LetsGetChecked partners with Salesforce for ultimate test

With so much of our lives – work, entertainment, exercising, socialising – now taking place in the comforts of our home, millions of people worldwide are taking personal control of their health and wellbeing.

In this healthcare revolution, LetsGetChecked has quickly become a world leader, enabling its customers to manage their health at home, through direct access to convenient, confidential services, including diagnostic testing, virtual care, and medication delivery for a wide range of health and wellness conditions. Individual citizens, health plans, employers, and other partners all use LetsGetChecked’s suite of services.

Co-headquartered in Dublin and New York, LetsGetChecked is available nationwide in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most EU countries, delivering millions of tests and serving more than 300 corporate customers with testing services and biometric screening solutions since 2015.

“We’re transforming how people engage with their health,” said Ronan Ryan, Chief Operating Officer at LetsGetChecked. “Pre-pandemic we were processing 250,000 tests a year, now it’s approximately 250,000 every week.”

Technology has been the ultimate enabler for LetsGetChecked, transporting it from maturing start-up to global market shaper in just seven years, supporting rapid growth through extensive recruitment, and service expansion through strategic acquisitions.

We talked to LetsGetChecked to find out more about this remarkable success story, how Salesforce has supported it through the explosion in the demand for home testing caused by COVID-19, and what the future holds for this important partnership.

By early 2020, in just five years LetsGetChecked had gone from launch to an international success story, in an exciting emerging market with constant innovation and strategic acquisitions, experiencing +18,000% growth in the years 2018 to 2021.

But as COVID-19 entered everyday conversations around the world, LetsGetChecked was already correctly predicting the role that testing was about to play in the response. “Like any other start-up we were on start-up tools, sharing email inboxes, working off spreadsheets, and building our own systems,” explained Ryan.

“With the pandemic approaching we needed to scale at an unprecedented rate to meet the inevitable boom in demand for testing. We also knew that it would be extremely difficult with our existing tools.”

At this time, Colm Murphy joined LetsGetChecked as Customer Solutions Manager. “We needed to act quickly to put in place a technology platform that we could quickly stand up and scale to meet our customer care team’s immediate service requirements.”

“We were looking for a solution that we could extend into sales and marketing activities, too. Within two weeks we had launched Service Cloud - an incredibly ambitious timetable for Salesforce and its implementation partner Vanguard. Only Salesforce could have achieved our go live target.”

As a result, the organisation moved from email and phone messages into a single controlled environment, capturing information in one place with metrics and tracking capabilities.

Service Cloud controls all email communications from customers sending emails to 20 different accounts, creating individual cases to be actioned and tracked. Calls coming in on 45 phone numbers are captured, recorded, and integrated into Salesforce, too.

“Now we have rich contextual data, enabling us to constantly build up our knowledge of the customer, their needs, and how we are responding,” said Murphy.

Chat bots are supporting a growing use of Sales Cloud too, gathering key customer data and automatically creating new opportunity records for sales teams to follow up, as well as offering the enquirer the opportunity to be transferred to a sales representative.

By automating repetitive tasks, Salesforce is saving valuable minutes in each interaction, enabling sales teams to focus their skills on meeting customer needs. “Multiply the time saved by automation across hundreds or thousands of daily interactions, and the efficiency and productivity gains are substantial,” explained Murphy.

Finally, LetsGetChecked makes extensive use of Slack for always-on communication, across functions, geographies, and time zones. Now, every department – sales, development, engineering, marketing, customer support, and nursing – uses Slack, and it has become the company’s digital HQ. It acts as a command centre for incident management, so service reliability stays on point at all times. Salespeople are having productive, cross-functional conversations and closing more deals. “It’s a phenomenal platform to stay up to speed on everything or to jump on important stuff quickly,” said Ryan. “It’s so much faster and efficient to have a quick chat on Slack, rather than aligning diaries and committing to a half hour meeting.”

For LetsGetChecked, sales and service are one and the same, with growth achieved by a shared understanding across the organisation that every interaction is an opportunity to deliver a great experience, for an existing customer receiving personal care, or a first-time caller being expertly guided through their options.

