All posts tagged healthcare

Apr

Care online

Categories: News

The healthcare marketplace has traditionally prided itself as being above the commercialism of the high-street, seeing it’s role as a provider of clinical excellence only. This is slowly changing, as national, chain-type, brands strive to break the old GP-referrer cycle and reach-out directly to potential customers and nowhere is this more prevalent than on the Internet. The healthcare category is one of the most researched online and commercially-focussed healthcare companies are now expanding with up-to-date marketing, strong calls-to-action and bigchoice messaging.

The irony here as that the older clinic-model is actually a really good fit in the online marketing world as site visitors are seeking information, re-assurance, answers and solutions to health-related issues. The early adopters in this space are, naturally enough, the elective treatment providers such as laser eye surgery and cosmetic surgery but it doesn’t stop there. Freedom Back Clinics have recently opened a small national chain of clinics aimed at providing convenient chiropractors, osteopaths and physiotherapists and their web-presence is chock-full of Calls-to-Action and a pretty sophisticated online booking service. The aim, we are told, is to simplify the steps a patient needs to take to attend either a free consultation or directly book a treatment.

They are one of the early adopters in their space and in a year have grown from a single clinic in Leeds to add Canary Wharf and Manchester with more planned during 2011. This commercialism should not be feared by the clinical model, nor should they take a snob-view of national chains. They should adapt and beat the new boys at their game using the power of their trusted brands to reach out to all those millions of web-centric folk who have healthcare issues that can be addressed.

With the planned cuts in NHS services more and more individuals will be turning to private clinics and treatment even for conventional treatments and operations and this presents a huge opportunity for growth in this sector at the same time as the NHS-funding for referrer-type business is falling away. There will be some big winners and losers over the next 2 years.

Taken from myBookingWizard.com

Sep

ASA annexes t’internet

Categories: News

Tags: advertising, asa, automotive, building & construction, business services, cap, chemicals, communications, finance, healthcare, media, oil & gas, public sector, retail, Technology, travel & tourism, utilities

Comments: No

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) has announced an extension of the Advertising Standards Agency’s (ASA) remit to include digital advertising from March 2011. This is currently receiving a mixed reaction and is not helped by the ASA’s admission that the extension of it’s remit is going to pose quite serious operational challenges. Thankfully they are taking a pragmatic view and will be looking for comments during the review process.

Most organisations are pretty happy about the regulatory role planned for corporate web space, advertiser networks and commercial portals but very real concerns surround the plans to audit and regulate surrounding content contained in social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter et al which all fall into the “non-paid for” sector.

Over the last few months some (less than “straight”) organisations have been using social media to actively solicit User Generated Content and then re-publish it within their own marketing and when the new ASA regulations come into force this information will fall under the new remit. An example of this is rewarding people to “like this” or “follow me” and then subsequently use the “value” of the authority gained as an active marketing tool. Many in the industry are wise to this now and don’t attribute any value to, for example, the number of followers a company has on Twitter but, alas, the consumer is frequently seduced by this level of acquired authority.

Some areas will escape the reach of the ASA and they include search engine entries and press releases although it’s fair to say that lots of search engine entries are designed to be marketing statements that influence consumers so it is possible that at some point in the future this may also come under the ASA.

How this will change the landscape is yet to be seen. Most marketing communications in the unregulated world are actually compliant at the moment and with the ASA not really having any of it’s own teeth (sanctions will be via a voluntary code adopted by the media publishers/networks and then, at last resort, the Office of Fair Trading) it is probable that little difference will be seen until a high-profile company crosses the line and the ASA reacts.

Aug

Product Overview : Online Booking (OBS v1.5)

Categories: News

Tags: consultancy, healthcare, OBS, online booking, products, services

Comments: No

Introduction

Online Booking is one of the simplest and fastest ways to improve online conversion rates and give organisations a massive competitive advantage in sales and marketing.

