Why 1upHealth Takes a “Dirty-Glove” Approach to Customer Success

While most technology companies talk about providing “white-glove service” to their customers, 1upHealth takes a “dirty-glove” approach to help customers succeed with their interoperability goals. It’s this “dirty-glove” approach that sets us apart as a partner. Our whatever-it-takes mentality often takes us into the trenches to solve complex technology and data challenges alongside our customers.  

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the two approaches, and why we think our approach is best. 

“White-glove” Service vs. “Dirty-glove” Service

In an article entitled “The future of customer experience: Personalized, white-glove service for all”, McKinsey & Company describes “white-glove” service as being “long associated with high-value customers and transactions” and “characterized by attention to detail, convenience, speed, and emotional fulfillment.”

This is all well and extremely good. I don’t disagree with one bit of this as it pertains to supporting your customers’ success. However, the “white-glove” nomenclature seemingly indicates that it’s easy or at least made to look easy. A “dirty-glove” approach indicates it’s not necessarily easy and a willingness to get into the muck – side-by-side with customers – to solve their problems and help them succeed. 

Why customer success in healthcare interoperability requires a “dirty-glove” approach

Healthcare interoperability is a lofty goal that requires a lot of data, processing power, and FHIR expertise. Connecting data silos across IT systems, organizations, and the larger healthcare ecosystem through APIs provides patients, and sometimes their families, with unprecedented access to health information, empowering them to make more informed decisions and take better control of their care. Interoperability across organizations drives better patient outcomes, more efficiently and at a lower cost. 

However, at this early stage of healthcare interoperability maturation, there are a number of issues that can arise during the data cycle, from initial file formatting to data pipeline monitoring to reporting and insights generation. This is not always clean and easy and often requires our Customer Success team members to get their hands – or in this case gloves – a bit dirty. Let me provide a few examples. 

4 Ways our Customer Success team digs in to solve customer challenges

#1 Acting as the Voice of the Customer: The team advocates on our customers’ behalf, pushing forth feature and functionality requests to the 1upHealth Product and Development teams. 

#2 Serving as a data steward: As a gateway to the Support, Product, and Engineering teams at 1upHealth, the Customer Success team helps catalog input files and sources, ensuring data requirements for ingestion are met and making sure our customers have access to the Development teams.

#3 Championing product adoption: We’re passionate about health data and provide transparency on utilization within our clients’ organizations as well as industry trends that could provide them with opportunities to improve value. 

#4 Acting as a direct line for business and operational needs: Customer Success Managers at 1upHealth act as a customer’s single point of contact, helping customers navigate through a myriad of challenges to achieve success. 

Our commitment to our customers’ success runs deep

Data stability and scalability can only be achieved through diligent practice. It’s 1upHealth’s objective to understand our customers’ data needs, ensure these needs are met, and support the evolving landscape of interoperability. The 1upHealth Customer Success team is committed to being best-in-class partners for our customers – even if that means taking a “dirty-glove” approach to service.