Jul 22

Winning Healthcare Customers Online

By Owen Cooney Health 2.0, Stuff we've learned 5 Comments »

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 Sales 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.

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Jul 16

RevaHealth.com Supplier Site Upgrade

By Caelen King Health 2.0, Web/Tech No Comments »

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

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. Pictures for treatments. All paid accounts can now add pictures to their treatments.

  7. 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.

  1. The facilities tab has been moved and the information that used to be there has been combined into the details tab.

  2. 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).

  3. Various lists have been cleared of unused facilities, services and treatments.
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Jul 15

Statistics for Correct Entry of Phone Number by Consumers

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned No Comments »

As part of contacting a clinic we ask consumers to enter their mobile number, this allows us to text the phone number of the clinic to them. As noted by Tim in an earlier post, phone numbers are problematic and we strive to handle any format that the user might throw at us. Never-the-less a huge number of these number fail for a variety of reasons including:

    1. The user has entered a land line and not a mobile number. This is perfectly valid and doesn’t represent an error state, however it does mean that we can’t give these users the same experience as those that enter the right number
    2. The user has decided to leave the field blank. Once again this is a valid input and is the users prerogative.
    3. The user has entered a deliberately distorted number – i.e. a string of 9 zeros.

I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics. In the first two weeks of July we attempted to send out text messages to 5,296 users. Of which:

• 3,660 had valid mobile number
• 2,884 responded with an automatic sms receipt. We expect that the remaining valid number has SMS receipt turned off on their phone or on their network
• 1,534 failed

Of the 1,534 that failed

• 414 had no phone number
• 1013 have what looks like a valid land line number
• 107 had a deliberately distorted input

Jul 14

Using Country Specific Domains For SEO

By Caelen King Web/Tech 6 Comments »

Our approach to SEO at RevaHealth.com is never to attempt to deceive the search engines. We regard SEO as the art and science of narrowing the distance between the search engine’s understanding of our pages a human’s understanding of a page.

The search engine are trying to do a very hard job, they are trying to use machines to understand the nature and meaning of a page while simultaneously doing the same for users query’s. Even with the best brains on the planet the search engine’s understanding of a page is going to be different to the reality and it is our job to help it understand our pages given the tools that we have available.

There are thousands of ideas out there on how to influence the position of pages in Google index. Many of these are tricks designed to deceive the search engine and others are out-dated techniques that have long been relegated to the history books. The problem with all search engine optimization is that from research alone it is impossible to tell the snake oil form the Promised Land and some changes can have disastrous results.

We have found that every time we want to implement some changes, we first conduct a scientific experiment to check if it’s a good or bad idea. This takes time and dedication and is not something to be taken lightly. Note that despite every effort to remain scientific there is a good deal of interpretation at all stages as it is impossible to control all variables in the study because the search engines are effectively black boxes and no doubt look at variables that we have not considered.

One of the tools that the search engines use to interpret the intention of a page is the use of country specific domains. So pages that are targeted at an UK audience can benefit from a .co.uk domain. Google also allows you to manually assign a preferred country using its webmaster tools. The problem for us at RevaHealth.com is that while we have content that is focused towards specific countries, it is not just one country (99 in fact). This means that we can’t use Google web master tools for optimizing for particular countries.

We’re about to test now how redirect to www.RevaHealth.ie and www.RevaHealth.co.uk will influence our position in Google.ie and Google.co.uk. We have local domains registered but we used to redirect all traffic to our main domain www.RevaHealth.com. We will redirect pages of 10 counties in Ireland and 10 shires in the UK to the local domains. It’s a great number of pages when we multiply counties by hundreds of locations and 25 clinic types. We have to redirect the pages permanently (301), as temporary redirect (302) doesn’t pass the PR.

What can we achieve? We are expecting to see the surge in position of our Irish pages in Google.ie and UK pages in Google.co.uk as the domain-extension is suppose to influence it. We risk our position in Google.com but we expect that drop to be minor. We will dilute our traffic as well, as visitors will be divided between domains. We will keep you informed on how we’re doing with the experiment.

