What will it take to climb healthcare’s “AI Everest”?

About the show

Hosted by Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, the Deep Learning with PolyAI podcast is the window into AI for CX leaders. We cut through hype in customer experience, support, and contact center AI — helping decision-makers understand what really matters.

Summary

In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Michelle Schroeder speaks with Sarah Wright, Vice President of Global Customer Service at ResMed, about why healthcare AI transformation feels like such a steep climb to success. From protecting patient information to connecting fragmented systems safely, Sarah shares how she’s tackling healthcare’s unique challenges — and how her strategies can inform other regulated industries.

They discuss how to move beyond reactive service models, how to use real customer data to guide investment decisions, and why frontline teams become even more important as automation grows.

Key Takeaways

Transcript

[00:00:51] Michelle Schroeder: Welcome to deep learning with PolyAI. We're here to help CX leaders get a window into the latest and greatest developments in AI. Before we get started, just a quick reminder to subscribe, give us a like on YouTube, and leave a good rating on your favorite podcast app. Alright. And now I have the privilege of introducing our guest. I'm joined by Sarah Wright, who's vice president of global customer service at ResMed. Sarah has spent almost two two decades leading service organizations across health care, technology, and medical device companies. Her focus is on purposeful work that genuinely improves patients' lives. She's now leading a newly created global customer service organization, which gives her a unique vantage point on how healthcare can scale without losing patient trust. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you. So like I mentioned, you've been doing this a while. So you've been in customer service leadership for two decades now. What keeps you in the space?

[00:01:50] Sarah Wright: It's so interesting. You know, I found myself into customer service quite accidentally. I had been working in a government role. They downsized the area I was working in, and I was driving home trying to think how am I gonna pay my bills. I'm fresh out of university, and I saw this sign at a local contact center hiring, paid training, full benefits, and I knew nothing about customer service. And so I thought, well, at least I can do this while I find something in my field. And who knew that that would become my field? I looked around, and I saw so many really great things happening. But then I also was always curious about how we could make things better for the employees and for customers. And I think that there's always these recipes you can look around and see, you know, retaining great people, building great teams. But again, really making sure that there's purpose or meaning behind the way that we interact in the front line, and you have a really interesting role in customer service. You're almost like the heroes of the brand. You are the front line. You often have the most captive time with your customers or patients or whomever you're serving in customer service. And so it's really important that we leverage that time because that's the impression you're gonna leave with your customers. And I think that it throughout my career, it's interesting and different depending on the domain, but the core is really the same.

[00:03:27] Michelle Schroeder: Yeah. I love you saw a literal sign and then it sounds like worked your way up to this incredible position that you're in now. And you talk about purposeful work and starting that in government and going to healthcare. I'd love to hear about what purposeful work means to you and how it shows up in health care specifically.

[00:03:47] Sarah Wright: Look. I can I'll give you an example of how we're intentional at, you know, making sure that each moment is meaningful for customers. But I think when you're looking at purposeful, I don't know that purposeful mattered as much to me early in my career. I think you're still trying to figure out what do I like to do? What am I good at? Where can I make a difference? And I think that's the first glimmer that I had that making a difference really was gonna get of more importance to me throughout my career. And I think, you know, about purposeful right now, you know, in the space I'm in, it's in, you know, health care, but throughout the domains, you think of yourself as that customer. When you think about purposeful and you're serving patients and customers, you have to imagine yourself in that persona. Right? We are customers. We consume through many channels, but we're also patients. We're also have a lot of the needs that we provide. And, you know, it's really about humility. Doesn't matter what company you work at. It's about taking a walk in your customer or patient's shoes and thinking about how do you remove friction. In the world of healthcare, there's already a bit of a gap between that that patient trying to navigate a new diagnosis and then they don't have the medical literacy of the care providers and the experts that are helping them figure out what they need to do next. And so really trying to think about no matter what domain you're in, no matter what type of customer it is, it's about making sure that the work you do really does drive wellness or a better outcome or an ability for that patient, in this case, to have more medical literacy or more awareness of how they're doing so that they can advocate better for their own care. So I think it's really about connecting or bridging the gap between the expectations of your customer on the products or services you offer no matter where you're focused and then how that patient or customer interprets that. So that's really the core of, of what I enjoy doing as I've navigated different domains.

[00:06:06] Michelle Schroeder: Yeah. I love that the word that you used is humility. Just having that humility to sort of level set and understand those challenges, those things that bring friction for the customer and for the patient in a industry where the stakes are high. This is your health. You know? It's your it's your future. It's your quality of life. But talking about stakes being high, you've talked about the, you know, the fact that health care CX transformation is an Everest climb. What makes it feel so steep? You know, at the heart of delivering great patient care is protecting patient health information.

