‘Patient 1st - How we use technology at SISU to create the best individual patient experience’
On Jan 1st we made some major decisions around changing our patient experience at Sisu Clinic. We wanted to incorporate that amazing clinic experience into every touch point across the business.
We felt there was a ton of opportunity being left on the table in marketing and patient support services, and decided to make some dramatic changes, firstly removing agencies and then marketing leadership with me adding the role of CMO to my CEO role.
Obviously, belief was important from the executive team, that took a while but from the outset we were aligned that getting our patients engaging with the Sisu team will transform the patient experience. The challenge was how to do it!
We rebuilt the team from the ground up with people experienced in AI, Deep SEO, high frequency trading and went to work.
We also wanted to build an AI system where we could chat to our patients in almost human form but more about that later
- The 1st step was a baby one. We removed social media monitoring and added ManyChat, the returns here were immediate, we created a set of prompts that answered everyday questions but also escalated urgent ones delivering a much cleaner experience for our patients.
- 2nd step was to add Pallyy which enabled all our front of house teams to chat/engage with our patients for escalations across all social channels, dramatically improving the experience.
- 3rd step was the booking engine, we transformed how our booking flow looked and felt, in partnership with Brian and team at Minicorp, moving from our almost soviet style CRM to something much more user friendly, this led to a 20% change in conversions, a totally enhanced experience on mobile and a significant uplift in patient bookings.
- 4th Step; Bringing SEO in house, a painful and slow experience, we operate in 26 locations, 2 continents and 3 countries so each treatment page, each bio, every page needs to be completely unique, we had moved to Webflow late last year and feel they are a great partner, we now rank in all our individual markets for important keywords making it easier for our patients to find Sisu through organic search.
- 5th Step; We brought in an ROAS platform, (name withheld) which allows us to understand how patients are engaging with our marketing campaigns in real time down to a single campaign across all channels and geographies. This platform allows us to examine 1st touch, last touch, linear and many other models around how where/we spend, Understanding ROAS on every single campaign globally has been transformative.
- 6th Step; In May I felt we were really flying now and decided to go all in on our vision around AI/booking/patient support service, I had watched KLM and Klarna do amazing stuff around this with Klarna AI customer service was doing the work of 700 human agents and leading to a $40 million cost saving in Q1. I chatted with Brian at MiniCorp who were already building a relationship-first customer service AI platform called Laila which was a perfect fit for us. We have now successfully deployed and integrated Laila across Sisu Clinic allowing our patients to communicate with her over WhatsApp, website and more to come plus 24/7/365 in any language, she never gets tired/sick/holidays. Laila has generated over a quarter of a million in bookings in the last 6 weeks.
And now to the final and most painful step
We originally outsourced our patient support services and whilst our partner Otonomee who have been excellent to work with, we wanted our patients engaging directly with the Sisu Team across our 25 clinics. I selected Aircall as the operating system who have been great to deal with (my telco background helped a lot here) and we went live 3 weeks with our USA/UK platforms as a test, to see Niamh in Douglas booking in a patient for Richmond in London and Ellen in Waterford booking in a patient for New York recently has just blown my mind.
Yesterday we went fully live globally
We have gone from 4.5 outsourced operatives on patient support to 25, of our own fully trained in-house teams, 455% more human availability and changed call availability hours from 79 hrs to 104 hrs per week, more importantly we had halved our call answer time to 20 seconds. Our patients now interact directly with our highly trained front of house teams delivering that amazing clinic experience over the phone.
Obviously, none of this has been easy, it’s been painful in the extreme, but it has worked, the patient experience has been transformed.
Focusing on the patient experience has delivered explosive growth in 2024 and while we have only patients in Sisu, putting the customer at the center of your decision making truly does transform your growth trajectory.
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