Jul 09

New Supplier’s Site On Its Way

By Philip Boyle Health 2.0 No Comments »

We’ve been pretty busy these last few weeks working away on improving the one part of the site that most visitors never get to see – the supplier’s site. This is where the clinics using RevaHealth.com go to update the information that is displayed about them and to check how many people have been in contact with them.

This part of the site has stayed much the same for most of this year, but we always felt it was a bit too complicated to use properly. So, we set about reworking it from the ground up, making it easier to use and hopefully more useful too. It will be going live to our suppliers next week all going to schedule.

One new feature we’re going to be offering is giving clinics the ability to create their own website, www.myclinicswebsite.com, without having to go near a computer. These days the majority of people looking up a phone number or an address are turning to the web to find it, yet the majority of clinics don’t have their own web presence. We can solve that problem for clinics with the minimum of fuss.

Full details of both the new supplier site and the new website service will be posted here next week.

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Jun 25

Learning from each other

By Philip Boyle Start ups 1 Comment »

Myself, Caelen and Jason went to an informal meeting last night of some local online business people, where we all talked through our products and pricing plans and gave each other some advice on how we might change and hopefully improve them.

It was great to meet:

James from Piehole
Eoghan from Contrast
Helen from Shop 4 Training
Shane from the Castleknock Print Blog
Ali from FishPond

We’re looking forward to continuing to discuss some of the ideas that cropped up last night, and hopefully we’ll see all of the above and some more of you at the next one. More details soon…

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Jun 23

Collab.ie – Matching Ideas With Skills

By Philip Boyle Tuesday Push 3 Comments »
Collab.ie Homepage

Collab.ie Homepage

This week’s Tuesday Push is for Collab.ie, a site which aims to enable “collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills”. Collab.ie is brought to us by SmartCube, the people behind SwiftStore.

So, how does it work?

Say you have a great idea but you don’t have the tech skills to implement it, you could come to Collab.ie and post an general outline of the project and ask for someone with the right skills to collaborate with you on it. Similarly, if you have a product but no idea how to market it, you could find someone here to help you get on track.

Now, at first this just sounds like another job / CV site, but (and I’m guessing here) there are other ways to collaborate other than just being paid straightforward salaries. Some people will no doubt offer advice for free. Others may even lend a hand on a small part of a project in their spare time. Others still might want a stake in the final company or product in return. I guess this whole aspect won’t become clear until more people are using the service.

Something that does stick out to me though is that a lot of the collaboration seems to take place behind closed doors.  This makes sense for privacy reasons obviously, but also discourages people from joining in to collaborate. For instance, I wouldn’t spend my time on a message board giving advice to someone about SEO or SEM if someone else has already given them the same advice earlier in the thread. If the public’s responses to a Collab.ie posting are hidden from each other, they might be less inclined to take part in the first place. This is a little bit catch-22, so I’m not sure what the answer here should be.

I decided to try using the site and came up against some behaviour that was a little unexpected. When I hit the “Add a Project” button, rather than being asked to put in the details of my project, I was asked to login, with the usual “forgot password” link. However, I wasn’t given the option to register on the same screen, other than the link in the top right hand corner. Ideally, I’d have liked to see a form where I could post my project and add my login or registration details in at the end.

Apart from that though, the site seems pretty clear and functional to me. The latest projects list and the tag cloud give you a couple of quick ways into the content. All the expected links (Twitter, RSS) and pages (How, About, Contact) are easy to find. Overall, Lee Munroe has done a nice job on the design.

Any tool that can help move people and their ideas forward is very welcome, especially in current climate. A free tool like Collab.ie even more so.

collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills.

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Jun 22

Setting The Right Price

By Philip Boyle Start ups 1 Comment »

Caelen and James Kennedy of Piehole the voiceover directory are getting together to talk about sales, marketing and pricing on Wednesday after work in Oleysa’s Wine Bar on Exchequer Street (between Grafton Street and George’s Street) and would love you to come along too. It’s completely informal, and there will be some drinking, but the main purpose is to talk about how to decide what your price points should be for your products, and how to differentiate them for sales and marketing purposes.