How? By encouraging your clients to use the web to book their appointments you are changing the game by improving your visitors perception of your organisation and driving down the cost of acquisition. By letting your potential and returning clients book things themselves you benefit from:

24 x 7 booking – opens the window of booking and reduces the cost.
Better information – vetting accurately the data online and getting the visitor to do all the data-entry work.
Cool image – the improved customer journey is what they want. It’s a market-leader’s tool.
Slicker diary management – let computing power and algorithms do the hard work.
First class sales proposition – why not put it at the core of your product or service offering, would it make you unique?.
Get online – moving your organisation further into the online world will increase it’s value.

More and more people expect to be able to book events and appointments online and implementing a simple system for the your web-site visitors will generate increased sales, fewer no-shows and higher quality clients. It is now the norm in many areas such as flight and hotel booking and in the years to come it will be viewed as a handicap if your organisation does not provide these basic services.

How does it work?

The OBS v1.5 provides an application that “pops-up” over your existing page (ala Facebook, Web 2.0 style) and gives the visitor a proven multi-stage process for booking events and appointments. The diary element of the OBS allows the visitor to see the next 6 weeks of available appointments in either calendar-style or list style. The visitor will be able to move forward or backward through weeks, months or available slots. Selecting a date causes the system to show the availability for that day and on selecting a slot they are taken to the next stage which asks for personal details.

Additional stages (both pre and post date and time selection) can be added for further refining of the available slots or providing qualification questions as either multiple choice or yes/no confirmation boxes. At every stage a “helper” is available that offloads the visitor into a “call-me-back” system to allow problematic situations to be dealt with.

On completion, OBS sends a customised confirmation email to the visitor and completes the booking with the back-end diary system. Should an error occur at this stage a custom page can be shown to offload the visitor into a different route for booking.

Additionally, should the OBS be unable to get live, get to Level 1 or level 2 ghost information, the system slips into a “fake” mode that looks like a real booking system but has an additional step at the end that advises the visitor that the booking is provisional and requires confirmation. Below you will find a typical step-by-step run-through of the process.

Data for the diary is typically held in a bespoke diary system (not provided) and three levels of diary synchronisation are available:

Live booking. A bespoke API will gather live booking information from the back-end diary system. It is key that the back-end system has the capacity to deal with, for example, a request to pull every available slot for the next 2 months.
Ghost Level 1. A periodic update from the back-end to the web-server is available to cache available slots and reduce the load on the back-end diary system. Typically this ghosting process will occur every 10-60 minutes depending on the number of slots available and the rate at which they are consumed.
Ghost Level 2. Provides a local cache of available appointments every time an appointment is booked. This ensures that the online system can stay 100% in step with itself but does run the risk of getting out of step with appointments booked directly into the back-end.

Technology

Three core modules plus a number of associated plugins form the basis of the OBS

Front-end interface; written in Javascript and XHTML using standard JQuery and Template Toolkit
Back-end API, bespoke tailored for each client supporting SQL and most common database standards and SOAP interfaces. Written in PERL.
Outbound communication API written in PERL supporting email senders such as CheetahMail, Communicator and SendMail plus a Call-me-Interface support Click to Call and most other commercial C2C systems.

The OBS application can be installed directly onto a LAMP server with some configuration or provided as a hosted service on Rackspace servers managed by Connected. Full reporting and alerting are available as plugin modules. Connected provide a range of services to help with the implementation of OBS from simple license-only deals to complete turnkey supply and management with consultancy.

OBS works on all major browser platforms including Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Flock. Information on mobile application support is available on request for iOS4 (iPhone & iPad) and Android. In line with many other software developers we do not support Internet Explorer 6. Why?

Come and talk to the experts in this field, contact Nick, Liam or Martin in sales or call us on 0845 051 4228.

All current versions of VITES (2.1, 2.4 and 3.0) support OBS v1.5. Implementation cost starts from around £5k, a typical configuration costs £25k. including consulting, design, deployment and 3 months support. All prices are excluding VAT. E & OE. Prices subject change, accurate as of Jan 1st 2010. For an up to date quote please contact Sales.

