Sometimes we find that the best observations come to us after an event, lecture, or gathering. That is exactly what is happening with Gainsight’s Pulse 2022. So many incredible keynotes and tracks were filled with exciting news and knowledge.
Over the years, we’ve been inspired by the unique strategies customer success professionals have presented to Pulse attendees and the way they’ve expanded CS beyond SaaS and into other industries.
One of those industries is the healthcare industry. Pulse 2022 had a few incredible sessions specifically focused on how CS is increasing efficiency and driving revenue growth for those in the healthcare industry. There was such a wealth of information, we wanted to pick our top learnings and share them with you.
Here are our top three takeaways for your organization—whether your organization operates in the healthcare space or you find yourself facing unique CS challenges in your industry.
Take Away #1: The U.S. Government is interested in the value of CS as it is applied to Healthcare and its cost-saving potential.
The U.S. government remains hyper-focused on the costs of U.S. healthcare systems and in search of ways for healthcare providers to provide better care, more efficiently. As a result, customer success has come to the forefront as a vital strategy for driving efficiencies and effectiveness of care while driving down costs.
Healthcare technology providers like Inovaccer have not only recognized this trend but have built world-class customer success processes proven to transform the way healthcare systems provide and prioritize care while improving outcomes for patients.
Providers can use CS principles and data analytics to predict patient health, increase productivity, and reduce healthcare costs. Vikram Khanna, VP of Customer Success at Innovaccer, shared this during his session at this year’s Pulse, “Customer Innovation in Healthcare: Population Health and Value-Based Care.”
Inovaccer works with over 37,000 providers across over 50 health systems with the purpose of consolidating healthcare and patient data to build a single system of record for its customers. “We activate the data even further by adding a system of intelligence on top,” explained Khanna. This allows them to provide its customers intelligence and workflows to the frontline providers, so they can provide a patient-centric experience and improve health outcomes, while being more efficient.
Inovaccer improves patient-facing processes and health outcomes by ensuring their customers —providers and healthcare systems—have the tools and technology to be successful. To do this, Inovaccer supports a high-touch customer success motion for every customer. This includes providing a Customer Success Director and Delivery Manager for each customer, who also oversee customer success delivery pods consisting of data scientists, data engineers, and a QA team to ensure their technology is not only performing as intended, but also being adopted and utilized to the greatest extent possible by the customers and end users.
Khanna also detailed the importance of metrics when providing customer success services and tracking outcomes. Inovaccer goes beyond traditional metrics such as NPS and CSAT by providing an additional engagement score for every customer. This tracks very specific activities customers are taking, such as going to conferences, attending roundtable sessions, agreeing to be a customer reference and more, in order to more accurately measure customer health and predict outcomes.
What Inovaccer is doing is helping create value-based care that providers can deliver more efficiently and at lower costs. In these circumstances, the government incentivizes physicians to save money by sending patients to associated facilities or hospital systems, like Dignity and Banner Health, that Innovaccer services.
Through a concerted effort of Innovaccer and partnering with health care providers, they have saved the government over $600 million over the last five years with their health data systems. Customer and Patient Centricity creating productivity and cost savings? That is a winning system.
Take Away #2 Customer Success, Data Analytics, and Biosciences work well together.
There were many heroes during the COVID-19 epidemic, but we never thought we would hear how customer success played a part in saving lives. Medidata is a software company that utilizes digital transformation in the area of life sciences. They are known for helping generate evidence for pharmaceutical, biotech, and diagnostics companies while accelerating value and optimizing outcomes.
Jeff Ventimiglia is the Senior VP of Customer Experience at Medidata. He explained to amazed attendees in his session–“Pioneering Customer Success in Life Sciences During a Global Pandemic”–that their customer success organization worked throughout the pandemic to ensure that it was accelerating the development of drugs to help save lives. But let’s face it, as Jeff admitted, “life sciences has never been the leading edge of any technology growth.” Yet, their work played an essential role in the recent clinical trials for vaccine production.
Medidata is involved in aiding clinical trials. Long gone are the days of billion-dollar drugs. The pharmaceutical business is now becoming more specific with personalized medicine and how to treat particular diseases. Clinical trials, however, are considered uncomplicated. They are merely scientific experiments. Yet, these scientific experiments involve human beings. There is a need to be extremely controlled, and significant regulations surround them. Accompanying those regulations requires a better view of what’s happening in that patient’s life—a more holistic view of data captured within the patient’s profile.
