Taking Care: Customer- Centric Culture Key to Serving Healthcare

By Marty Guay, President, STANLEY Healthcare

Marty Guay, President, STANLEY Healthcare

The Salesforce platform is a core business system for STANLEY Healthcare, and we have garnered attention—including a Surfboard Award back at Dreamforce 2015—for how we use it in the healthcare space. While we are certainly proud of that, we see it as just an expression of who we are. Because the truth about any tool for customer service is that it is only as good as your commitment to know and serve your customers. Sales cloud, service cloud and community cloud are powerful enablers of our business— we could not succeed without them— but the animating force behind them is a customer-centric culture.

Serving the healthcare industry as we do, we are very mindful that our solutions are integral to patient or resident care for thousands of hospitals, clinics and senior living communities. This knowledge provides the essential context for our investments in customer service technology.

Mind the mission

Most clinicians, care-givers and healthcare administrators chose their careers because they are passionate about helping people. Their mission is to support wellness, treat diseases and enhance quality of life. They dedicate themselves to caring for others, making sure that services and systems are working efficiently to deliver a superior patient and resident experience.

As a healthcare vendor, our mission is to empower those caregivers with the tools and insights they need to make the best possible decisions and deliver the best possible care to patients and residents. From infant security to patient flow and environmental monitoring solutions, we operate with a clear understanding that our systems and resources are mission critical. In our sector, it is vital that customers know that they can depend on our applications to perform—and that they count on us to be with them as they design, implement, use and continually improve them.

Customers at the core

At the heart of any company’s strategy should be a close identification with the goals and values of its customers.

At the heart of any company’s strategy should be a close identification with the goals and values of its customers.

We have chosen to codify this and give it a name—By Your Side—to remind every individual in the organization every day that we share with our customers the responsibility for safe, secure and efficient care.

This philosophy finds concrete expression in a number of methodologies that underpin our business, and guides how we develop products and services. It also reinforces the need for a holistic view of what it is like to work with us. That view shapes how we continually refine the tools and services we use to help customers. Salesforce continues to provide the technology backbone as we live our philosophy every day.

By bringing together Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, we have been able to achieve a unified, end-to-end view of our customers. A single account record—available anywhere, any time over mobile— is the first stop for our sales, service and field agents. They can quickly get up to speed before they get in touch with our customers, leading to more productive and efficient interactions.

Guided by data collected from our products, which is sent to and stored in Salesforce, our customer care team can proactively reach out to customers about how our products are working in the field. Using real-time feedback in Service Cloud, our customer care reps can offer suggestions on how customers can do things better. They also can identify and solve emerging issues before they become real problems

Service Cloud forms the foundation of our robust online support function, including self-service capabilities where customers can troubleshoot product issues, request on-site service, initiate returns or generate product licenses on their own. The portal also features a library of videos and articles covering frequently asked questions and requests. Robust self-service support frees our support and product management teams to spend more time solving more complicated problems that require greater expertise.

Beyond that, Community Cloud has enabled us to create online customer communities, where healthcare organizations can come together. The Knowledgebase and Discussion Rooms provide convenient channels for exchanging ideas and best practices, and sharing successes with our solutions. It is rewarding to see how our customers collaborate and empower each other through information.

What is more, Salesforce serves as the hub for our customer satisfaction metrics. All of our customer satisfaction surveys are launched out of Salesforce and tracked within it. Those metrics point to the growing success of By Your Side, with customer satisfaction now exceeding benchmark levels, agent productivity increased more than six fold and first-call resolution up by 20 percent.

A customer-centric strategy is the key to serving those who make the world well. Customer centricity is not a destination. It is an ongoing journey for any organization. At all times, the customer’s needs should be the “true north” of every company’s compass. With that vision, the goals of your customer engagement and the tools needed to realize it come into clear focus.