CRM in Healthcare Digital Solutions

Summary: Digital customer relationship management tools in the healthcare industry are cost-effective time-savers and also reduce the risk of human errors in patient care. The reliance on virtual CRM tools has grown in the post-COVID world where hospitals and independent medical practitioners are increasingly using telemedicine to interact with patients and deliver prescriptions. The cloud-based CRM solutions by Tata Tele Business Services help healthcare service providers to deliver personalised patient care while also ensuring the privacy of their data. Read on to learn how.

The healthcare industry had been adopting technology-enabled customer relationship management (CRM) systems to improve its operational efficiency. Healthcare CRM helps to enhance the quality of care for patients and utilise their medical records more effectively for recovery.

Instead of stacking hundreds of paper-based records, hospitals and clinics can organise their patient information in systematic applications for quick access and management. It helps them to understand patients’ concerns more effectively, book appointments through a variety of channels without duplication, direct patients to the right departments as per their requirements, and organise follow-ups correctly.

Did COVID also play a role in highlighting the need for digital CRM?

As the first industry to bear the direct impacts of COVID-19, the healthcare sector realised a stronger need for digital solutions. When the pandemic struck, medical centres were not only required to care for the affected population but also make provisions to serve patients who were apprehensive about visiting hospital premises, even if they needed help for other ailments.

That’s when the solutions for virtual consultations, or telemedicine, were deployed. This move towards digitalisation was also accompanied by the accelerated implementation of cloud-based CRM solutions. With added digital applications, the healthcare industry can enable its customer service staff to work from distant locations and reduce the risk of infections.

A balanced mix of customer or patient-care management tools also contributes to time and cost savings while eliminating the chances of human errors in healthcare services.

Here’s how the hosted CRM tools offered by Tata Tele Business Services help the sector to meet its goals in serving patients:

Hosted IVR

This cloud-based hosted interactive voice response (IVR) automates telephonic responses in hospitals that typically receive sensitive, complex and urgent calls.

As bespoke telephony software, it greets the callers in pre-recorded voice, offers them a menu of keypad-based options and directs them to the source that can best resolve their problems. It can be used to streamline the booking of appointments or medical tests and help patients to reach the pharmacy if they wish to buy medicines.

This zero-CapEx CRM solution features dynamic call routing. With its call hunting ability, it connects a caller to an alternative agent when someone is busy. It also comes with a portal for call analytics so that healthcare service providers can evaluate their departments’ customer service abilities and the number of calls they missed.

Live Chat

The outbreak of COVID has compelled more people to work from home. Several front- and back-office hospital team members who routinely attend to patients’ enquiries are not visiting their work premises daily.

The Live Chat cloud service ensures the continuity of services and productivity offered by these individuals. They can continue to answer the queries of every visitor on the hospital website in real-time, irrespective of the location they work from.

Powered by the TCS iON technology, the Live Chat tool also helps to auto-route a chat to specific individuals or teams for more effective communication with the patients or their caregivers. In essence, it also implies that a specialist can be consulted in real-time even if she is working at a different branch of the hospital and is not available personally in the patient’s town.

Doctors and patient-care agents across departments can also collaborate internally on the platform to discuss a case and share information, including multimedia files, for better service.

With the TTBS Live Chat, medical teams are not restricted by distance and can provide telemedicine services cost-effectively. It is a plug & play solution that can be accessed even on mobile devices. Additionally, it records all patient interactions and provides the facility of email if the chat is offline.

Cloud CRM

Gathering patient insights correctly is essential for improving service management and decision-making in hospitals. The hospital CRM system must maintain comprehensive records of patients’ ailments, the services they used at the premises and may need in future, and the dates on which they may need to visit for follow-ups.

Whether it is the scheduling of the next appointment for someone using dental care services or regular health checkups, healthcare organisations can leverage the TTBS Cloud CRM application to make their patient management more efficient.

Fuelled by the TCS iON technology, the app has customisable sections to analyse a patient’s concerns and enable the provision of right services. By recording end-to-end details on their interaction with an organisation, it also helps to offer them tailored packages such as free ambulance service or discounts on specific tests and outpatient care.

Cloud CRM can, moreover, help hospitals to automate tasks such as appointments and fee payment reminders.

With all its intuitive features and self-help modules, the tool is cost-effective, simple-to-use, and is backed by round-the-clock service assurance of TTBS.

Digital Survey

Like any other enterprise, a hospital or medical centre also needs to proactively collect the feedback and opinions of its customers for bringing improvements in service levels.

This is where the Digital Survey solution by TTBS helps. It has readymade templates to conduct surveys and solicit responses in a variety of Indian languages as well as English.

Healthcare companies can use this TCS iON-powered CRM tool through their web portals, social media platforms, emails, chat services and/or SMS applications. It also allows them to personalise the surveys with official logos and banners.

The cloud-oriented Digital Survey service has robust analytical capabilities with visual data presentation to gauge and review the information keyed in by the survey participants.

Online Fee Collector

Certain healthcare units may not essentially be hospitals or clinics even though their services contribute to the well-being of people. The category includes yoga teachers, mental health counsellors and other therapy service providers.

Such entities can manage fee collections from their patients securely with the TTBS Online Fee Collector. It streamlines payment management processes and eliminates the need for manual tracking of the due dates for all customers.

Payment alerts are automatically sent to concerned parties, who can pay online with secure web logins on the organisation’s website. Amounts are transferred between bank accounts without bringing mobile wallets into the picture.

A user-friendly interface helps to view fee details for orderly payments.

Optimising CRM with digitalisation

From regulating administration tasks and supporting patients efficiently to understanding new expectations and streamlining revenue management, the TTBS CRM tools support the healthcare industry in a number of ways.

At a time when digitalisation and virtualisation are the ways forward for hospitals and independent clinicians, we are helping our clients in this industry to create future-ready ecosystems.

To learn more about our solutions and services for your organisation, call us at 1800-266-1800.