Linking Customer Experience and Partner Success

Continuing on from last month’s post about partners and their importance to your ecosystem… you need to make sure you help your partners be successful. When you think about the multichannel and the omnichannel customer experience where partners are involved (they aren’t always), it’s even more critical to ensure partners are lined up for success. When your partners are successful, you, in turn, are also successful. From a brand perspective. From a customer experience perspective. From all perspectives.

In last month’s post, I gave some tips to ensure that the partner experience is aligned with your brand experience. In this post, I’m going to reiterate why this is important to your success — and more importantly, why it’s critical to the customer experience overall.

For B2B companies who deal with consumers via/through partners or resellers, their focus has traditionally been on the relationship with the partner, often with very little visibility into the end-customer experience. This is definitely changing, and we’re seeing a new trend in the marketplace: the shift from B2B to B2B2C. This shift is ultra-critical, for a variety of reasons.

You can have all the partners you want. You can satisfy their needs all you want. But if the product you manufacture doesn’t add value, doesn’t sell, or isn’t something the end customer actually cares about, both you and your partners are going to go out of business.

How do you add value for your partners and help them be more successful?

Simple. Don’t be so far-removed from the end customer. Don’t just rely on what your partners are telling you about customer experience — you’ll need to do your own research, your own listening, to get ahead of the game. Work with your partners to listen to the voice of the end customer. Understand who they are, how they use your products now, what jobs or tasks they are trying to achieve — and then use that information to shift gears to better meet their needs in the future.

There are a lot of B2B2C customer experience design examples to support this need, this scenario, but my favorite (and a very powerful one) is the story of how Doug Dietz, the principal designer for GE Healthcare, transformed the MRI experience for patients (the C) and ultimately made their partners (the Bs) successful. He’d been designing equipment for 20+ years for hospitals; he realized after spending two years designing an MRI machine that the actual patient experience was scary and quite miserable.

How did he discover that? By going to see his product in its actual setting, about to be used on a small child. By observing his machine in use. By seeing the patient response to the machine.

Have you done this? You sell to — or through — your partners; have you seen how their (your) customers use the/your products? Have you heard how they feel about them? What the experience is? If the products meet their needs and help them do what they’re trying to do?

Watch Doug’s TEDx talk on how he transformed the experience for families. It’s so worth the 20 minutes. Be sure to grab a box of tissues before you begin watching it.

Video Transcript

I thought I’d start with this — kind of the heartbeat of my story today. You’ve heard a lot about design thinking and the design process that many of these folks have gone through — very powerful tools. I just want to emphasize that empathy, at the beginning for me, is really the heartbeat of the project. When you move forward — into iteration, prototyping, and other design phases — you often need to refocus and remember the empathy that got you started in the first place.

So I thought I’d share a quick story with you guys. This is a tough story to tell, but I’ll give it a shot.

I had just finished designing a big MR scanner. How many people here have had an MRI scan? Oh my gosh, a lot of you. Don’t charge the stage! I was very proud — I’d worked on it for about two years. I’m an industrial designer, and I had done the enclosures, the controls, displays, coils, and patient transfer systems. I was so excited to see this first product installed in a real hospital environment.

So I ran through the hospital to check out my new product — my “baby.” I was a proud papa. The technologist came in and said, “We have a patient coming through, could you step out for a bit?” Sure, no problem. I stepped out into the hallway.

Then I saw this young family walking toward me. The little girl was weeping. As they got closer, I heard the father lean down and say, “Remember, we talked about this — you can be brave.” They turned and walked into the MR suite. I followed them in.

I’ll never forget it. The little girl froze. And from her point of view, the environment I had just been celebrating — doing my happy dance in — looked completely different. On the wall was that horrible warning sticker, yellow and black tape everywhere, like a hazard zone. The room was dark, flickering fluorescent lights, everything beige and sterile. And the machine I designed? It looked like a brick with a hole in it. Then there’s that terrible MRI noise. She started crying harder.

Standing behind her, I could see her parents glance at each other — silently wondering how they were going to get their child through this. That was a huge awakening for me.

Our challenge was clear: this little kid had to go through that experience. What does that machine look like to them? Big. Clamped. Cold. Terrifying. The whole experience — from the moment a child learns they need a scan, to the car ride, to the maze of hallways — is an anxiety curve that just ramps up and barely flattens at the end.

