The old search results
We deployed an updated version of the RevaHealth.com website last night that focused upon the usability of our main search pages. The goal of these changes is to make it easier for users to refine their search results and increase their engagement with the site.
We are closely monitoring the performance of this change and are expecting to see a noticeable increase in the number of pages viewed by the average visitor. We also expect to see a drop in our bounce rate, however we expect this to be slight. If the test succeeds the next goal will be to convert the increased engagement with the site into delivering value to both the visitor and the clinics featured on the site.
- We reduced the prominence of the search functionality. While the search boxes are still visible and constantly available we have discovered that the vast majority of our visitors are either interested in further refining their search or broadening it. It is rare that they want to jump into different categories or locations. Eye tracking analysis tells us that putting the search box on the right hand side of the page means that most visitors simply won’t notice it. This works as long as the page is relevant to the visitor, however some users will always land on the wrong page and having the search function available is still important.
- We logically grouped all of the search functionality into one cohesive unit by putting a white background behind it. Previously the search functionality comprised of three separate items that needed to be tied together into one function by the visitor. Now by strongly visually linking them we hope to have simplified this.
The new search results
- We changed the filtering mechanism from tick boxes and radio buttons, replacing them with drop down lists. While we don’t feel the new interface is as elegant or visually appealing as the previous filtering, it is more standard and occupies less real estate. We expect that by adopting the more common practice of drop downs and not forcing our users into learning a relatively unique UI that we will increase the use of this feature. This will give the visitor better and more relevant search results.
- We increased the size of the title on the page and spaced it out more so that visitors who land on page for the first time can instantly see what the page is about.
- We added the number of clinics that are returned by a search. So instead of saying ‘All Dentists in XXXX’ we now say ‘All 212 Dentists in XXXX’
- We have added breadcrumbs into the header of the page for visitors that want to broaden their search criteria. We are not 100% sure about this feature and we expect to do further tests on their placement on the page.
Lots of clinics don’t have an online enquiry form on their website. After all why do you need an enquiry form when you can just put your phone number on your website? If someone wants more information they can just call you, can’t they? Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong.
In our guide to sales funnels for health clinics we include the online enquiry (form) as a distinct stage. It is a part of the process that brings consumers into the sales funnel proper, so it is not a step that you should consider trying to skip by leaving the form off your website. Here’s why:
- 24/7. Customers look at your website all the time; on the weekends and in the middle of the night. Will they get a good consumer experience by ringing you at this time? If all you have is an answering machine then the answer is no. Most won’t bother to leave you a message, and you are relying on them to remember to call you again the next day, which they probably won’t. An online enquiry form is available 24/7, and it is easy to set up to meet your customers’ expectations (see moving prospective customers through the sales funnel).
- Phone calls can interrupt your normal daily business. An online enquiry form empowers you to use your staff resources as they are needed, and then to have them deal with the online enquiries when they are not so busy.
- The form allows you to weed out the time wasters. Many people who call the clinic aren’t really a potential patient at all. It might be that they can’t afford your services, or that they aren’t in your catchment area. By using an online enquiry form you can weed these time wasters out and reply with a polite standard email rather than tying up your staff with another phone call.
- Be prepared. An online enquiry form gives you the time to prepare information for the specific query so that when you do actually talk to the patient you can meet their expectations by being able to talk directly to their concerns. A phone call does not give you this opportunity, and you can be forced to terminate the call in order to get further information. This does not give the consumer a good experience.
- Capture the patient’s information reliably. Everyone has had the experience of talking to a potential patient and taking down their contact information incorrectly, or maybe your computer is booting up and you write it on a scrap of paper only for the cleaner to put it in the bin. Now the patient expects you to call back and you never do – how likely do you think it is that they will call back? If they do, what sort of impression have you given of your clinic? Online enquiry forms can solve this problem.
- Some people don’t want to talk. Many potential patients who are early in the buying cycle are not prepared to talk on the phone and would rather remain at arm’s length for the time being. If you don’t have an online enquiry form then you are excluding them.
Hopefully you can now see some of the benefits in having a dedicated online enquiry form.
