November 2nd marks the 70th anniversary of when the Hercules H-4, also known as the Spruce Goose, reached a formidable elevation of 70 feet as it flew over the Long Beach Harbor. With how much fan fare it had garnered, the years it had spent in development, and sheer engineering fortitude it took to bring it to life, November 2nd was both its maiden and final flight. Aside from being an aviation aficionado, I highlight the Spruce Goose because I see many parallels in the world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Healthcare. We are seeing multi-year CRM implementation across the healthcare provider landscape, built in theory to do everything for everyone, and yet its utility barely sees the light of day or has an ROI that is too far off in the horizon.
CRM in today’s marketplace
According to Gartner’s Health IT Hype Cycle 2017, Healthcare CRM is about to hit turbulent air as it enters the Trough of Disillusionment, descending down from the Peak of Inflated Expectations. And rightfully so! While market forces in healthcare scream for the need of CRM, a tried and tested platform in nearly every industry except Health, the reality is healthcare can’t afford an industry-agnostic CRM, or one that is deployed like that other three-letter acronym in health IT (you know, the one that starts with E, and ends with MR).
Gaining Perspective on Healthcare CRM
The essence of Customer Relationship Management has always been to help connect the right product to the right customer, and amplify its effectiveness by doing so with the right message at the right time. So how do healthcare leaders leapfrog Gartner’s forecast that CRM in Health will take 5 -10 years to reach ‘Enlightenment’? You do it by deploying and delivering real tangible wins, that actually demonstrate ROI in the first 3-6 months.
Healthcare executives need to gain perspective that implementations of most traditional major platforms of CRM:
- Take months to years to deploy
- Require significant internal IT resources to support (before and after go-live & run)
- Deliver results that may or may not take off as leaders and business models change
- Usage wanes as change management is never factored or budgeted
- Costs for the deployments is in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars
The SymphonyRM Differentiation
So let’s talk about the speed-to-value for CRM, and why we at SymphonyRM are disrupting the market by really doing Healthcare CRM right. It helps that our team collectively has been in the CRM space for 40+ years combined, having built successful CRM platforms for the likes of telecom, banking, retail, to those of us that have deployed the traditional vendor CRM platforms at health systems and payers. Here’s how we partner to serve our Healthcare clients:
- Strategy: SymphonyRM partners with our clients to identify business metrics, their value, and the stakeholder analysis required to ensure a successful deployment.
- Subscription-based model: How confident are we? We deliver our platform as a monthly subscription, forcing us to continuously deliver on metrics and value. How addicting would Netflix be if the content wasn’t fresh or easily accessible?
- Risk-based payment structure: Demonstrates that we are in it with you. We won’t walk away once the sale completes. We move metrics: be it driving net new patients, closing care gaps, primary care utilization, etc.
- Systems Integration & Change Management: Are all included in the monthly subscription, as are the best practices on data integration and our agile delivery management framework.
- The Platform of vNext: SymphonyRM is a platform, not a one-off and one-use case scenario. Check out our on stage presentation at Health 2.0 Launch to learn how the platform brings on new campaigns and opportunities seamlessly.
We do hope you join us, as we build and deploy a more nimble, honest, and metric-driven CRM platform to serve today’s consumers in healthcare. Interested in seeing a demo or engaging with SymphonyRM through a Strategy Session, let’s talk.
Sheetal Shah is SymphonyRM's Vice President of Market Development. His experience includes 10+ years health strategy & technology consulting in the Provider and Payer markets. He has deployed Digital Health Technologies at some of the most recognizable national healthcare brands. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheetalyshah/
