Healthcare payers, providers, and vendors are facing more competition as consumers are increasingly making their choices online. Coupled with this, consumers are demanding more and more from their online experiences.

Fortunately, there are engagement techniques already proven successful in other industries that can be applied to the healthcare industry to ensure consumers are attracted to your brands and stay loyal to them. Core to these techniques is the ability to personalize the visitor's online experience in real-time and push the accrued analytics to the CRM and therefore to the sales team who significantly benefit from the additional intelligence during the selling process.

To demonstrate how productive these techniques can be, we can look at how two enterprise systems, Sitecore and Salesforce, can be used to attract, convert and retain consumers.

Why these two systems? Sitecore is purpose-built to deliver personalized online experiences and Salesforce is optimized for lead conversion and customer retention. Forester consistently rates both systems as leaders in their market specialization (see Sitecore and Salesforce reports). Their collective features far exceed those of dedicated healthcare applications. All that is required to create a powerful system to attract and retain healthcare customers is some thought around content personalization and an integration like S4S to get the data moving between the two systems.

Let's look at an online engagement process for healthcare prospects:

• The prospect is attracted to the Sitecore healthcare website
  • The website has the usual qualities like good content, performance, and compatibility
• Web content is personalized
  • This is "best guess" implicit personalization because the visitor is anonymous 
  • Their experience continues to improve as they traverse the website on multiple visits 
• The prospect submits a "sign up" web form
  • The form field plus personalization data is pushed to a Salesforce lead record
• Salesforce workflow immediately issues a receipt acknowledgment, typically by email
• The CRM sales team follows up quickly and potentially converts the prospect into a customer
• The customer is given login credentials to access a personal web space (Sitecore portal)
  • Content personalization is explicit because the visitor is now known

The web portal, accessible only by authentication, is key to customer retention. It can be personalized based on the type of customer, and to the characteristics of the individual directly from Salesforce. Some portal use cases for payers and providers are:

Patient Portal (hosted by Providers)

• Manage appointments and display preparation information about upcoming procedures
• Risk scoring for chronic diseases
  • Track patient behaviors
  • Use predictive analytics to estimate the likelihood of a future outcome
  • Disseminate health advice that matches the outcomes
• Trigger real-time alerts that require a team to immediately spring into action
• Emergency contact information and next-of-kin details
• Drive web content based on Salesforce record data if needed
  
  

Patient Portal (hosted by Payers)

• Show targeted content to the individual. According to Competiscan, when insurance consumers were asked, "What's the one thing your insurer could do to make your experience better?", 33% said clearer communications, 26% wanted better customer service, and 12% better website features and functionality
• Show the current healthcare plan and relevant offers
• Establish trust by educating members on their chosen plans
• Show proactive health reminders, such as flu shots
• Disclose claims and demographic information

Sitecore and Salesforce, integrated with S4S, is the perfect combination of tools to woo healthcare prospects and consumers. Their powerful out-of-the-box features can be used to first captivate prospects, convert them to customers and retain them for life: 

• Sitecore - Content Personalization: Captivate website visitors by personalizing their content in real time based on their behavior. Store the analytics for future visits
• Sitecore - Forms Wizard: Quickly create advanced web forms in minutes
• S4S - Mapping Wizard: Map Sitecore web forms to Salesforce leads. Optionally push the Sitecore personalization data and analytics to Salesforce
• S4S - Sitecore Analytics in Salesforce: Viewing the analytics in Salesforce lets the sales team see the prospect's activity on the website (or in the portal). This includes data like visit time/dates, pages visited, downloads, goals seen, etc.
• Salesforce - Tracking: Track the status of leads throughout the qualification process until they are converted to a customer (contact). Manage their information and interactions
• Salesforce - AppExchange: In addition to Salesforce Health Cloud, the AppExchange has numerous applications that add healthcare functionality to Salesforce   
• S4S - Drive Sitecore Personalization from Salesforce: Salesforce users can completely control the website experience of anonymous or logged (portal) website visitors in real-time, directly from their Salesforce record. 
• S4S - Security Connector: Customers can log in to the Sitecore portal if their entered credentials match those in their Salesforce record.
• S4S - Multiple Role: By selecting a new role from a drop-down list in a customer's Salesforce record, Sitecore can reveal completely different Sitecore portal pages for customers, internal staff, partners, vendors, and/or any other group that requires the delivery of privileged information. The portal pages contain content specific to each role and can be personalized from Salesforce in multiple ways. Internal staff, for example, who do not have access to Salesforce, could access "Internal Only" Sitecore portal pages that surface Salesforce data, like a list of patients that have a particular chronic disease. Optionally, the staff member could have the ability to create, read, update, or delete these records, pending the member editing status in their Salesforce contact record.

Being enterprise systems, Sitecore, Salesforce and S4S can accommodate traffic bursts, like the result of a very successful social media campaign that results in 300,000 signups in one day. 

To learn more about how to add value to your business in this way please contact us for more information

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