It’s one of the most important decisions facing business owners, healthcare professionals and practice owners today: which software should I use to manage my client relationships? There are lots of options on the table, and it can often be difficult to figure out the differences between them, let alone which is right for your business. Too often, practice owners end up simply choosing to deploy whatever their colleagues are using without a proper diagnosis of what they need in their practice, or investigating other options that could deliver better results.
At The Business Catalyst, there’s only one CRM tool that we recommend to our clients: Keap. Keap is the best-in-class CRM, sales and marketing automation platform that offers unparalleled functionality and customisation for businesses and practice owners of all kinds. By harnessing the extensive flexibility that Keap offers, we have developed and built the Ideal Patient Journey for appointment based brick-and-mortar businesses. An all-in-one system for managing and automating patient communications, internal workflow, reporting, and much more.
In this article, we’re looking at the Ideal Patient Journey alongside some alternative systems currently being used by UK healthcare professionals to see how they compare.
What else is on the market?
Two popular alternatives that we have found currently being used by UK dental practitioners are:
A Reception Chatbot*: a website chatbot that fields customer enquiries from your website and can transfer their details to a Kanban board for lead tracking, where you can manually update the stages of a contact in the patient journey, manually create the reminders for the daily to do lists, facilitating manual lead management and the ability to have some basic lead reporting with associated dashboards.
DenGro: a lead management system that allows you to document and track incoming leads as they interact with your business.
Each of these tools has its own plus points, and the choice of the individual practice should be based on their needs, other systems and processes. I think it is also necessary and only fair to point out that when comparing the features that it may not be like-for-like as you would find when comparing Pepsi and Coke or Apple iPhone and Samsung Android.
For this article, we took the time to survey and interview some of our Ideal Patient Journey customers and prospects who are or have been users of the different systems as well as reviewing the information available on both the Chatbot’s* and DenGro websites.
What do I need from my (CRM) client relationship management software?
For a practice owner, your CRM software needs to fulfil several vital functions. It should:
- Capture the relevant details of potential customers and patients who interact with your practice.
- Include outbound personalised relevant communications on both SMS and email.
- Allow you to track each prospective patient or lead as they pass through your sales and marketing process.
- Help you monitor how and when your staff are interacting with prospective patients and customers at each stage of the process.
- Provide the data which you can use to drive improvement to your sales, marketing, patient experience and management operations.
What we have discovered in our research and review of information on their respective websites and demo videos, is that both the chatbot and DenGro will successfully help you carry out the first of these tasks by creating a list of all the leads who have interacted with your business through your website.
What is also great about the chatbot* is that we have successfully integrated their lead capture capabilities from their chatbot into the Ideal Patient Journey system for a number of our practices.
DenGro also offers an open API with ClickFunnels, so you can integrate it smoothly with the paid traffic for which you will be using the landing pages.
However, what we found was that when you move beyond these basic requirements, DenGro starts to run out of steam:
- DenGro doesn’t allow you to visualise your client’s journey through the sales funnel.
- DenGro is unable to help you keep track of your staff’s interactions with your customers.
- DenGro can’t provide you with the granular data you need to drive improvement.
DenGro, as a one-size-fits-all solution, can fall short in being able to completely satisfy the specific needs of its individual users if they are looking to have a more end-to-end approach to their patient journey. The Ideal Patient Journey, on the other hand, is a platform that is designed specifically to evolve and grow to fit the requirements of the most demanding practice owner.
How The Ideal Patient Journey stands out from the crowd
The Ideal Patient Journey offers a range of functionalities that go beyond what’s available elsewhere on the market. These shouldn’t be seen as optional extras! As digital continues to become a bigger element of how practitioners interact with their customers, practices that can’t access these tools will struggle to keep up with the competition.
End-to-End Reporting and Visualisation
The Ideal Patient Journey lets you track each stage of a lead’s relationship with your practice, from first contact to treatment to becoming a repeat customer. With DenGro, there’s no way to visualise this process from end to end, which one customer found a constant frustration.