I talked with one father whose son needed sedation for a scan. In that modality, about 80% of children had to be sedated. As he carried his son to the parking lot afterward, he suddenly stopped. “I forgot where I parked my car,” he said. Why? Because he was overwhelmed. My early assumptions — that parents were worried about diagnosis, insurance, or work — were wrong. Their number one concern was simply: How am I going to get my child through this?

So that’s where we started. Our first brainstorming session was at a local daycare — you can see it here — with some of my very young “designers.” One little boy wasn’t coloring like the others; he was sticking crayons into the cracks of the table. That moment made me realize I needed to learn more about children’s developmental stages and what triggers anxiety.

I knew I couldn’t do this alone. So I brought in experts — like Fern Shook, director of the Betty Brinn Museum in Milwaukee. Her team worked with us, along with hospital staff — radiologists, child-life specialists, nurses — and even parents. We brainstormed together to create strong, empathetic solutions.

One key insight came from watching how kids play. What are three kitchen chairs and a blanket? A fort. A castle. A rocket ship. They can turn anything into a world of imagination — and stay there forever. That imagination became our design tool.

Here’s my desk at the time — a reminder that a lot of right-brain thinking went into this. Let me walk you through a few of the rooms we developed.

Our first pilot rooms were at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. This first one used the same scanner — but we softened the design, added a ring instead of a clamp, and created a calming “water” environment. The blue sky lighting cascades down; we added aromatherapy — a subtle lavender-water scent — and gentle visuals like a waterfall mural and a koi pond that extends into the hallway. Kids come in walking on the “stones,” inviting their parents to join. The table looks like it lowers into the water, becoming a hollowed-out canoe. We tell them, “Hold still so you don’t rock the boat.” If they stay still, fish “jump” over them. The kids become statues — perfectly still. Sedations went from 80% to nearly zero.

Another favorite: Pirate Adventure. You walk in on a dock, past a shipwreck and sandcastles, and “walk the plank” to the scanner. The same machine looks completely different — larger, softer, inviting. When kids said the cabinets reminded them of a dentist’s office, we turned them into a tiki hut instead. We even used a piña colada scent — the parents loved that one. When the kids saw their parents smile, they relaxed too. “If you get the parent, you get the child.”

After one scan, a little girl tugged her mother’s shirt and said, “Can we come back tomorrow?” That moment floored me. I looked down and saw tears hitting the floor — mine. Then I noticed the technologist crying too. Later, she told me, “You don’t understand — this reminded me why I got into healthcare.” Amid all the regulations and equipment challenges, she had forgotten that — to help kids. This project reawakened that purpose.

We went on to create other environments: Coral City — an undersea emergency room, with blue walls, dimmed lights, and a disco ball casting bubbles everywhere. Cozy Camp — with starlit walls, a sleeping-bag table, and a tent scanner, where technologists watched from a “camper” window. Magical spaces.

And you know what? If you’re not having fun doing this, it’s half your fault. These projects were full of meaning and empathy — but also joy.

I’ll leave you with this: when you design for meaning, good things happen. When you design for money and hope meaning follows, it doesn’t work that way. In this case, sedation rates dropped dramatically, patient satisfaction rose by 92%, and throughput increased. But that’s not how I measure success.

For me, success is whether I’ve influenced the conversation in the car on the way home.
If I’ve made that conversation different — calmer, more positive, more human — then I’ve done my job.

Thank you.

At the end of his talk, Doug shares how he measures success of his product redesign. Yes, there are the hard metrics…

• The number of patients requiring sedation was drastically reduced, which improves the patient experience and also increases efficiencies for the hospital.
• Wait time to get an appointment was reduced.
• Patient satisfaction went up 92%!
• Patient volume also went up as a result of the efficiencies.

But Doug’s success measures lie in this: did he influence or change the family’s conversation during the car ride home?

Ultimately, he measures success based on the patient experience. Yes, the healthcare partners had a better experience, too. But, in the end, that’s not really what matters the most, is it?

When was the last time you observed your product in use by end customers? When was the last time you spoke to them about how they use the product and understood what the experience is?

If it’s been a while — or never — it’s time!

If you do not seek out allies and helpers, then you will be isolated and weak. -Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”

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