I’ll finish with one final piece of advice – even though we recommend strongly that you use an online enquiry form on your site, our own survey of consumers tells us that your phone number is also in the top five pieces of information that they are looking for on your site. Don’t forget to make it easy to find, in the header or footer of the page, and include it on your enquiry form too.
There are no shortage of articles telling us about the scale and staggering growth of the ‘medical tourism market’. Deloitte has valued it at $60 billion, while a Research and Markets report estimates it at a lower, but still substantial, $40 billion. I have spent the last 3 years working in the field and after putting over 50,000 customers in contact with overseas healthcare providers, I have come to the conclusion that while there is a growing and vibrant international trade in healthcare services, it isn’t a market in the true sense of the word.
A market is defined as any structure where buyers and suppliers can exchange goods and services, in this instance, healthcare. Once you talk to a number of ’medical tourists’ it becomes abundantly clear that they don’t purchase their overseas healthcare from a ‘medical tourism marketplace’ at all. Instead they buy from a globalised healthcare market. In simple terms, when Annie Smith considers travelling to Thailand for a breast reduction procedure, she doesn’t compare Thailand’s cosmetic surgeons to other overseas cosmetic surgeons; she compares them to local practitioners. She doesn’t buy from the ‘medical tourism market’, she buys from the globalised healthcare market – she compares the price and quality offered by multiple clinics that carry out this procedure, both at home and abroad, and chooses her preferred option.
The fundamental mistake that analysts and pundits make is to assume that globalisation creates new markets – it does not. Globalisation combines many domestic markets into one larger market place. In the case of healthcare, the consumer is free to evaluate their options at a global marketplace and choose the clinic that meets their needs. While the location of the service provider might be a consideration for the consumer, or even a deciding factor, it does not change the fact that the services being consumed are available across multiple locations.
In some ways this globalisation of healthcare echoes that of other previously globalised markets. For example, parallels can be drawn between the healthcare industry and the automotive industry. When Carlos Ghosn became CEO of the Japanese Nissan company, he started purchasing car parts from factories in China and India. This decision was influenced by the price and quality offered, not by source location. In other ways the globalisation of healthcare is unique and some lessons will have to be learnt by trial and error, rather than by reference to historical market analysis.
One way in which healthcare is different to, for example, consumer product industries, is that the patient must be transported to the service. This has two major affects on medical tourism. Firstly, it makes it difficult for governments to apply trade barriers in the form of tariffs (effective trade barriers are already very much in place, in the form of subsidies or national insurance that apply only to domestic providers). Secondly, unlike intellectual property which can cross borders effortlessly, healthcare is not a frictionless product. The cost and time involved in travelling over large geographical distances presents a significant barrier to trade. This gives an inherent advantage to the local market. It is quality, availability of care, value for money and additional privacy that enable overseas clinics to overcome these barriers.
Healthcare suppliers who target overseas patients may regard themselves as constituting a ‘medical tourism marketplace’, but this is because they operate from a myopic, supplier-centric
view of the market. It is necessary to take a step back and view the market from the consumers’ perspective. After all it is they who define the market.
What this means for healthcare providers worldwide is that they must become aware of the options open to their patients, locally, nationally and internationally. Only then can consumers be expected to make educated decisions about their own healthcare.
Sources:
http://ryanfamily.typepad.com/files/us_chs_medicaltourismstudy28329.pdf
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c74425
All online enquiries deserve a personalized email response; however your business processes should also include an automated email that is sent immediately once the online enquiry has been submitted. A well thought out response should include the following five pieces of information:
- Confirmation that you have received the enquiry. This reassures the consumer that their enquiry hasn’t fallen into a black hole and your systems are working correctly. An automated email is standard practice on the internet and the consumer expects it. If you don’t send one then you won’t be meeting their expectations and reducing the chance that they will ever visit your practice for treatment.
- A time and date when they can expect a personalised response. This allows you to set the consumer’s expectations so that you can then subsequently meet them. If you don’t tell them when they can expect a response then they will create their own expectations, which will probably be unrealistic. If you say in the automated response that you will contact them within the next two days it is critical that you actually do contact them – even if it is only to apologize that there is a delay. If you do delay the response make sure you inform them of when they should expect the new response.
