One fertile area that seems to be overlooked is Social CRM (S-CRM). The S-CRM presence of most organizations is far from overwhelming, and often seems to be lacking a business perspective for doing much of anything other than checking a box to show they have done something. Almost all have a web site, but not many web sites do much to deliver value. A few more have a presence on Twitter, and even fewer do anything in the way of blogging, Facebook, or Youtube.
Why is that, especially since the cost to the organization is almost zero? S-CRM is a great way to cross-sell your message to employees, patients, physicians and other stakeholders, and to do it in a consistent and professional manner.
The tricky part once you have a web presence is figuring out the “so-what” factor. Why are you there, and what do you want to do with it? If nothing else, tell people what you want to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.
The next question to answer is “What do I tell them?” The answer is what you want to tell them is probably quite different from what you are conveying. So how do you know what to include? S-CRM can do two important things for your organization — increase revenues and decrease cost, and it can do both far more cheaply than anything else you might try.
I also use S-CRM to help hospitals decrease patient and physician churn and to significantly decrease the number of inbound calls. Here is one way to look at it. In most cases, if the phone is ringing, it means something was not done right somewhere else along the food chain. Every time you answer the phone, you are essentially putting water on a fire that started somewhere else.
Why not use S-CRM to prevent fires, rather than put them out. Some firms have figured out how to do that, and some of those have nothing to do with healthcare. That is okay. If some other organization has learned how to excel at S-CRM, study what they do, and make the ideas yours. That’s a polite way of saying steal rather than reinvent.
There are even some good healthcare web sites, Twitter profiles, and blogs. Almost any question that can be answered on the phone for $20 a call can be answered using S-CRM. The great advantage of S-CRM is your organization delivers the exact same message each time. S-CRM can be used by patients to download forms, read bios about the physicians and specialties, learn how to read bills, how to contact payors, handle disputes, inquire about results, and handle scheduling. One hospital I know attributed $8 million in new revenues to their S-CRM efforts.
Is there any reason you cannot do the same?
Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.