The Promise of Time: The Ultimate Customer Value Proposition | What’s Your Edge?

Today’s conversation explores how a lean process improvement initiative, originally launched to address patient complaints about long wait times, evolved into something much more: a deeply embedded customer-centric culture grounded in customer value and customer-centricy, and a move away from random acts of efficiency toward a systematic, measurable approach to customer experience. Stephanie Collins, CEO of Austin Retina, a practice that has been serving patients since 1979, joins us today as our guest for What’s Your Edge.  Stephanie has been with the organization for 25 years, rising through the ranks to lead the practice through significant growth. The practice has grown from a single provider to 19 physicians and nearly 300 employees. And recently, it became a part of Cencora, a global leader in pharmaceutical and medical supply distribution. Stephanie, I’m looking forward to learning how Austin Retina reframed time as a critical dimension of value, how you operationalized customer-centricity, and how you measure the impact of customer value on growth, loyalty, and performance.

Stephanie, welcome to the show.

The Inflection Point: From “Just A Number” to Valuable Customer

Stephanie, let’s start with the moment that really catalyzed change. In 2015, Austin Retina initiated a lean process. One of the primary triggers was patient feedback that they felt the practice didn’t value their time—that they were being treated like a number. I imagine most everyone listening has experienced this feeling. In fact, nationally, studies suggest that patients spend roughly 11–18 minutes just waiting to be seen in a doctor’s office, and when you add travel and disruption to the workday, researchers estimate about $89 billion a year in lost time due to medical visits. Now, when we wind back the clock, patients were often in the office for three hours, and these patients often see their physicians every 4–6 weeks. That is a significant time commitment. We can easily see why the initial goal of the lean initiative was straightforward: shorten wait time. Congratulations on achieving your goal and reducing the wait time from three hours to about 90 minutes. Take us back to that period. What were you hearing from patients that made you realize “we have to do something different”? Was there a specific story or piece of feedback that made the leadership team say, “We cannot continue this way”?

When I think back to that time, what really struck me wasn’t just that patients w