Simplyhealth

Salesforce Customer 360 will help us collect insights that will shape our future wellness plans and offerings and ultimately lead to a happier, healthier Britain.”

- Dave Exall, CIO and Transformation Director, Simplyhealth
Simplyhealth image
 
1,344 employees

1,800

cases per month triaged by two chatbots

 
 

Simplyhealth unlocks Customer 360 with its One Salesforce Initiative

We all know that prevention is better than cure. But when illness strikes, the UK’s healthcare providers have got our backs. Healthcare solutions company, Simplyhealth, has been improving access to healthcare since 1872 – predating even the NHS. Today, it is leveraging digital services to help customers stay healthy for longer, while providing that much-needed safety net should customers fall ill.

“Empowering people to look after their health has never been more important. With Salesforce, we can help more people access healthcare services and offer lifetime value to customers, from lifestyle tips to virtual appointments,” explained Dave Exall, CIO and Transformation Director at Simplyhealth.

The company has been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in more ways than one. It launched a complete overhaul of its digital strategy just before the first lockdown in March 2020, quickly adapted its teams to remote working, and set up virtual healthcare appointments for customers via its SimplyConsult app at lightning speed.

But with a team of fearless Trailblazers and a solid plan for success, the company is pioneering a next-generation customer experience that could shape the future of private healthcare.

 

One Simplyhealth is our digitalisation strategy; a single source of the truth on a robust, centralised Salesforce platform. It’s a solid foundation to build out an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.”

Dave Exall, CIO and Transformation Director, Simplyhealth

Giving internal operations a comprehensive health check

Simplyhealth is no ordinary healthcare company. It provides health and dental plans for more than three million UK customers, and builds long-term relationships that last a lifetime.

The company aspires to make great healthcare accessible for everyone, but it also believes in the power of community and giving back. In addition to its paid-for services, it developed a free app called SimplyMe to help users take a holistic approach to health, with fitness tracking and push notifications to encourage people to establish healthy habits.

But to give internal operations a comprehensive health check and get a better overview of customers and staff, Simplyhealth needed to align core business units, centralise data, and establish best practice processes across the organisation.

“One Simplyhealth is our digitalisation strategy, and it’s built on a platform we call ‘One Salesforce’,” said Dave. “We had multiple solutions in place to support different parts of the business, but we needed to create a single source of the truth on a robust, centralised platform.”

Taking a strategic approach to success

 

With Salesforce, we’ve built a platform based on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau. Next, there will also be a community built on Experience Cloud to come. This has enabled us to unlock 360-degree visibility across the organisation, reimagine customer relationships, drive efficiency and empower people.”

Rebecca Hall, Head of Salesforce, Simplyhealth

The team defined the core pillars of its digital transformation: to reimagine customer relationships and provide a great experience, to drive efficiency and communication, to empower people, and to unlock 360-degree visibility across the organisation.

“While the pandemic accelerated digitalisation, we still need to be able to serve our more traditional customer base who prefer paper forms and phone calls to apps and chatbots,” added Dave. “One Simplyhealth doesn’t mean one way of doing things; it’s a solid foundation to build out an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.”

Simplyhealth’s Head of Salesforce, Rebecca Hall, was in charge of bringing this vision to life. “It took six months to establish One Salesforce,” she recalled. “We used Salesforce accelerators and Trailhead to upskill the tech team, and built a platform based on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau. There will be a community built on Experience Cloud to come, and we are currently rolling out Interaction Studio too.”

Working remotely during lockdown, the team integrated key systems such as its policy admin system, with custom APIs. The team used as much ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality as possible to get the core platform in place.

Unlocking richer insights from a centralised pool of data

The first iteration of One Salesforce focused on the company’s key priorities: empowering employees and centralising data – both key ingredients to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Using Tableau, employees are able to explore and analyse their data taken directly from Salesforce. Tableau’s interactivity and ease of use means employees can easily track KPIs and metrics, and make data-driven decisions based on the insights they find.

“Salesforce gives us a single view of the customer so we can build stronger relationships and add more value,” explained Dave. “We can see which products they have, where the sales team has opportunities to cross-sell, and every interaction they’ve had with us.”

With the initial implementation complete, the team of Trailblazers is working in two-week sprints to continuously release new functionality. “While we’ve been working in One Salesforce, the tech team have been implementing changes at a breathtaking rate,” commented Sally Clarke, Director of Customer Services. “The platform just gets better and better.”

To optimise One Salesforce, the team captures feedback from users on Chatter – although Rebecca has the final say on what’s implemented. “I’ve been working with Salesforce for ten years, so if I don’t think something will work I always suggest an alternative to keep our employees happy and productive.”

One such change was to create an email in Case Macro to cut down on manual data entry for the service team. Now, email templates are prepopulated with the right information and case status is automatically updated in Salesforce, saving five minutes per email across hundreds of emails.

Supporting better lead management across the sales funnel

 

Using Salesforce Chatter has been great for cross team collaboration and helping salespeople feel more connected as they had to adjust to working remotely during the lockdown.”