One customer commented
“I had to create my own visual pipeline in Monday.com, because DenGro didn’t give me the visual capacity to see where the leads are at every stage of the journey. If you’re a visual person you want to be able to see that.”
With the Ideal Patient Journey, you can not only see how many new enquiries are coming in and for what treatments, but also which tasks your team members are working on for each lead and whether they’ve completed them. This isn’t just a to-do list – it updates in real-time as your staff go about their work. Each time your team contacts a lead, they can record the outcome of the interaction so you can see how well you’re doing at engaging potential customers. These dashboards can also be customised to the individual practice needs.
DenGro isn’t designed to continue the journey once a lead has become a patient, that is where their job is done and there is currently no way to track the patient’s ongoing experience within your practice. The chatbot too is for the top end of your marketing funnel, specifically designed to manage the new enquiries. The Ideal Patient Journey, on the other hand, allows you to communicate with referring practitioners, manage cross-selling and upselling opportunities, track treatment plans and get the patient back into the pipeline once they’ve finished treatment.
Full customisation
Part of the service DenGro offers is an automated email sequence that will get sent to all the leads who contact your practice. However, these emails are the same for everybody, regardless of the customer’s background or their medical needs. If you want them customised, you’ll have to pay extra.
One practice owner commented
“If I wanted to customise the emails, I’d have to pay 25 per cent more on my subscription, and I wasn’t willing to do that.”
The Ideal Patient Journey, on the other hand, can be tweaked to fit your specifications and those of your prospective patients, so that each email dynamically delivers to them the relevant information. Using this flexibility within the subscription we can craft a system that is tailored to the needs of your practice and your patients – that’s why we call it the Ideal Patient Journey!
Of course, this means that you’ll need a bit more expert support with set up (that’s where The Business Catalyst comes in as the Ideal Patient Journey includes full support, setup, onboarding, maintenance and customisation!), but once installed, you can set it and forget it. The added value it provides is exponential. For a practice with the ambition to scale, the investment is a no-brainer.
Smart automations
The Ideal Patient Journey, built in Keap, offers a level of automation that is unmatched by the other options on the market. Sending emails, text messages, managing leads, prompting your staff, internal tasking, reporting – you name it, Keap has it. Other vendors may defend their lack of automations by arguing that it diminishes the responsibility of your staff, but that’s simply the wrong attitude, as explained below:
One Ideal Patient Journey customer who has managed to relieve himself of a full annual salary comments:
“Some have argued that if you have automation in your practice, you’re taking away the team’s responsibility to do their job, which you’re paying them for. That’s the exact opposite of how you should be thinking about automation. Automation is there to support your team.”
Smart automations will free your team to focus their energies on the really important tasks, like making sure your patients have the best possible experience when interacting with your practice. Meanwhile, if your staff levels should dip for any reason, the automations will keep on ticking in the background, meaning that you should never fall below your baseline performance.
A great testimonial for the Ideal Patient Journey is revealed when one practice owner commented.
“I had DenGro for two years. We did £60,000 in the first year, and £120,000 in the second year. With The Ideal Patient Journey, we cleared £120,000 in the first four months.”
He achieved these results without significantly increasing the number of leads coming into his business. The Ideal Patient Journey didn’t magically transform the number of people visiting his website overnight, but the automation did instantly enable him to manage his existing customers more efficiently. What’s more, he was able to achieve this leap in performance without a fully-functioning admin team behind him.
He goes on to say…
“The Ideal Patient Journey and Keap have given me the certainty that I can trust the system. It’s efficient, and nothing is being missed on the automation side that might cover for the poor performance of a team member. And that’s huge.”
If you’re a dentist, or any other kind of healthcare practitioner, and you’re impressed by what it is possible to achieve with the Ideal Patient Journey and The Business Catalyst, contact us today to find out more. Our lines are always open for enquiries, demos and discovery calls.
* name of the chatbot has been removed for legal reasons at their request as they did not want to feature in this article – Learn More Here