[00:06:43] Sarah Wright: And so in some domains, you can really, you know, experiment with how to offer self-service experiences and leverage technology to test different ways, um, different channels, different engagement points. We have to protect that patient health information, and we have to be really careful how it moves between systems. And so you already have to be mindful at what your integration points might be or what de identified data could be relevant in in another snapshot in time. So I think the Everest Climb really comes down to being able to identify where can we remove friction, where can we connect information so that these pathways are able to build capacity or, you know, create some efficiency in workflows or make that external experience better. The Everest climb really comes down to the fact that we've often in health care in general, you work really hard on protecting this patient health information, liberating sometimes the data that you need to really build some of these or unlock a lot of value across AI, but really across new channels, self-service channels, omnichannel. It really comes down to knowing who you're talking to. And if you don't know who you're talking to and you don't know how they've interacted with your company or with your products or services in the past, it's hard to move from that reactive state to really drive predictive personalized experiences. And I think it's really about that. It's really about doing things safely in the right order and bringing together technology in a way that is protecting, but also moving the right datasets to be able to take you from that, you know, traditional break fix to the meeting our customers or patients where where they are.

[00:08:48] Michelle Schroeder: Yeah. I I love so much about what you said, and I'm gonna unfortunately take the opportunity to extend your metaphor and be corny about it, but it really sounds like you, Sarah, have been the Sherpa even for your company, not just on behalf of your customers and your patients, but ushering in this this new sort of frontier of CX transformation. And I'm wondering how you've done that, especially for our listeners who are trying to do this in their own organizations. Like, how did you build the trust? How did you, you know, communicate this protection that you were focused on for your own customer?

[00:09:22] Sarah Wright: How did you talk about the data story and and, you know, like, your your vision for this? Just very curious about, you know, your role. You know? And I would say this isn't my role today solely. I think that for a long time you know, I I think of a reference in consumption economics, a book from 2011, where they talk about customer service as being often these teams that we invest so much in and have these huge workforces, but yet then we turn around and pump low value content through these teams, and they have this massive, you know, impact and connection point with customers, patients, wherever. I think that's the key is really showing through data. I'd I'd say, you know, being able to show whatever team it is, how many interactions we see in certain areas that are low complexity, high volume, and really showing the pain, turning it around, again, back to that humility, even asking people to share their best experiences, their worst experiences as customers, as patients, and then admitting that we just won't do that. You know, like, let's stay away from those things. I think, again, connecting it to their own journeys and being really patient, I think teams oftentimes are up against we're up against all the same things. Right? Time, funding, you know, resourcing. And so I think what I've really tried to do is be the voice of customers, the voice of patients through the data stories. Why are people contacting us? What do they need? What are the things we aren't resolving right away? What are the things that are repeat issues? And if you can layer, um, if if, you know, the the listeners are leveraging any kind of voice of customer dataset, you can cross reference that and start to say, alright, here's the big ones. Here's the big points of friction. And just agreeing, I think, internally on those things. When you're a passionate customer service leader or or working customer experience, you can be too passionate, too excited about all of the technology. You have to also remember that, you know, a lot of teams aren't as close to those experiences as you are. And so really letting people share their own experiences often tends to make it more real and more tangible and more of an urgent call to action, really. We don't want that experience, especially when we know what kind of an experience we expect.

[00:11:56] Michelle Schroeder: Totally. It also snaps people into, like, an empathy mode almost. Do you think about your own frustrations and it becomes so much easier to have empathy for the people on the other end of that call or that experience? Last time we spoke, you're very clear in your perspective that technology should augment human moments and not replace them. And I heard you talking a little bit about using data to enhance care as one of the means for this. But what else does this look like in practice for you? How do you use technology today to augment the human moments?

[00:12:27] Sarah Wright: You know, it really depends because I think if you look at the the way that that technology is impacting many domains in health care, it's through the entire journey. Right? Technology is, you know, at the point of prediagnosis through the diagnosis And, oftentimes, technology is liberating access to care by making diagnostics, in some cases, virtual. In some cases, there's pathways that aren't as formal as having to go through, you know, sitting in a hospital system. So I think the access to care or the access to diagnostics is really an amazing place that health care in general is increased access. I'd say, generally speaking, one of the biggest opportunities we have is listening. And so how are we leveraging QA at scale in a lot of these organizations, and how are we turning that into something meaningful? I think that, you know, we're spending time as leaders, you know, across different groups that we connect within, you know, leaders in technology. And the themes that I hear all the time are reducing, you know, time to diagnosis, reducing costs, and and reducing or removing barriers to care. I think that technology is allowing for patients to be able to do things online and as well, organizations are able to start to interpret the QA datasets, the voice of customer datasets, and start to partner that with, you know, product roadmaps and bug fixes and things like that. As we get better signaling and better data collection, it doesn't have us needing to spend as much time hedging our bets on priorities. I think that when you have real life datasets to be able to pull from and they become richer and richer the better the sample you have, the better reliability there is. And I'd say that is probably the way that in the groups that I'm talking about technology, those are the quickest wins and the most powerful ways to gut check, you know, where we're investing. And I think that that's something that, you know, broadly is pretty consistent topic that I'm talking to in all of my my circles for sure.

