Your CRM is a Bridge to Your Ideal Patient Experience.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are not new to healthcare, but it did take some time for software companies to develop a CRM specifically for healthcare and its unique needs.
Today, there are plenty of solutions to choose from but the parity in features, differentiators and capabilities might be less of a deciding factor than a CRM’s ability to be effectively implemented and adopted by its planned end users –– and truly utilizing automation to deliver an ideal patient experience.
Less than 30%
The average utility of CRM capabilities being used by healthcare organizations.
What really matters when choosing the right CRM, or better utilizing the CRM you have, is how it’s implemented or what you really need it to do, and that you are able to establish a healthy and meaningful relationship with your patients. Across the healthcare industry, we’re seeing multi-year initiatives to implement CRM tools with the intention of solving everything for everyone. But inevitably, their day-to-day utility is about 30% of what the CRM is capable of doing and questioning the ROI will produce a variable mix of responses depending on who you ask.
Insights to Actionable Communication Begins at Implementation
As with most software products, it’s common to get excited about everything your new CRM does and everything it can plug into. But what’s commonly underappreciated is how much time it’s really going to take to implement, train internal staff how to use it, and negotiate with internal stakeholders about how it may not do everything they want it to do. On average, 50% of CRM projects fail due to poorly planned implementation.
However, when they are effectively implemented, most CRM tools do produce mountains of data on patient segmentation and predictive modeling that can be incredibly useful if properly managed. And the ability to distribute relevant information and communications to your entire census of patients includes everything from appointment reminders to content specific to chronic conditions –– which demonstrates to your patients that they are important to you.
Begin with Your Patient Experience
Given the investment in time and cost, it’s critical to stand up a CRM solution that adds value to your marketing and CX/PX strategy. To do this, a good place to start planning the integration process is by assessing everything that touches the patient and work backwards.
This approach should include a segmentation model that can evolve with each new patient, and has the ability to add or change attributes during the course of the patient journey. This model should also include messaging and content that can be cataloged in these segmented portfolios and support these key components:
- Continuity: consistent and faithful to the brand
- Credibility: messaging that is accurate and timely
- Compassionate: authentic and motivated by caring
- Relevance: messaging that is equally sensitive and important
Assuming every healthcare organization is working with some form of CRM for population health management, the real question is… how many are really using their CRM effectively? Imagine what you could be capable of doing if you could unlock 20% more of what your CRM does and instead of just managing customer relationships, you could deliver a remarkable patient experience.
Introspective
How is your healthcare organization translating patient data into insights and actionable information? Do you have an internal business analyst or do you work with a support team provided by the CRM?
If you could launch an initiative to improve the utility of your CRM, what would be the top three things you’d like to accomplish in the next six months?