- Some further information on the clinic. Give the consumer something to read and to think about. Focus on the best aspects of your clinic such as accreditations, specialities, equipment, training, etc.
- Include two of three real testimonials with full names. Credibility is absolutely critical here and if your testimonials have been published on 3rd party sites you should include that fact.
- Contact Information. A lot of people use email as a crude tool for organizing their life – when they want to contact you in the future they will remember that you emailed them and will search their email. Putting all of your contact information in this mail will maximise the chance that they will contact you in the future even if they don’t come for treatment immediately.
It is nice to be able to personalize the email response to include the patients name and the treatment that they are looking for. This is not critical but if your technology easily allows it then it is a good idea.
Sample Email
Dear [insert the patients name here]
Thanks for your enquiry regarding [insert treatment here] with [insert your clinic name here]
We are currently reviewing your enquiry and will contact you in the next two days.
Clinic Overview
Describe your doctors or dentists experience, qualifications and specialisations- Take this information from your staff listings and add more detail as you like.
Procedures.
Describe the procedures your clinic performs. You should let them know how long the procedure normally takes, the recovery time and the number of visits required. You can include before and after pictures if you have them.
Testimonial 1
“I was very pleased with the treatment and also I was very pleased with the way I was looked after on my visit to the clinic.” – Alison Benson, Surrey, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)
Testimonial 2
“Despite having been to the dentist every 6 months all my life, I discovered, when I had my first appointment in Budapest, that none of the caps and facades I’d had put on locally fitted properly and my teeth had been quietly rotting away for years (the dentist gave me a mirror so I could see for myself, and I was horrified to see that the teeth underneath were black). Consequently I needed a lot of work. I’d had an estimate in a local clinic of 8 hours and 1300 Euro for just one tooth. The dentist in Budapest did the preparation work on 19 teeth in six and a half hours and the whole thing, including the most expensive crowns available (which are metal-free and therefore look like real teeth) cost around 5000 Euro. The most impressive thing was that because the dentist was so gentle and sympathetic, six and a half hours in the dentist’s chair really wasn’t that bad. It was tiring though and I felt fragile afterwards so the fact that Access Smile then drove me back to where I was staying (and ferried me back and forth to all subsequent appointments) really made a huge difference.” – Daniel Smith, London, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)
Contact information.
The patient may wish to contact you. Give them email, phone and website information for your clinic. Tell them the hours of business for your clinic and don’t forget to include the time zone – tell them hours before or after GMT.
Patient Coordinators Full Name
Managing your finances is critical to every business and I think accountancy should be an effective tool for managing a business. However, for all too many SMEs accountancy is all about compliance, simply ensuring that accounts are filed correctly and taxes paid.
Now I’m not an accountant, however I have always been of the opinion that anyone in business has to be able to understand the finances of the business. So about a year ago I went and looked for the accountancy tools that would help me (a non-accountant) to manage my business. Eventually I settled on Xero, for its simplicity and because it was online giving me access no matter where in the world I was.
At that time Ulster Bank Anytime Banking supported the OFX format which was readily support by Xero, allowing me to easily import my bank statements each month. However about 2 months ago Ulster Bank stopped supporting Anytime Banking and move their customers to a new system called Bankline. Despite repeated reassurances from Ulster Bank that all features of Anytime would be supported in Bankline they dropped support for OFX and only supported CSV.
This was a disaster for Ulster Bank user who used the Xero system as it made reconciliation of your bank account slow and error prone. Last week, at the end of July 09 Xero started to support the import of CSV formatted bank statements. This post looks at the tweaks that you need to make in order to get your Ulster Bank statement into Xero.
Exporting your Ulster Bank Bankline CSV statement
- Log into your Ulster Bank Bankline account as normal and navigate to the statement of the account that you want to import.
- At the top of the page select the date range that you want to statement to be for and press the go button to the right of the date fields.
