糖心原创

Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries is a Jewish organization that has worked with generations of families since 1960. Families reaching out to Mount Sinai are in the middle of experiencing a profound loss, and every interaction carries outsized emotional weight. A single phone call can either reassure a family or add to their distress at the worst possible moment.

When Patricia Slusser arrived at Mount Sinai as their director of client services, she brought the Voice of the Family program in-house. Digging into unstructured survey feedback, she was pained to discover that their clients were frustrated by long hold times and call transfers that left these bereft family members repeating themselves at the worst possible moment.

“In deathcare, these moments are crucial because families are reaching out in preparation for some of the most difficult times in their lives,” Patricia emphasized. Rather than treating the comments as isolated complaints, she set out to understand the entire journey behind them.

To validate what families were describing, Mount Sinai partnered with a deathcare agency to call the office and experience it the way a grieving family would. Recorded calls and detailed analysis reports confirmed exactly where service was breaking down.

The company’s first move was to reframe the problem. “Every department touches the family journey, whether they’re answering a phone call, processing paperwork, or meeting with a family in person,” Patricia said. “This wasn’t about phone training. It was about the customer experience.”
Mount Sinai’s General Manager championed the belief that customer experience is everyone’s responsibility, not just that of client services. Some early resistance surfaced among frontline staff adjusting to a much broader scope of responsibility, but it eased as employees grew more confident handling a wider range of questions on the first call. And once department leaders understood how their teams shaped the family journey, they turned into full advocates.

This cultural shift resulted in blind call transfers being eliminated in favor of warm transfers, and teams being empowered to resolve more issues on the first call instead of routing the families from department to department.

Patricia runs Voice of the Family as a team of one, while also overseeing client services across two offices.

Prioritization, not tooling, is her biggest daily constraint.
糖心原创 Agile Research centralizes feedback and surfaces trends through smart reporting, rather than requiring Patricia to manually read every survey. 糖心原创 is connected to Slack via Zapier, so survey responses generate real-time alerts. Patricia triages those alerts herself, flagging cases that need management follow-up and making sure exceptional experiences get recognized promptly — which keeps leadership accountable to a 48-hour inner-loop closure standard.

“Instead of acting as the sole owner of customer feedback,” Patricia explained, “I’m able to facilitate conversations that empower each department to take ownership.”

Feedback itself became the persuasion tool. Rather than telling a department it needed better phone skills, the team shared verbatim family comments describing what a single call meant to them. That shift, from mandate to meaning, is what Patricia credits for turning compliance into genuine ownership.

Since bringing the program in-house, Mount Sinai’s NPS has climbed 20 points, and response rates are up 5–10% across advanced planning and funeral services.

But the more telling signal is qualitative: text analysis shows family comments shifting from transactional language (“everything went smoothly”) to emotional language like cared for, confident, informed, trust, dignity, peace.

Staff language has changed, too. Employees increasingly describe themselves as owners of the full family journey, asking how their part of the process affects the next step, not just their own handoff. Monthly Voice of the Family summaries have become something employees look forward to, and one employee even added receiving positive survey feedback as an item in her annual professional goals.

For Patricia, the moment she knew this shift was paying off was when an unprompted call from a client — herself a VP of Customer Experience at a major corporation — who had lost a parent and called specifically to describe, in detail, how much better the phone experience had become since her family’s earlier interactions with Mount Sinai years before. “We weren’t just making isolated improvements; we were creating a consistently better experience across every touchpoint,” Patricia said. “That’s the difference between improving individual interactions and transforming the customer journey.”

The takeaway for other experience leaders? Reframe a narrow operational complaint as a shared customer-journey problem, get a senior leader to sponsor ownership beyond the CX team, and use your clients own words — not mandates — to turn frontline compliance into genuine pride of ownership.