If you’re free on Wednesday evening, drop in and say hi and add your 2 cent to the discussion.

What: Talking about pricing, drinking beer and wine.
Where: Oleysa’s Wine Bar, Exchequer Street, Dublin 2 [Google Map]
When: 6pm, Wednesday, June 24th.

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Jun 22

Getting It Right

By Tim Hawkins Stuff we've learned No Comments »

Following on from my ramble about addresses (see Return To Sender) I’m going to complain in general about some blocks of information on the web.

Say you work as a professional, and your professional body sends around a form for you to fill out. They tell you it will be published on the web, say to help people find their nearest qualified aerospace engineer, of which you are one of course. Now, if you fill in an email address on the form and it gets published you will get emails. It is surprising how many people think this will not happen.

Which brings me to what my real point is: a whole load of data that gets thrown out there on the web is published without considering either its intention or its purpose.

If you make your phone number public, is it decipherable? The bottom line is that I don’t want phone numbers like (0)-555/767.768/9 appearing anywhere. [OK, below is a long post-amble about what I think a well formed number might be. Read it to see how finikity (which may or may not be a word, making it all the more embiggening) I am.]

If you write your number like this people will probably still be able to reach you, but you’re making it hard for them, and if you’re inputting the number on the web somewhere, you’re probably caused a few people to scratch their heads and wonder if they should bother coding solutions for numbers of such opacity. (They should not.)

In case you’re getting angry at coders at this stage, the flip-side is the dumb entry field that insists you enter your number in some bizarre format chosen by a coder through ignorance/laziness. (Yes Bord Gáis a + is valid in a telephone number, in fact it is the single best starting character for a number to have, but enough about that… )

Where was all this going?

Oh yes, why is all this information going on the web in the first place?

A lot of official data now seems to find a place on the web in PDF format. The motivations behind this may be laudable; the original may be a Microsoft Word document and PDF is a more open format. However, PDFs tend to be designed for human rather that machine legibility and lack the semantic structures that are increasingly available (if underused) in html/xml formats.

If the official Canadian list of area dialling codes is in a PDF that lacks a readable table structure then someone (or worse still, more than one person) will create unofficial lists using wikis or web pages. These will only maintain some level of compatibility with each other and the original source, so any further sources of information that verify themselves against these pages become less and less reliable. This is all a long way from Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a semantic web.

If governments are responsible for making data they hold accessible, and this is good in any number of ways, then they also have a responsibility for the level of accessibility. A locked filing cabinet in a basement that is accessible by asking the staff member responsible, available the first Monday of the month, between 9:00 and 9:30am, is a level of accessibility…

This is not a purely esoteric complaint. Somebody pays for that list of dialling codes, and those emergency service numbers and a whole host of data that has been decreed web worthy, but very little thought seems to go into how much of that information appears to the web or how its value could be maximized.

ISO, the International Organisation for Standards publish a lot of information on the web. Take their currency pages for example, which have nice tables of data. Well, their HTML is invalid; the doctype does not match the data contained. Their entity names are arbitrarily chosen forms of country names, even though they themselves define unique identifiers for countries, so the table must be interpreted for it to have value. I guess if ISO can’t get this right there is little hope for other folks.

Is there a point to all this? Well the ISO pages are better than a PDF, and PDFs are better than MS Word documents, and all are better than no information at all. There is at least a chance that something like linked data will be widely used and provide a more useful web, but, in the meantime, just a little thought about the quality of information and reasons for it to be placed on the web will make me a lot happier…

*Post-amble

What does a dash (-) in a phone number mean, why was it put there? Probably it was just put in to separate the number into human digestible chunks 555-767-768. Whitespace would have been as good but no problems so far.

What does a slash (/, virgule) mean in a phone number? In a sentence it might have a dash type meaning but I would usually use it to designate a substitution or a logical OR type statement. I would avoid using a – for OR and also avoid using a / for a join.