- Click the ‘export statement’ link at the bottom of the page. This will save the statement onto your computer in CSV format. The fields in this file are different to the ones required by Xero, however the file is easily editable to make it compatible.
- Open the file in Excel or Open Office.
- Xero expects the following columns which are not in your CSV file – Cheque number, Transaction amount. Add these two columns into the spreadsheet.
- Copy the amounts from the Debit and Credit columns into the transaction amount column. The transaction amount column should now be a solid list of numbers, positive numbers for Credits and negative numbers for Debits.
- Save your spreadsheet ensuring you save it as a CSV file.
- Bankline puts the cheque number into the Narrative #1 field. Whenever the type = ‘CHQ’ copy the number from the Narrative #1 field into the respective cell in the new Cheque number field.
- Log into Xero as follows and from the account of the relevant bank account menu select ‘Import a statement’.
- Click the ‘choose file’ button and select your CSV file and click the ‘Import’ button.
Mapping your CSV column to Xero
- You are now presented with a page in Xero that allows you to map columns from the CSV file to Xero. Make the following mappings:
- ‘Date’ in the CSV to ‘Transaction Date’ in Xero
- ‘Narrative #1’ in the CSV to ‘Description’ in Xero
- ‘Narrative #2’ in the CSV to ‘Payee’ in Xero
- ‘Type’ in the CSV to ‘Transaction Type’ in Xero
- ‘Cheque Number’ in the CSV to ‘Cheque No.’ In Xero
- ‘Transaction Amount’ in the CSV to ‘Transaction Amount’ in Xero
- Press the save button and you’re done. Xero will remember these mappings so you won’t have to do them again for subsequent imports.
The internet is changing the way healthcare providers deal with customers. As the internet increasingly becomes the first point of contact with new customers, healthcare providers need a process for turning website visitors into bookings.
In this first post in our series on winning healthcare customers online, we discuss online contact methods and the customer funnel.
Online Contact Methods
The essential part of your online strategy is how easily customers can contact you. There are two basic contact methods that every healthcare provider needs to emphasize online, an enquiry form and your phone number.
Some people believe this can be accomplished by simply putting your phone number and email on a website or directory, and letting interested people call you directly. While doing this is an important first step, this alone is not an effective method for winning new business online.
A phone number is an essential but only partial solution for being accessible online. Firstly interested people will be on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However your clinic may only be open during normal business hours of say 09:00-18:00. The difficulty with only being contactable during normal business hours is that your customers are also at work and the last thing they want is to have a phone conversation about private health treatments amidst their colleagues in the office. For the most part, people will not leave private matters on your voicemail, also because of privacy concerns. Even if people are looking at your website during normal business hours, they may be more comfortable writing to you via an online enquiry form. This is often the case for private procedures like cosmetic or fertility treatment.
With an online enquiry form, interested visitors can contact you directly whenever they want to. The beauty of the internet is its 24/7 always-on accessibility. Therefore to get the most from your internet presence, your clinic also needs to be always-on. Also from the clinic’s perspective, written enquiries allows you to keep a record of the customer’s initial enquiry. For these reasons, we would advise you put the emphasis on the online enquiry form over the phone number on your website. Why an online enquiry form and not simply an email address? The online enquiry form makes life easier for the customer. With an email the question arises of “what do I write?” With an online enquiry form, you tell your customer what information you need.
Congratulations, with your online enquiry form and your phone number, your contact methods are now internet friendly! However, having the right contact methods in place is the easy part. If you are planning on to win new healthcare customers online you need to ensure that you have a customer management process in place to convert your website visitors to customers. The key to this is the customer funnel.
The Customer Funnel
The customer funnel is simple way of managing new customers. The funnel is broken into 6 key areas. Visitors are people who see your website, some of whom may be interested in purchasing your services, many other will not. The best your website can do is to convert those that are interested into written enquiries. From your email enquiries you hope to convert a sizable percentage to phone calls. The next stage is a face to face meeting and onto treatment. Once you have invested in this relationship it is important to maintain it to achieve repeat business and personal referrals.
