Defining A CRM Workflow
A good CRM focuses on one thing – your patient. This means that the CRM you chose for your practice needs to offer a selection of workflow automation tools, contact management solutions, activity management tools, and analytics for marketing and ROI. These tools will help your staff and your brand form a strong bond and loyalty with your patients.
In today’s market, there are many different CRM companies that offer these tools to medical practices. Thus, it can be difficult to decide which one to choose for your practice. At the end of the day, what matters most is to pick the CRM that fits your internal workflows and can help your staff work smarter, faster, and stronger. Decrease opportunity cost by automating marketing efforts to new and existing patients, reduce staff workload and provide transparent tracking and analytics to help make better business decisions.
What Are Workflows in a CRM?
A workflow is a series of actions leading up to an end goal in a business process. In a medical practice CRM, goals can be to book a procedure, respond to and correct and bad review, or launch a marketing campaign. Workflows are meant to assist the respective employees in completing that goal in the most efficient and consistent manner whether it’s a patient coordinator, a practice manager or a marketing manager.
In a medical practice, an example of a workflow can be that a new potential patient has filled out the contact form on your website. Having read through a few pages on your website, and providing key information via the contact form like name, phone number, email, and a procedure of interest, this person would be considered a valid lead and enter into a lead management workflow. From the website, this lead information would be fed into the CRM and put in a queue for a patient scheduler to reach out.
Once a human connection is made, the patient scheduler can evaluate their readiness to book a consultation or procedure. Based on that evaluation the lead is placed further down the sales funnel. Depending on their placement in the patient journey the patient scheduler can set up automated reminders for the staff to reach out at a later date, set up automated marketing about their procedure, or if an appointment is booked, drop them into a queue to automatically be sent important information about their appointment.
This is where the patient coordinators and marketing team can really take advantage of the automation that CRM platforms can provide today. It used to be that a workflow was designed in a chart and manually executed by the staff. This leaves the practice wide open to inconsistencies in communication to patients. With automated marketing tools the practice marketing team and patient coordinators deliver consistent messaging and education to every single patient.
When deciding which CRM platform to use for your practice, it’s important to choose one that has the most efficient and all-encompassing tools to achieve these goals. RSI, for example, has the intelligence to identify where someone is in the sales funnel – a lead, a new patient after their first consult, an existing patient wanting another treatment, etc. – and can drop them helpful information about what they are interested in via communication that is easiest for them to digest. Whether that’s receiving information via phone call, email, or text message. Each patient can be catered to in a completely customizable form that feels personal but is completely automated for the practice staff.
