How to Ensure Business Continuity in Adversity?
We have compiled a few techniques to kick-start your diagnostic lab business during & after COVID crisis
Every business is very different at the time of crisis. Navigating during this time requires you to have sustainable business processes & agile teams. To ensure business continuity in crisis situations like the current coronavirus pandemic, we thought we will write about some fundamentals any business should focus to get right during tough times.
We have curated these key business-focused areas based on our learnings with some of our customers and our own experience running a business for the last six years.
Build a Strong Customer (Patient) Relationship
Building a strong relationship with your customers is never a bad idea. At such a challenging time, reaching out to your customers and conveying your support & message is very important.
Providing support in times of emergency would show a caring & personal approach towards your patients.
Sending personalised messages, updating websites about COVID, and sharing on Social media as well as Whatsapp helps. We have also seen significant patients use Google Maps also to find out about timings, services & pictures about the centre.
Invest in Online Management Tools & Processes
Having control of your business is vital, more so if you are often travelling or not in the office. Remote management, good communication & easy collaboration are key for ensuring good operations.
Online tools are often compared to their offline alternatives, with similar costs & benefits. But this is where online tools significantly over-power any offline alternatives.
Your ability to manage your business online & remotely significantly improves your ease of doing business. Using Cloud / Online Lab Diagnostic Management Systems would help address this problem, eg. LiveHealth, CloudLIMS, MocDoc LIMS, etc.
Consider migrating your accounts & books to an online book-keeping system, for eg. Zoho Books, QuickBooks, Xero, etc.
Make your Patient Engagement future-ready
Ensure you have customer details to contact your customers in the future, by capturing mobile numbers & email IDs. Make yourself ready for digital engagement. Understanding that every interaction your team has with patients is an opportunity for relationship building.
- An important aspect of a good customer relationship is, don’t expect every interaction to be a sales opportunity, build long term relationships with your customers.
- Focus on delivering a great customer experience through your service. Ask your customers for feedback and implement that feedback.
- Make payment collections easy & transparent. This would not only reduce your accounting overheads but also improve your customer experience.
Digitize your Payments & Sales
Payment collection is key for a healthy cash-flow of your business. Collecting online payments from your patients & businesses can help you maintain track of your payment cycles. Digital payment collection has reduced account overheads by more than 75% foremost, and improved customer's experience since they get to use their wallets and save some money by cashbacks.
Software with integrated online payment ensures that you have no financial leakages, and reduces reconciliation time from hours to minutes. Know more about the benefits of integrated online payments in your lab solution here.
Make category-specific Health Packages relevant to your Customers
In Healthcare Diagnostic Business, you would already be serving different types of customers or patients. So it's important to have options for every type of customer.
With our market research & data, we found that most common categories of health packages that were bought by patients are as follows -
Most popular Health Packages
- Patients older than 60 years (Senior Citizens)
- Diabetes focused Packages
- Cardiac Health Care Packages
- Thyroid Care Packages
- Overall Health Packages for your frequently visiting patients
- Expecting Mothers & Maternity Care Packages
Having these common packages gives options to your customers and make a choice for what they can buy. If your CRM is capable to identify customer types based on their past history & transactions, you can use that data to run campaigns to reach out to specific customers with personalised packages; which will increase likeliness to buy.
Thank you for reading, we will continue to provide you a series of articles focused on kick-starting diagnostics labs business during & after the COVID-19 crisis.
