Ascensia has built an online patient community on Community Cloud, which patients can use to access information faster. “Our products, influencers, and campaigns all drive patients to our website, where they can log onto our online community to ask questions about our products by raising a ticket, as well as accessing a wealth of advice,” explained Ishmael.

If a patient wants to speak to a member of the service team directly, call center staff can view their full history via Service Cloud to ensure a rapid, accurate, and personalized response. “Our company ethos is to do things in as few clicks as possible, but to give those clicks more impact. We’re using Salesforce to make the customer experience as smooth as possible – when they call in our rep has all the information they need in front of them instantly,” explained Ishmael.

With Salesforce it’s able to log cases and customer information more quickly. Agents can also spend more time on the phone with customers – nine minutes on average – which results in service levels of 99%-100%. However, now that patients can use Communities to help themselves, it’s seeing more patients move away from the phone and using more online tools.

As Sales Cloud integrates seamlessly with the company’s ERP system, sales reps can submit orders while sitting in front of a customer. “We’re making it as easy as possible for reps wherever we can. To create an order, they simply select the product, add a quantity, and submit it. It also makes it easy to manage any reimbursements due,” said Ishmael. Once orders have been placed, the sales reps can provide their customers with real-time updates on shipments.

Information captured in Salesforce doesn’t just help the team on the ground to do their jobs, it also helps the senior management team to keep track of performance, targets and KPIs. “With costs and expenses logged in Salesforce, we can see an accurate ROI on every order to make sure we’re making smart investments,” said Ishmael.

To help automate patient marketing campaigns Ascensia looked towards Pardot. Registered users are segmented based on criteria such as which web pages they’re visiting or the content they’re downloading, so the marketing team can ensure they only receive communications relating to their interests. “With Pardot, we can provide new users with more information on how to use their meters and apps, and also keep them up-to-date on the latest releases.”

It has a 70% open rate from all its patient engagement emails and a click through rate of 5.89%. (The market average is 21% and 2.25% respectively.) Marketing now wants to expand this to other product lines and create a plan to implement more personalized engagement for patients with a long-term goal to expand to its Health Care Professionals.