A Guide To Setting Up CRM Workflows
Maintaining successful relationships with patients can be done by managing successful workflows in your CRM platform. Mapping out workflows and communication needs will help you and your staff provide the best patient care outside of the care they receive from your medical providers. Here’s how to get started.
Phase One – Set Actionable Goals
Define specific goals for each department from your marketing team, to your patient schedulers to your practice administrators. Everyone knows that the end game is to give every patient the best experience, but having specific goals based on their roles in the practice help each individual understand what they are responsible for and how they add value to the patient’s journey.
Phase Two – Evaluate Manual Work
For each department in the practice, identify any work that is repetitive, time-consuming, or overlaps with another team. These are the manual processes that should be automated with workflows in your CRM. Anything that is done the same way every time or requires a team member to do or check on something can all be set up to execute based on logic triggers.
Phase Three – Consult Your Staff
No one knows what the pain points and inefficiencies are better than the people doing that job every day. When you’re onboarding your teams to the CRM, make sure you include them for input. While a practice manager or account manager at the CRM company may be able to provide some helpful best practices to get you started, your individual staff members are going to be the ones actually using the software. Thus, it is important to get their feedback on the intimate details of what their roadblocks are from being as effective as possible.
Phase Four – Implement, Test, Adjust
Once your workflows are set up, it’s time to evaluate. Take note of what your current KPI stats are for each team. After you’ve been running for a while, evaluate if those KPIs have improved and if you are hitting your goals for each team. If you’re not, review ways that the workflows can be adjusted to help the team reach their goal numbers for the week, month, quarter, and year.
Workflows should be fluid and should be reviewed frequently to maintain alignment between the team goals, practice growth, and standards for patient care. The most successful medical practices review their workflows anytime there is growth in the practice (i.e, a new procedure, provider, or location is added), staff turn over (i.e., workflows should be part of all new employee onboardings), changes in the industry (i.e., the rise of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of practices all over the world re-evaluating workflows around virtual appointments.)