Jul

Online Booking : The challenges

Categories: News

Tags: amazon, Barnes & Noble, healthcare, micro-applications, OBS, online booking

Comments: No

I recently posted about the client/visitor/user perspective of adding an online booking system (OBS) into the client journey. In every test and trial we have run the efficacy is unquestionable; producing more, better quality enquires that ultimately convert at a much higher rate than standard “form-filled” type enquiries.

So why doesn’t every company use online booking?

Well, before I go into the challenges it’s worth highlighting that some organisations just cannot fit into automated appointment management or need quite high levels of human interaction to make that possible but assuming you don’t belong to this odd 1% lets have a look at some of the reasons organisations don’t use online booking.

Back-end legacy systems

For online booking (OBS) to work the web-front end has to talk regularly and reliably to your existing back-end systems. Many of these systems are simply not designed to do this. There are ways to step around the problem and put “middle-ware” systems in place but it’s not a strategic solution and could become a brake on the success of the project.

Planning and simplification is the key.

Not to say that all legacy back-end systems are bad, in fact many work really well if you modify your plan to take into the account the challenges. The art is to carefully specify what you need and want from an OBS system and aim for the 80:20 rule rather than discounting a system that can’t quite do everything last little thing you need. Bell and whistles can always be added later on and, when the OBS does show it’s success there is greater momentum and buy-in to fix legacy problems.

Not invented here

Sadly, this still pervades sales, marketing and call centres after all the 1990′s fears about “the Internet putting sales and marketing out of a job”. It doesn’t, quite the contrary. Implemented properly it will liberate sales & marketing to focus on interesting a valuable stuff. This can extend to executive management as they don’t properly understand the role that online booking systems play; insisting “on the personal touch” or “we’re a people company” or “our clients like to talk to real people”. These statements are all true. OBS systems are not trying to remove this personalisation, far from it; the systems should release people to have more meaningful conversations on a more personal level and remove the clunky “where and when and what” conversations completely.

No senior buy-in

Implementing an OBS initiative may involve some changes to company culture, operating practice and infrastructure. You must have buy-in from the top otherwise the initiative will almost always fail. The exec must understand what is trying to be achieved and this must be clearly communicated to everyone it touches.

Bloody hell, never thought of it

It is surprising how many organisations had actually never thought of using automated booking systems. Sometimes it’s as simple as the lack of understanding of how something that sounds so complicated could be applied. It could also be a case that the organisation is so drowning in it’s operational challenges that it never gets a chance to look up and innovate; these are the organisations that frequently benefit the most, as a good OBS implementation can not only turnaround struggling marketing campaigns, it can drive down the cost of sales, improve customer satisfaction and release corporate brains to start thinking again. Many clients we speak to fit into this category.

It ain’t broke

Just because you don’t use OBS now is not a reason to not use them in the future. Everyone in the industry is predicting an increased use of micro-applications and cross-platform systems. It’s coming and it’s coming fast; if you don’t catch the first wave of adoption then you may be out of business in a couple of years.

Barnes and Noble is the largest retail bookstore company in the US. It was pretty much last on the ladder for online sales and then e-books; each time citing “old wisdom” as to why these new upstart companies and technologies will not last. In January this year they had a massive lay-off plan and Amazon is touted as the best buyer of the struggling chain. First-in (usually) wins; last-in (always) loses.

Confusing product or service offering

Is the range of services and products so confusing that internal staff need a 1 week induction course to get there heads around it? OBS probably isn’t for you because you’re not going to be able to successfully let the man (or woman) on the street pick what he needs, where and when if it’s too complicated. It’s important to distinguish between confusing solutions and problems; you can easily simplify the OBS system by letting the visitors highlight their pain (i.e. what’s up?) and then let some algorithm do the hard work in terms of coming up with a solution. The other way to deal with this is to simplify your product offerings within the OBS, use Pareto’s rule and only deal with the products and services that really matter, or that make you most money or that are easiest to deal with online.

