COVID-19 Sees Breakthroughs in Omnichannel Healthcare
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- September 26, 2022
Not so long ago, doctors were invited to in-person events to hear about the latest medical treatments. For GenesisCare, the invites were generalized, and the follow-ups were spasmodic.
Fast forward to today, and the invitees are carefully selected from a growing database to match their relevant interests. The follow-ups are systematic and based on a recently installed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program.
So what happened? COVID-19.
Jane Power, the global marketing and digital transformation director at GenesisCare, told at the recent Chief Digital and Data Officer Australia Summit in Sydney how the pandemic lockdown had seen the company transition away from its “burning platform” of engagement and embrace the digital future.
Power outlined that during the lockdowns, GenesisCare had turned to webinars to replace the traditional in-person dinner format. At the same time, the company implemented a modern data-driven CRM solution for the first time.
CRM on the menu
Now that the pandemic restrictions are over, dinner is back on the menu. Yet, the CRM helps target the invitees and manages the engagement.
“Dinner with doctors was our primary channel and our referral base, so the pandemic was a huge catalyst,” said Power.
“The change was not so much about the webinars, but what they really gave our business was that it forced us to engage in a different way and that created leads data. This enabled us to actually think about nurture journeys and segmentations.”
Previously, GenesisCare’s approach was a “high-touch single channel.” This has now evolved into a multi-channel approach with webinars and in-person dinners.
“The marketing team, for the first time, enables the face-to-face team using data insights, and we’re able to employ the channels in the most effective way”
Power explained that the previous model was “hi-touch and hi-cost.” Not only had the digital tools reduced costs, she said, but they had had a “revolutionary” impact on marketing.
“We now have this incredibly rich database around our primary customers’ adopters, and we now have segments that guide that activity,” she said.
“The marketing team, for the first time, enables the face-to-face team using data insights, and we’re able to employ the channels in the most effective way.”
When potential customers now attend webinars or dinners, the marketing team can understand which segment they belong to and decide on the next most appropriate action.
If the attendees are brand new to the company, their information is gathered. They are then onboarded into the CRM as potential customers, and decisions are made about the next most appropriate interaction.
“So it has gone from ad hoc chats around the dinner table to very methodically taking them through the journey we have built,” said Power.
Client driven
Another Australian healthcare company with a similar experience of the pandemic is the Altius Group, whose core business is occupational health and safety for the workplace.
Nick Park, the general manager of Altius Group Technology, told the CDO Trends Summit that around 90% of counseling sessions were done in person at around 30 offices throughout Australia before the pandemic.
“We have these rooms with nice chairs in them, and they’re very well appointed, and it's also a comfortable environment,” said Park.
“We had some sessions which were done on the phone, but previously we had zero online sessions at all, and our psychologists' mindset was that ‘this is how it was done,’ and you need to be in the room with the person.”
For Altius, the issue was not the technology but the culture and the work practice. While the psychologists had to learn new ways of interacting with clients, Park says the clients were more enthusiastic about online consultations. For many, the idea of an online consultation was preferable to face-to-face.
“We’re probably now seeing clients we would never have seen before,” he said.
“That’s because there’s a huge psychological barrier to calling up an organization and saying ‘I need help.’
“If you want to talk about anxiety as a challenge in your life, you might not want to physically go into a location, be greeted by a receptionist, and then go into a room with someone you have never met.”
Being able to do so from home, at a time of their choosing, has meant that Altius is now seeing more clients.
“I genuinely believe we’re now actually able to help more people by having gone through this transformation and do it in a way that suits them,” said Park.
“Meeting on the channel of their choice automatically creates a calmness to the situation, and they can choose whether or not their video is on, so it has balanced things up and been an enabler for our services.”
Power and Park talked about the journey from multi-channel to omnichannel delivery and said that while this was the goal, neither organization was yet there.
Even so, the consensus between the two was that the pandemic had been a significant catalyst for new digital services, which had forever changed their delivery models.
There was a downside, however, for Jane Power at GenesisCare, for whom the next challenge is introducing digital into more aspects of the “patient journey.”
“We did drive an amazing amount of innovation in a very short period of time,” she said.
“It’s been a double-edged sword in that as people are looking at what we did and thinking about the future and saying, ‘oh, you could do that in nine days.”
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/PraewBlackWhile