RingMD turns to Salesforce to help bring healthcare to the world

RingMD is bringing telemedicine to the world, using Salesforce to access real-time data that is powering the company’s rapid evolution.

Billions of people around the world lack access to basic healthcare. RingMD is a rapidly growing telemedicine company that aims to solve this problem by making universal healthcare accessible and affordable for all.

The Singapore-based company operates a virtual healthcare platform that connects a diverse range of patients with doctors and practitioners from 32 countries, and utilises cutting-edge innovations such as a health chatbot and wearable technology to provide vital medical services to people who need them the most. It is accredited with both the Singapore and India Governments and building a strong global base from its startup beginnings.

This is a noble pursuit, but one that is incredibly difficult to achieve considering the diverse range of patient needs that RingMD must meet.

“We have so many different kinds of patients, all from different countries, with different needs, and on top of that we’re operating under different government health regulations,” says Jae Lee, VP and Head of Engineering at RingMD.

“It would be very easy to saturate the company with overheads if we tried to cater for all these needs without the right strategy in place. So we wanted a way to track and understand our various customer journeys in order to approach our business in a strategic way.”

The company launched with a custom CRM system that was built from scratch in-house. It soon became clear that this system wasn’t up to the job, so Lee and his team turned to Salesforce Sales Cloud.

“We wanted to make the CRM lightweight, but our in-house system became too fragmented,” he explains. “Once we deployed Salesforce, we could see the entire customer journey from beginning to end, and build our strategy around real data.”

Lee says that Sales Cloud helps his team to identify all the phases of the customer journey – from onboarding through to their first call to a practitioner and the resulting consultation report. One of the biggest benefits is that they can track the action in real time.

“We have set notifications that are linked to different trigger points,” he says. “So we immediately know when somebody signs up. This helps maintain a sense of urgency because we know that we’ve had 87 signups today. It keeps us aware of the way the business is moving, and drives us to a more productive way of working.

“Then we can break down the customer’s journey into phases. People who download our software don’t necessarily immediately become patients. By understanding how much time there is between people signing up and actually making calls to a GP, we can strategize more efficiently.

“Sales Cloud then shows what the outcome is of the call with the GP and whether medication was delivered to the patient’s address. This helps us get to know our customers better.

“With Salesforce we can follow every phase in the customer journey and analyse each segment without any fragmentation. It's amazing.”

Lee believes that the best business decisions are based on real data, and Sales Cloud is providing the deeper business intelligence that the RingMD team needs to keep refining and evolving every aspect of its offering.

“Sales Cloud gives us deeper intelligence about how our business is running. We’re not engaging in guesswork or making assumptions. All our decisions are now based on real data,” he says.

Data-based decision making also prevents silo thinking, says Lee, and helps to keep department heads focused on what’s best for the overall business.

“I think there is always this conflict where the product development department and the sales department have different prioritisations in terms of decision making,” he says. “However, having access to business intelligence through Sales Cloud allows us to make data-driven decisions that are not compromises between departments, but rather something we all agree on based on the real data.

“And that means we can more effectively and specifically refine our product to meet the actual needs of our patients and practitioners, and therefore make the best decisions for the company.”