Fails the return on investment test

Implementing any automated system can be costly and the development cycle may be months or even years. If a business is only likely to do, say, £20k turnover using online booking then it’s going to take a fair old while to get your investment back. The real cost to implement online booking will start at around £5k and, depending on the complexity of systems involved could cost £50k+. Safe rule of thumb? If you expect less than £250k turnover pa from your online booking initiative then you can probably spend the money better elsewhere.

Jul

5 tips for producing killer landing pages

Categories: News

Tags: a/b testing, engagement, financial, good practice, healthcare, kaizen, retail, visitor tracking

Comments: No

How many times have I seen posts titled along these lines in the last few months?

Too bloody many! All of them purport to offer the answer to the holy grail of advertising landing page design.

Most of the advice is re-regurgitated, old, unproven and bloody obvious if you have more than an ounce of common sense. What would be more useful would be a real guide to what has worked, why and how well.

The reality is that landing pages are very often the real “heavy lifters” on a web-site in terms of generating enquiries, sales, data and actions. That is a good thing as at least we know where to start when in comes to optimising performance as PART OF AN OVERALL STRATEGY.

Let’s not get bogged down in the fine detail of what to try, where and why as this does vary from site to site, person to person and market to market. Let’s start where we should do, at the beginning and from the visitor’s point of view.

1. The visitor arrives at the landing page after consciously clicking on a sponsored link. They want something, you know what they searched for. Give them what they want. If they search for a brand term then give brand options, if they search for a product then show a product, if they search for a place then give then location-based information.

Focussed landing pages have performed 150% better than generic landing pages. In real tests, with real visitors, this year.

2. Don’t make ‘em wait, impatient or frustrated people don’t convert as well. That means a fast loading page (ever wondered why Google’s home page is just 16k in size?). Speed of loading is dependent on small pages, fast servers, good connectivity and few outside “includes”.

Frequent testing with our clients show a direct correlation between logical size of page and performance. A recent test saw a 25k page perform 50% better than a 100k page and 75% better than a bloaty 150k page. The pages were identical aside from logical size.

3. Visitors want to do something, such as buy, apply, find, request or contact. Make those options clear, visible, easy and fast to do.

Above the fold can make a difference but only if the page is uncluttered. A recent test on a cluttered page showed no difference in above and below the fold for a conversion point.

4. No clutter. Less is more. Reduce choices to keep the visitors decision process simple. No need for complex navigation (or any real navigation at all?). Big text, small words, white space, compelling reasons for an action and no bloody clutter. Everything on the landing page is there to drive the conversion, everything else is dead-weight that WILL hamper conversion rates.

Testing a series of landing pages recently saw a dramatic increase in on-page, in-session and intra-journey conversion when the navigation system was removed as the page was de-cluttered.

5. Everyone makes mistakes. Most of the time. And that includes your carefully crafted (call to action) form so make sure the error handling is world class. It’s a trick called “soft-erroring” and works by never actually producing a traditional error. When an error occurs the visitor is gently guided to a “thanks but” page which gently tells the visitor we need a little more information and the reasons why and maybe makes a suggestion or two. With testing you’ll produce better forms in the first place.

This IS a killer. You can easily see a doubling in first-time conversion if the information you require is difficult to acquire (telephone number, for example) or the question is complex.

Contact T: 01138187800 Email, Twitter or Quick Index

All posts tagged healthcare

Care online

ASA annexes t’internet

Product Overview : Online Booking (OBS v1.5)

Introduction

Online Booking is one of the simplest and fastest ways to improve online conversion rates and give organisations a massive competitive advantage in sales and marketing.

How does it work?

Technology

Online Booking : The challenges

Back-end legacy systems

Not invented here

No senior buy-in

Bloody hell, never thought of it

It ain’t broke

Confusing product or service offering

Fails the return on investment test

5 tips for producing killer landing pages