The number 555-767-768/9 then means that either 555-767-768 or 555-767-769 will get you through.

The number 555/767/768-9 would be ambiguous to me: it could mean the same as above but I might try 555767768 wait then press 9, or some such.

The use of a full-stop as a visual separator seems dubious; it has other meanings both in number sequences and in textual contexts.

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Jun 19

RevaHealth.com Visitor Trends – May 2009

By Philip Boyle Monthly Barometer 4 Comments »

One of the exciting things about working in a web startup company is the rapid growth that happens at the start as your ideas turn into actual traffic to your site. May 2009 was another month of continued growth for us here in RevaHealth.com. As you can see below, our traffic was up by 23.38% on the previous month, and the number of enquiries for clinics on our site grew by 20.98%.

RevaHealth.com Monthly Growth - May 2009

RevaHealth.com Monthly Growth - May 2009

Average monthly growth rates have been around the 20% mark since the start of the year, and we’re hoping to push these up to 30% per month as the year goes on. Obviously this gets hard the more traffic we generate, but we have our ideas and we’re making our plans so we’ll keep you posted!

As usual, the majority of our traffic came from the UK (37.21%), Ireland (26.10%) and the US (10.60%). According to our Google analytics, the remaining 26.09% came from 182 different countries or territories! This got us interested, and since the start of the year, we count only 13 countries on the map that haven’t visited our site since the start of the year. I wonder if we can get this number down by year’s end?

The split between people using our site to contact clinics at home or clinics abroad remained roughly the same this month for both the UK and Ireland. As our SEO efforts for our local listings take hold we should see the proportion of enquiries for clinics at home increase, but only time will tell.

Home vs Abroad (UK) - May 2009

Home vs Abroad (UK) - May 2009

Home vs Abroad (IRL) - May 2009

Home vs Abroad (IRL) - May 2009

Of interest here, we know that the number of people looking at clinics (as opposed to contacting them) is far higher than the contact figures above reflect, so from next month we’re going to look at providing figures for visitors and figures for users i.e. people who just come to the site versus people who use the site to contact clinics. The differences in their behaviours should be interesting.

Interest in travelling to Northern Ireland from the Republic is strong as ever, with the raw number of enquiries up another 12% month on month, and the percentage of enquiries slipping just slightly from 19.73% to 19.11%.

Poland leapfrogs Hungary and Turkey this month to claim the most popular foreign destination title, with Bulgaria taking Spain’s place at the end of the top 5.

Top 5 destinations (IRL) - May 2009

Top 5 destinations (IRL) - May 2009

Our methods of calculating which treatments people are interested in have changed slightly this month, so we can’t compare them directly to previous months, but there are no real surprises in the top 5 treatments in dentistry for Irish patients. Cosmetic surgery though has seen a slight shift towards weight related treatments, as expected as the summer approaches.

Top 5 dental treatments (IRL) - May 2009

Top 5 dental treatments (IRL) - May 2009

Top 5 cosmetic treatments (IRL) - May 2009

Top 5 cosmetic treatments (IRL) - May 2009

One of the fastest rising treatments we found in our incoming keywords was “Endermologie”, which was a new one on me. This was closely followed by “Mesotherapy”. It turns out these are both treatments aimed at reducing cellulite, so I guess bikiniphobia was particularly strong in May!

The countries outside of the UK that British people were interested in visiting stayed much the same, with only Spain replacing Bulgaria in the top 5. Poland remained the most popular destination for people from the UK.

Top 5 Destinations (UK) - May 2009

Top 5 Destinations (UK) - May 2009

While the UK interest in dental treatments pretty much mirrored that in Ireland, the cosmetic surgery treatments being requested differed in that acne / scar removal and tattoo removal weere 2nd and 3rd after Botox in the UK.

Top 5 dental treatments (UK) - May 2009

Top 5 dental treatments (UK) - May 2009

Top 5 cosmetic treatments (UK) - May 2009

Top 5 cosmetic treatments (UK) - May 2009

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