[00:15:00] Michelle Schroeder: I love to hear that. It's something we talk about a lot with our customers, just sort of shortening that time or that distance between, you know, interpreting a signal and adapting to what you're hearing. You've got, you know, the especially in the back of of a, you know, large scale successful automation deployment, you have a lot of signal from your customers directly from their voices about what they want, what they like, what they don't like, what's working, what's not working. And as long as you can parse that signal and, you know, focus on the one that will meaningfully improve things for them, you just you have a much to your point, you have a much better dataset, a much more reliable, trustworthy, you know, a call to action for a business with a trusted signal, which is the voice of your actual customer. On that note, as AI and automation become more capable, what do you believe is more important about, you know, the culture or the business for frontline teams? Like, what is the people element of that equation? What changes as AI gets more capable?

[00:16:04] Sarah Wright: I really love that question because it's so interesting that there's all like, you know, it's a really hot topic, AgenTek AI. You know, where does AgenTek AI play? A role, and does Agentic AI become customer service? And I'd say, you know, as I think about frontline teams and as I think about customer service teams, I see them becoming more important. And so we have to as we implement technology, we need the gatekeepers. We need the human oversight. We need to make sure that culture you know, when your customers and patients, you know, enjoy your brand, enjoy interacting with your brand, you really wanna continue to be driving that brand affinity. When but I really wanna see customer service professionals become that human differentiation, um, being able to offer that oversight, teach and refine and fine tune the experiences, and really kind of, you know, hop in with the heroics where it's not a highly repeatable set of engagements. I think that no matter what, our patients, our customers across all domains, they want access to service quickly, and they wanna make sure that they can trust the information they're getting. And I think that more than anything, we really need to make sure that we can max out or get that ROI on those human connections and not bring that low value, highly repeatable stuff Because, again, the a key differentiator oftentimes in those frontline teams are our people, and they exemplify our culture, and they really drive that that strong brand presence. And so it's really about celebrating that uniqueness that that they bring. They are our culture.

[00:17:57] Michelle Schroeder: Yeah. I love that answer. I think it's how we think about things as well. If you automate some of those low level, you know, repeatable tasks, you free people up to do more complicated, more interesting work, more meaningful and purposeful work, you know, especially as you're building those relationships with your customers and that brand affinity to your point. What else would be the point of doing this? It's all meant to instruct that human experience. That's what this is really about. And back to your point earlier about this technology really best being focused on augmenting human moments and not just replacing them. I really I really like that as a frame. I guess I'll wrap up with this question. As I know a lot of our listeners are in your position, for any healthcare leaders that are listening to this or anyone who's really feeling the pressure to modernize and transform quickly, what advice would you give them? I know it's open ended.

[00:18:52] Sarah Wright: I, you know, I think it's be patient, listen, but start with your data. I think that data is your best even if it's not, you know, as much data as you'd like, as you wish you were collecting, start, start somewhere, you know, set your baselines, decide what good looks like, and really, you know, set your priorities. Uh, I think that transformation is not easy. Transformation requires strong change leadership. And so I think being open to questions like, you know, hey, I work in customer service. Is agentic AI going to replace me? Being open to those kind of questions and really setting a vision about human oversight and being the brand defenders and the role that customer service of the future, and in my view, will always be important. I think we'll always have people that swoop in to save the day, but it's making sure that it's in the right moments. And I just say start with your data, look at it, benchmark it, and then from there, set your sights on where the investment is gonna return the most, but also not starting at, you know, a place where your customers or patients are already very delighted. You know, don't try to fix what isn't in in need of a fix.

[00:20:14] Michelle Schroeder: Great advice. Uh, so I guess if you're preparing to climb Everest, I've heard, you know, be a good listener, you know, have humility, look at where your data is telling you to go, you know, and set your sights on that summit. But this has been such a thoughtful and wonderful conversation, Sarah. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been great hearing your perspective on how health care can innovate without losing humanity, which is, I think, something that we're all deeply, deeply invested in, and I know our listeners are as well. So really, really appreciate you coming on.

[00:20:44] Sarah Wright: Thank you so much for having me, Michelle.

[00:20:46] Michelle Schroeder: Alright. Don't forget to subscribe if you enjoyed this conversation, and we'll see you next time.