Kavita Tandon has a candid conversation with Ruchir Ranjan who is the Chief Customer Officer at Simplify Healthcare. Ruchir has more than three decades of experience in leading large scale digital transformation initiatives for several organizations in the Healthcare sector.
Listen to Kavita and Ruchir talk about his role at Simplify Healthcare, the importance of building trusted relationships for client success, and his vision on Simplify Healthcare’s path forward

Apart from technology or the innovation… an equal amount of attention needs to be given to change management and the journey to bring the organization stakeholders along, so that they’re participating, understanding, believing, supporting, championing that transformation so that all the outcomes can be achieved, together. — Ruchir Ranjan

Listen to the Podcast

Transcript

Kavita Tandon: Hello and welcome to the Simplify Healthcare podcast. My name is Kavita Tandon, and I’m the Head HR for Simplify Healthcare and your host for today’s episode. As we begin this exciting session, I would like to introduce our special guest. I am very excited about this interactive conversation and hope you are too. So, without further ado today, we have with us our Chief Customer Officer, Mr. Ruchir Ranjan.


Ruchir has spent more than 30 years helping businesses in the healthcare sector achieve end-to-end digital transformation. Before joining Simplify Healthcare, Ruchir served as the Managing Partner and Region Head at Cognizant, driving large digital and enterprise transformation initiatives for companies in the healthcare domain. Ruchir brings three decades of experience managing strategic clients at Cognizant and Accenture, and leading smaller entrepreneurial firms over his career. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a BE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Through our conversation today, we will learn more about Ruchir, personally and professionally, and his new role, vision, and thoughts on Simplify Healthcare’s path forward. 


Ruchir, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Kavita Tandon: So, Ruchir, let’s talk about your personal and professional journey. Please give us some fun facts about you that we don’t know. (1:30)

Ruchir Ranjan: Sure. I am a long-time Chicago resident. I started my career in a Healthcare Provider network called the Rush Medical Center in Chicago. From there, I went on to work with two small startups — one was consulting services, and the other one was products and services. From there, I spent about two decades in large firms — 10 years with Accenture and 9 years with Cognizant in the healthcare practice before joining Simplify Healthcare. I feel like I’ve had a good mix of small companies, entrepreneurial experiences, and experience in very, very large firms and how they operate. Throughout my career, I’ve focused predominantly on customer relationship management and how to grow those relationships. That’s really what I bring to the table here. I live in the Chicago suburbs, not far from our office, with my wife, and I have two kids—a son and a daughter. We love to enjoy the summers in Chicago, which, you know, are few and far between, but I love to get out and enjoy the weather, particularly any opportunity to play golf. That’s my passion.

Kavita Tandon: Well, that's quite interesting. So, Ruchir, moving to your role, you are the Chief Customer Officer at Simplify Healthcare, and I'm sure our listeners would be as curious as I am to know more about your role. Would you like to share a bit about that too? (2:57)

Ruchir Ranjan:  Yeah, sure. I’m excited to join Simplify Healthcare. What drew me was the innovation and the culture and talking with Mohammed, our CEO. I am very excited to be part of the growth journey here. My charter is to build a customer success team consisting of client partners who will manage our customer journey end-to-end. So, this is really client relationship management with the idea of increasing client satisfaction and giving them a particular client experience. In a deeper way, building trusted relationships with our clients, all with the objective of bringing continuous innovation as we expand our product solutions to our clients. Based on that innovation, good delivery and customer service will drive growth for our company. So that’s the charter, and I‘m excited about doing that because if you look at my experience and my strength, that’s what I‘ve done, and I believe I can help our organization do that well.

Kavita Tandon: I'm sure of that too. It sounds exciting to hear all that you are sharing. Moving further, Ruchir, you have led, like you said, large-scale digital transformation initiatives for several healthcare organizations throughout your career. As a professional with such rich experience, what have been your observations and learnings from these endeavors? (4:26)

Ruchir Ranjan: Interesting question. I mean, they’re all somewhat unique, and they also have many commonalities across them. A few things come to mind. Large transformations can sometimes focus on the technology, the innovation, or the particular core of that initiative. But one of the lessons that I’ve learned is that an equal amount of attention needs to be given to the change management and the journey to bring the organization stakeholders along so that they’re participating, understanding, believing, supporting, championing that transformation so that all the outcomes can be achieved, together. That’s one of the things that I feel sometimes is underweighted by clients.

 

But, overall, I feel like the large transformations are successful, particularly as a partner helping customers only through trust, transparency, and direct conversation to deal with difficult topics at times. And that comes from building that trusted relationship that I mentioned earlier. Having that relationship with clients helps put you in a position where you can be an equal partner, stakeholder, and advisor, and bring that transparency in so that you’re dealing with difficult topics. Journeys often have an ebb and flow, and keeping the outcomes as the true north to get to the end line, really takes close collaboration and partnership. Building trusted advisor relationships, having transparent relationships, really having good alignment with your clients, being responsive and listening to them, but also being able to bring up those difficult subjects to deal with them together quickly, rather than letting them fester, that is really the key to achieving success through these transformations. 

 

Those are the two things outside the core technology and the initiative where equal weightage needs to be given — to the change management and being a good, trusted advisor to partner with customers and guide them to success. So that’s what I’ve learned, that’s what I’ve seen. It’s simplifying things down to those two core concepts. Our innovations and product evolution at Simplify Healthcare position us well to bring all that to our customers as they look to transform their organizations. Payers, in particular, can benefit from some of our core digital offerings. And we’re only expanding our solution stack, and I’m excited about driving those outcomes for Payers. 

Kavita Tandon: Great. Thank you. I think these are very pertinent points that you raised during this interaction, and as you wear the hat of the Chief Customer Officer, Ruchir, customer centricity is also one of the DNA that we have in Simplify Healthcare; what would be your suggestions or tips to our listeners who are our employees internally? (7:50)

Ruchir Ranjan: I think internally, it’s really important that all of us wear the hat of being representatives and custodians of our business to our customers. Whether you’re on the direct front lines working with the customers, you have to have that ownership, particularly customer owner mentality. This means you need to speak up and transparently, directly escalate issues, and escalate topics. Certainly, we enable our teams working with clients to be good custodians and partners and have that customer-centricity. But equally, I think innovation is a big part and bringing that innovation continuously to our customers. I think we are all doing our part in that. 

 

One of the things that we want to improve, certainly through this function and overall, as an organization, is how we bring that story forward and do a better job of explaining and getting a broader, innovative story and innovation story to our customers through their digital transformation. So, I think we all are participants and need to do that. Ideas related to that, ideas supporting that, and ensuring that any topics that need our attention related to customers are raised quickly will help with customer centricity as our teams engage with our clients. 

Kavita Tandon: Absolutely. And so, Ruchir, thank you so much for finding the time to have this conversation with me. It was quite riveting to know your views, the fantastic journey you have embarked upon as the head of our customer relationship, and the inputs you’ve shared with the team. I’m sure there is a lot that the listeners can take from it. And we look forward to many more interesting conversations with you in the future, and to all our listeners, thank you for tuning into the podcast. We will continue to have many more conversations with the leadership team in the future. Please tune in next time to explore another exciting story with us. Thank you and bye-bye for now.

For a more detailed discussion about our solutions and how we can help your business:
GET IN TOUCH