Real-time analytics are performed on those enrolled patients’ data and all that encompasses the trials, like patient visits, dropout rates, and other related events. Pharmaceutical companies, referred to as sponsors, must have total access to all that data in real-time to make medical and cost direction decisions. Finally, they need the data to ascertain specific information. It will eventually affect the drug’s submission to regulatory agencies, like the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), for approval and future distribution as medicine.
As a result of the requirements, Medidata’s business model and product needed to be different. “We don’t drop one thing in, and it’s there at an enterprise level,” Jeff explained. “We are really focused on having experiences across multiple end users within that clinical trial.” Interestingly, Medidata systems focus on the different experience levels, which include the sponsors or pharmaceutical companies, the scientists or academics studying the patients, and the patients themselves. Customer success principles and technology are hard at work through the use of data analytics and practice to impact people’s lives every day.
Take Away #3 Customer Success Principles, Practices, and Products are helping Mental Health Care Providers.
The importance of mental health care has been on the rise for a few years now. During the last year, many recognized the need for this type of benefit to be offered to employees. But for many teams, this was a one-time, check-the-box solution that could be described as “set it and forget it.” Enter Modern Health.
Modern Health is a global wellness benefit solution that provides mental health resources. With such offerings as therapy, one-on-one coaching, and group circles, they tailored all their products and overlaid them with digital programming and meditations. Modern Health essentially created a total customer wellness experience. Employers could choose personalized mental health solutions for employees and their families, all within one seamless app.
Their product is a long-term, sustainable solution for over a million members, many of whom are burned out emotionally due to the burden of the pandemic. The fact is that benefits and HR teams are often under-resourced, especially in SMB companies where a team comprises of one or two people. Modern Health determined they should be an extension of these teams. In light of the 98% burnout that many workers are experiencing, HR and benefit orgs need partners or thought leaders to aid in servicing overwhelmed employees.
Another aspect of this problem is that these same leaders and teams don’t always know the condition of their employees. They receive delayed responses from company employee sentiment programs that may occur only bi-annually. That is not often enough, considering all that is happening around us, including world events, and personal life experiences. Modern Health can assist them.
Many may ask, what do mental health and customer success have to do with one another? The reality is that benefit programs are old in nature and sometimes merely an afterthought solution. Mental health benefits are newer, with low maturity regarding coverage, value, and how companies can utilize them best for employees. That is where Modern Health comes in.
Their CSMs show the ROI of investing in such programs. Modern Health heavily invested in their own CS organization, which is four times larger than any others in their space. To their credit, Modern Health’s CSMs have become adoption champions for mental health benefits and use it heavily in the B2B market. We should remember that end users are benefit holders with dependents. So, the CSMs often deal with two customers in one. To Modern Health, their satisfaction matters as much as the client-customer’s. If there is a bad experience, there will be feedback that the CSM must deal with.
There are also third-party benefit brokers that are lead sources for potential clients. Modern Health must ensure their CSMs understand the desired outcomes from all perspectives. The involved CSM must also be clear about constraints, the needs of employer resource groups, and the end-user workers they are servicing.
At first, the benefits served mostly desk workers that were information and tech employees. Then, Modern Health expanded to companies with warehouse populations and agricultural workers, often in rural areas. More recently, educational organizations approached them. So, Modern Health started transforming its approach to incorporate ways to destigmatize mental health care and give it credibility within the CS process. That meant changing methodologies, engagement models, playbooks for various populations, and even languages. They had to manage this process while scaling in size and proficiencies. And as we all know, process matters, as synchronicity helps prevent unseen issues.
By embedding the CSM in the process, even with digital engagement, they served a unique set of stakeholders in distinct environments. The CSMs became trusted advisors helping create great customer experiences, and creatively solving problems internally and externally. Thus, they add to the value of Modern Health and client-customer. Additionally, tailoring engagement activities to customer’s use case and culture made the CSMs more successful. According to Samee Lieber-Dembo, Director of Client Success at Modern Health, this effort has made a 90% retention rate for all their teams.
Learn more in the Pulse Library
Customer success has a definite place in SaaS, but now its benefits in vertical markets, such as healthcare, are demonstrated. We can’t wait to see how CS evolves the healthcare industry in the next couple of years! To learn more CS strategies from industry leaders, access the Pulse Library.
