At Paige, we believe our customers represent the front lines in the fight against cancer – they are pathologists and clinicians who directly touch patient lives. Therefore, creating an effective and enjoyable customer experience for them is incredibly important. Our customer success and implementation team works tirelessly every day to keep transparency, honesty, and trust at the core of everything we do, with the goal of putting our customers first.
To share more about how Paige uniquely approaches our work with customers, we sat down with Stephen Johnston, Vice President of Implementation and Customer Success, for a deeper look into how we support our pathologists on a daily basis:
Q: What led you to pursue a role in customer success?
A: Before Paige, I held roles at technology companies including a mobile phone WAP company, a LIS vendor, and the first company to have an AI technology in digital pathology, called PathXL. PathXL was eventually acquired by Philips, and this gave me great exposure to clinical products and what it means to deploy, implement, and support an FDA-approved product. Now leading the implementation and customer success team at Paige, I am able to combine my deep understanding of the LIS world, the digital pathology world, and the AI world, to provide a well-rounded and personal experience to the customer.
Q: What is your approach to working with customers?
A: Customer success can mean a lot of different things to different people; some see it as how customers are supported through technical problems when they work with us. Others see it as more about driving adoption, and how we go on a journey together to make sure customers are achieving their goals. For me, it’s about combining these and being a true advocate for the customer. My goal is to ensure that each and every customer has the best experience, from helping them achieve their goals, to making sure that any technical problems are addressed in an efficient and open manner. I want all of our customers to know that no problem is too big or too small. It’s vital that every interaction I or my team has with a customer is guided by trust, openness, honesty, and transparency.
Q: What are some of the common challenges customers experience and how do we support them through these challenges?
A: As a SaaS platform, we often need to find a way to work with legacy technology vendors that might not have ongoing support or the ability to work to our newer technology standards. Our solution is to offer different implementation options to every customer so they can tackle this process in the way that works best for them. We’re a very flexible organization, we work closely with every team involved, and we are always looking for different ways we can improve our integration technology. We’re also always thinking about the future and trying to build that into our roadmap as we move along the integration path.
Another important solution is building the concepts of implementation and customer success into one organizational function. This way, we can truly understand what we’ve implemented at each of our customers, and that gives us the ability to support them in the most efficient and effective manner. Further, by combining these functions, customers get the benefit of always having a familiar face in their corner. That’s one of the benefits of being a startup – we’re dynamic and able to give the customers that personal interaction as we grow together.
Q: How do you measure customer success?
A: On the technical side, we track things like resolution response times to make sure we’re meeting the requirements of our customers. We also track utilization and adoption rates to understand how we’re doing in terms of getting the customer to their goals. But we also care a lot about NPS, or net promoter score, which is a more subjective, emotional metric. It’s about understanding whether we’re having good touch points with customers at each step of their journey with us, from trial through to active users. It’s important to us that we provide a really comprehensive and smooth experience throughout.
Q: What is Paige’s NPS score and what does this tell us about the customer experience?
A: To me, NPS is reflection of everything that everybody working at Paige does; it’s not just a reflection on the customer success representatives or the technical project managers. It’s about how someone perceives their entire Paige experience, from using the product, to the sales process, to their training, and so on. I really take pride in our NPS score, which at the end of 2022 was 74. That says to me that my team is doing something right, and that everyone at Paige is helping our customers in the way we intend to.
Q: What should labs that are interested in digital pathology or AI keep in mind before beginning their implementation of these technologies?
A: The biggest thing is having an open mind. People can often be resistant to the cloud or even unsure what a SaaS platform is. Taking the time to learn how the data is flowing and the precautions we take to keep security as the absolute highest priority can really help to mitigate those concerns. Additionally, the idea of integration can be complex. If you are willing to work with us to break it down into phased approaches, and to let us work with your 3rd party vendors and LIS, we can make it much more streamlined.
I’d also recommend doing a little bit of due diligence by thinking through what data you really want to extract from your current system, and what is going to bring the best overall pathologist experience. Our goal is always to make sure not only that the organization is getting all the efficiency gains of using AI technologies in their general practice, but that we’re actually setting them up to be as impactful as possible for patients.
Our customer success team is driven by the same mission that guides the entire Paige team: Creating a better world for patients. By working closely with our customers to implement and utilize technology that brings efficiency and confidence to day-to-day practice, we hope to empower our pathologists to positively impact their patients. We are proud to be driving innovation forward in pathology – from our technology through to our customer success operations – to help this goal become a reality.