With Salesforce providing a single platform and data source for all teams to access a complete history of the service provided to customers, every conversation is personalised and contemporary, providing confidence that LetsGetChecked is on the ball, with each individual’s needs and concerns its top priority.

“All the component parts of our business need synchronising to deliver a complete service, so having Salesforce in place and fully integrated was a breath of fresh air,” explained Head of Strategic Partnerships, Beena Thomas.

With one 360-degree view and a common, shared vocabulary, even those not in direct contact with customers can see what’s going on and what customers’ ambitions or concerns are. Most importantly, agents can see where their contribution is helping LetsGetChecked to succeed in its mission.

“The most effective business development is relationship building - and great relationships need great information. Salesforce gathers data from multiple sources and presents it in a way that’s easy to interpret and use. Admin time is much reduced, freeing up time for high value tasks, like nurturing relationships and our key partnerships,” continued Thomas.

Delivering test results at high speed is crucial to the company’s mission. The launch of its own laboratory in Los Angeles in February 2020 created huge testing capacity - just in time for the company to help respond to the boom in COVID-19 testing.

“One of the many reasons we partnered with Salesforce was the many instantly available plug-ins to add even more functionality, and this proved crucial during the pandemic,” explained Ryan.

Pre-pandemic systems for the collection of home tests, based on phone calls and manual processes, were far too slow for the unique demands of the emergency. With just one integration with Salesforce, all customer details are shared automatically, accurately, and securely with UPS and other carriers via a return shipping label, eliminating errors and cutting collection times by 50%.

“Salesforce enables us to get really smart, bring every stage under tight control, set our own quality standards, and improve our customer care,” explained Ryan. “Until we had Salesforce we didn’t have the infrastructure to handle the explosion in testing volume and speed of response required - we couldn’t have done it without them.”

For users of LetsGetChecked, having access to highly trained nurses and expert clinicians puts a test result into context, sets minds at rest, or offers advice and guidance and a clear way forward, whether that be access to additional services or a referral back to a GP.

Jasmine Hodgkinson is the Lead Nurse in the LetsGetChecked Dublin team. “Pre-pandemic, the nursing team was using a combination of email, phone messaging, and spreadsheets. Now, we have a record of the interactions with the customer right back to their first contact. Each customer has a Salesforce case number enabling secure viewing of patient records in a nurse view only area, ensuring confidentiality.”

Through automation, low value tasks have been removed. Templated emails are autogenerated and pre-populated with accurate data from Service Cloud. Test results are accompanied by information relevant for each individual customer, with prompts for a call to the nurse for more valuable, meaningful conversations.

“Salesforce makes everything much more manageable for the team,” concluded Hodgkinson. “Manual work has been significantly reduced and morale and satisfaction amongst colleagues has improved.”

“We don’t want nurses spending time filling in forms, doing admin, and trying to find the information they need,” added Murphy. “We want them to spend their time supporting and caring for people and that’s exactly what they want to do too. Salesforce automates these core processes.”

As LetsGetChecked continues to extend the range and scale of its testing programmes and millions more citizens take the healthcare at home option, there’s little doubt that the shift to a proactive, preventative approach to our health will result in diseases and conditions being identified and treated sooner, with corresponding improvements in overall health outcomes.

“That’s what gets us out of bed every day,” said Ryan. “By proactively testing and screening for a huge range of conditions and diseases, our customers have information and advice enabling early interventions that can be life changing.

“Salesforce gives us the confidence to embrace the scalability challenge. Once you understand what Salesforce can deliver, its speed and flexibility with the limitless potential to add additional features and functionality, that’s very liberating. Then you can focus on handling growth and expansion, and innovating, without worrying about how to handle it.”

There’s a home healthcare revolution underway. By partnering with Salesforce and embracing automation, LetsGetChecked has gone from start-up to global market shaper in just seven years. Said Ryan: “With the help of Salesforce, we’re at the cutting edge of the new world of home healthcare, providing customers with actionable information quicker than is possible through any other method.”