had completely different interpretations.
We wanted an objective means to determine whether there was a risk and proactively find out more, so we turned to Sturdy."
This got me thinking, "You spoke with three different people on three different teams for their feedback on a specific account?" I couldn't imagine how long that process must have taken. That's when Mike chimed in,
"I love Sturdy's objective account summaries. I cannot tell you how much time that saves me and the people in our organization. Taking something that would traditionally take me forever to pull together, and it's done with the press of a button. It's a true lifesaver when, in the past, I'd wade through our Salesforce data."
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Through Sturdy's comprehensive and automated approach, Laerdal has improved its understanding of how its customers feel about Laerdal's products and services. This helps them identify risks and areas for improvement and allows them to make proactive data-driven decisions. Moreover, because Sturdy provides this information with "the click of a button," Mike, Brian, and their teams have doubled productivity, significantly reducing time spent sifting through muddled data sources for a source of truth. And as the old adage goes, "Time is money."