The metaphor of the funnel is used because people drop away at each stage of a long enquiry process: For example, many of the people who send you written enquiries may have existing providers with whom they are very satisfied. On other words they are just testing the waters. Others may have requirements which other healthcare providers are better placed to treat. Still others may want to come for treatment, but not have the money to afford the treatment.
The image of the customer funnel is a visual representation of the step-by-step nature of a long enquiry process with this drop away in prospects at each stage.
Your goal at any stage of the funnel is to get the interested person to the next stage. For example when someone is visiting your website, the goal of your website is to get them to submit an online enquiry or to phone you directly.
The more efficient your customer management process is at each individual stage of the funnel the greater a percentage of the interested people will be brought to the next stage. With constant refinement and effort, a simple online presence can be converted to becoming the main source of new patients for a clinic.
Next week we will be rolling out a major upgrade to RevaHealth.com. This upgrade will not change any consumer facing pages on the website but instead focuses on the administration pages that clinics log into. We have spent months planning, developing and testing this release and although it will take some getting used to we are confident that it will big improvements for all of the clinics that use RevaHealth.com on a daily basis.
New Supplier Site - July 2009
The first thing you are going to notice when you log in is that the colours have changed from light pastel shades to a more solid blues and blacks. The contrast has been increased to aid usability and readability. Over the coming month we will be migrating these colour changes through the consumer site as well in order to achieve a consistent look and feel.
The clinic interface has been radically cleaned up which should make it much easier to navigate. The clinic’s profile is now displayed to the clinic in exactly the same way that it is to the consumer with the exception of additional edit controls. This makes it easier to find a section if you want to edit it and also provides immediate feedback as to how it is going to look to a potential patient.
All of the settings have now been collapsed into a single page which makes it simpler to get to the information that you want.
By far the biggest change to the product is the enquiry management interface. We have been in deep discussion with a number of leading clinics about the problems that they face in dealing effectively with online patient enquiries. There is a recognition that the main purpose of having an online presence is to generate enquiries, however without the tools and processes in place they simply aren’t being dealt with as effectively as they could be.
Now when you log into your RevaHealth.com account you will be brought directly to your enquiry management screen. This lists out all of the enquiries that you have in order of the due date of the task associated with each enquiry. As you complete each task you are prompted to create the next task until the enquiry is either booked or archived. This simple tool provides a lightweight process that helps clinics ensure that they are responding to potential patients in a timely fashion throughout the consultation period.
New Features
- Get a website. All clinics will now be able to get a website with their own domain name through RevaHealth.com. This is the most cost effective and quickest way for a clinic to get an online presence. The website can then be edited and maintained through the RevaHealth.com interface or for clinics without Internet access by fax. This feature has a promotional price of €350 per year.
- All clinics will now be able to turn off the contact form and only display their phone number. A lot of clinics do not monitor their email frequently and providing a contact form in these instances only gives the consumer a poor experience as they may have to wait several days for a response.
- Tasks. All patient enquiries can now have a task with a due date associated with it. Enquiries are displayed by default in the order of when the task is due. This feature is available to all clinics.
- Import enquiries. Enquiries come from a lot of sources and we realize that providing a management solution for just RevaHealth.com enquires is a partial solution. Therefore all paid accounts will be able to import enquiries into their RevaHealth.com account so that they can manage them all through the one interface.
- Add a review. Clinics can now add reviews from consumers themselves through the web interface. These reviews are clearly labelled as having been added directly by the clinic. This feature is available to all clinics.
- Pictures for treatments. All paid accounts can now add pictures to their treatments.
- Warning and alerts have been introduced into every page, informing you when important information is missing or when something needs your attention.
Features that have been removed
A range of small features have been removed that had very poor adoption rates. The removal of features is vital to any product if it is going to remain usable. We realize that some clinics use these features; however their continued support cannot be justified.
- The facilities tab has been moved and the information that used to be there has been combined into the details tab.
- Several fields have been removed from the staff section such as ‘place of birth’. The fields that have been removed are all rarely used (less than 2% adoption).
- Various lists have been cleared of unused facilities, services and treatments.
Recent Comments