Pam Whelan, Director of Sales, Simplyhealth

For the sales team, adapting to remote working was always going to be difficult, but Chatter provided a lifeline to help them feel more connected and stave off feelings of isolation. “Salespeople are naturally sociable, so the Salesforce implementation was really timely to make it easier to adapt to working from home during lockdown,” said Pam Whelan, Director of Sales at Simplyhealth. “It’s also been great for collaboration, and ultimately we’re going to use it to streamline cross-team collaboration as well.”

Automated workflows are also making life easier for the sales team, with leads triaged and routed to the right person at the right time ensuring emails are answered quickly and in line with SLAs. Better lead management and greater visibility across the pipeline is also crucial to underpin telesales operations and during the renewal lifecycle.

“Salesforce dashboards are great to help the team track leads and unlock richer insights,” added Pam. “They give senior management a really clear overview too – our previous system was too complex to get a bigger picture of how we’re performing across the board, but now I can drill down in real time to monitor productivity, reward good performance, and resolve issues quickly.”

Although early in its implementation, the marketing department has started using Interaction Studio to track browser behaviour and send more personalised communications to customers, which means they can generate better quality leads for the sales team. As the company rolls out more functionality on Marketing Cloud, the teams will be able to work closely together to boost engagement rates and convert more leads.

“Salesforce is a hugely powerful tool. Having seen what it’s capable of, I’d be distraught without it!” revealed Pam.

 

Technology empowers our people to have more personal conversations with customers with access to all the right information to give them an amazing service. The ideal customer experience should be effortless, integrated, and personalised across all channels, and Salesforce is helping us get there.”

Sally Clarke, Director of Customer Services, Simplyhealth

Providing seamless services to both traditional customers and digital natives

When it came to optimising customer service, Simplyhealth had a unique challenge – how to cater to a broad range of customers, from digital natives to an older generation of loyal customers who will always choose pen and paper over apps.

“We need to be able to deliver seamless omnichannel services,” said Sally. “With Salesforce, our reps are empowered with all the information they need to have great conversations with customers – whether that’s on the phone or on social media.”

With hundreds of different policies on offer, Sally’s team uses Knowledge on Service Cloud, a centralised knowledge base, to provide a hub where reps can check terms and conditions for all of its policies. With strong search capabilities, they can easily find the information they need without having to flick between multiple screens or escalate the query, which has improved first-time resolution and reduced average handling time, while improving employee engagement.

Another metric the company is tracking is customer satisfaction, and despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic – which included all dentists closing for several months – the company exceeded its 60% target to achieve 75% CSAT in 2020.

“To reduce churn, we had to act quickly and offer customers a three-month payment holiday for their dental plans,” explained Sally. While dentists were closed, cases related to Denplan spiked dramatically. But with better visibility on Salesforce via web cases and Live Chat, the team handled the rise in demand without compromising on service quality.

“Technology supports the customer experience but it’s not the whole story – it empowers our people to have more personal conversations with customers with access to all the right information to give them an amazing service,” commented Sally. “The ideal customer experience should be effortless, integrated, and personalised across all channels, and Salesforce is helping us get there.”

Empowering customers with great self-serve capabilities

To help customers self-serve for common queries, the team implemented two chatbots: Digital Dave and Betty the Bot. Leveraging artificial intelligence, the bots help to triage and prioritise the 1,800 cases per month that need to be routed to the support team. If a customer wants to cancel their policy, the virtual agent can capture insights into why and suggest alternative actions to help customers get better value from their policies.

Next, Simplyhealth is replacing the technology underpinning its customer community with Experience Cloud. “Salesforce will enable us to build out additional functionality on our portal such as OCR for scanning receipts,” explained Sally. “One of the biggest challenges for our more mature customers is attaching photos of receipts for claims, but with OCR they’ll be able to scan them in and the form will auto-populate.”

The community will also generate push notifications to keep customers informed as their claims progress.

Next on the agenda: accelerating innovation

One year into its implementation, Simplyhealth continues to evolve and improve its One Salesforce platform to achieve its ambitions of acting as One Simplyhealth. And it’s well on the way to transforming the employee experience.

“Our users embrace Salesforce because it’s intuitive and they can already see the value it brings to their roles and to the wider business,” said Pam. “Once we’ve perfected the employee experience, a seamless, connected customer experience will naturally follow.”

Next on the agenda, Rebecca’s team are leveraging Einstein artificial intelligence on service calls to generate next-best actions and automate note taking. As they continue to develop Marketing Cloud, they’re designing birthday campaigns to automatically enroll customers in a draw to win a voucher and increase engagement rates.

Meanwhile, SimplyMe and SimplyConsult work alongside One Salesforce to help build a richer picture of customer behaviour and expectations based on real data. The company has also delivered a new app, SimplyPlan, to enable customers to submit and track their claims.

“Salesforce Customer 360 will help us collect insights that will shape our future wellness plans and offerings,” revealed Dave. “For example, during the pandemic we saw a spike in demand for virtual counselling services, so we could make sure we had enough practitioners to meet that demand.”

With Salesforce, Simplyhealth is empowering more UK citizens to take control of their health. And it’s just at the beginning of its digital transformation journey. With Rebecca and her team of Trailblazers leading the charge, the future looks bright for One Simplyhealth.

 
 

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