Bob Yurkovic

Business Growth, Customer Experience, Engagement, Digital Operations & Solutions

Real Sales and Marketing – Connections and Conversations

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Being a sales rep is like being a doctor. First, you have to win the confidence of the person. You have to understand their pain – feel their pain. This makes an initial connection. Once you have earned trust by building confidence, they can talk about what ails them. A deeper connection develops through a conversation. Good doctors focus on the person and not on what meds they can push (one of their products). The doctors that see you and in 5 seconds and then prescribe meds have a bad track record. They do not take the time to understand the person. No connection – no warm fuzzies. No coming back to you!

Conversations take time and time is rushed in this crazy world so we must step back and yield to a more thoughtful approach. Marketing and sales is about making an investment in time and developing connections. So, instead of hawking your product with an “in your face” approach, invest time to build a conversation.

Sales and markeeting is really like a weird courting ritual. It is not about love but it is connected to it. What?? It is a human connection that can grow deep, loyal customers. Dating takes time and connections grow as you invest time and understand the person. If someone is courting a person and just talks about themselves (their product), there is little chance of a second date. Doctor, pursuer of love, or sales, it is about making a connection and having a meaningful conversation.

People really don’t NEED your product. There are always alternatives. So sales is driven by more than just need. In a B2B world, they really want a connection – human interaction is more important in an industrialized, technology driven society. So sales is about something much deeper. Good sales people and marketing folks understand this. So the conversation – not the message – has to be (1) well crafted and (2) timed. Yes, conversation. Not just an assault of sound bites. A conversation is needed to build a connection.

So for marketing folks, how can we initiate a conversation and allow it to blossom into a deep connection? Be thoughtful in your approach.

Thanks Zach Messler – you are the inspiration for this piece.

Challenge – an Art Form

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It can be a scary word and yet it represents hope for the future.

Humans are all stuck in their present way of thinking and doing things. We need strong people who are challengers to expose a new way of thinking so we can evolve and change our bad habits and create new habits.

Forceful challenge can have a terrible impact if used as an ax to hack away at a way of thinking. Some of us come in swinging the big ax and strike down the status quo leaving a path of resentment. I believe we have all seen this at least once.

Good leaders understand that brute force is not always the path to change. “Do it my way or you are out!” I’ve heard that a few times throughout my career. It didn’t work leaving those leaders scratching their heads. “But, we have to change or perish! It is common sense.” Resistance to change trumps common sense every time … it is in our genes. So, it is how we challenge that can have the most impact for us to commit to change.

What if we take this big word, CHALLENGE, and strike the status quo with the power of a feather? What? Strike softly and plant a seed of ‘perspective’ in the minds of others. Nurture the seed and watch it blossom into insights so the “others” begin to challenge themselves and they influence others. What a powerful, yet subtle way to shift what we do and believe. Brute force is not always the answer and people’s habits do not respond well to it as we have all witnessed. Strike the mind with a feather of perspective. It is not as scary and let’s people gradually embrace change.

Challenge can be scary to some. It is important to know that. In the hands of a skilled leader, challenge can alter the status quo without leaving a path of destruction. The success of using challenge is in HOW the power of it is used. Use it wisely.

Cogent Communications Leads to Consumer Engagement

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August 27, 2015

By Robert Yurkovic

When interacting with consumers, there are many channels for the delivery of communications. Multi-channel and Omni-channel are buzz words many of us use and they enable organizations to deliver communications to consumers through various methods and technologies. The issue I have is it is not a consumer-facing point of view and in some ways companies are abusing the technology that enabled them. With so many channels aimed at a consumer, the consumer feels like a bullseye resulting in an experience that is frustrating and chaotic. This often results in communications that are ignored and discarded, which decreases the opportunity to engage them.

Channel Unity misfire

To engage consumers, communications must be cogent … clear, strong and convincing as well as being able to influence the mind and behaviors. The goal should be meaningful communications and not worthless junk mail.

Why does this occur in healthcare and other industries? In healthcare, silo’ed organizations are common place. Each organization wants to reach out to the consumer with their message. Multi-channel platforms and applications provide access to the consumer and if each organization sends their unique communications, the consumer is bombarded with confusing, conflicting, and irrelevant content. No consumer wants pieces of an encyclopedia thrown at them requiring them to fish out relevant information. Consumers have short attention spans and scan material for relevancy in 2-3 seconds.

Coordinated

Organizations are not coordinating their communications across the business so a communication over mobile may be different than a communication over email or a web site. The outcome is a confused consumer, which may result in a phone call to the contact center or discarding the messages altogether as unimportant. If a consumer receives 2, 3, or 4 different communications from various company representatives, they will likely be discarded as the consumer’s perception is all communications are incorrect. Consumers will not spend time validating which communication is correct … this is a formula for a bad game show. The opportunity for engagement suffers and the customer experience deteriorates.

Consistent

Organizations tend to delivery different communications to one consumer even on the same channel. For example, I reached out to a healthcare payer’s contact center for a fairly simple question and received 3 different answers as I stumbled through their IVR system and multiple organizational representatives. 40 minutes of my time was wasted and my goal was not achieved so I was frustrated. The damage doesn’t end there since I communicated my experience with neighbors and friends. Now I am influencing a community and the company’s brand suffers. The lack of consistency of communications results in hours of wasted time and causes a degraded customer experience. The company disengaged me.

Clear

A communication is no good if you cannot understand it. Useful communications that have impact are simple and clear and refine the message to its essential core. No long, endless diatribe and no spouting paragraphs of information. Your audience must be able to understand the message quickly and without confusion.

Relevant

It is a B2C world and everyone wants to touch a consumer within a company and across different companies resulting in an increase of information sent through every possible channel. But is “more” better than “less”? Or is it a question of the right information to the right consumer? Relevant communications has the best chance of capturing a consumer’s attention and engaging them. For example, I receive newsletters from my primary physician’s office, the local regional medical center, urgent care, and several other health-related sources. The print matter ends up in the trash and the emails end up in junk mail. Why? The content does not pertain to me. Why do I want to hear about asthma or diabetes in a generic newsletter since I and my family do not have or are at risk for those conditions? There may be something relevant on page 4, however I did not get that far since I dismissed the communication at page one. The result is the communications deemed useless and failed to engage me. I also associate that company with other companies that send me junk mail, which damages their brand image. I am now conditioned to discard future communications swiftly and they have a very little chance of engaging me in the future.

Why Channel Unity?

Channel Unity means all channels communicate to the consumer with one cogent voice. To the consumer, it doesn’t matter what channel they use, they want to experience useful communications from the company. Companies need to shift their thinking to a B2C Model and embrace Consistent, Coordinated, Clear, and Relevant (CCCR) interactions and communications. Consumers don’t care about all the channels that reach them. They care about a connection to the company and expect it to act with a cogent voice.

Channel Unity

I have never seen a company transform and eliminate their deeply embedded silo’s quickly so the solution to Channel Unity must enable data, content, and processes to overlay a company’s business in a way that offers consistent, coordinated, and relevant communications to consumers. Autonomy is protected in the silo’s and a company does not need to wait 5 years for a major cultural shift to occur.

In my recent book, Commercializing Consumer Engagement, I describe best practices and approaches to achieve Channel Unity and consumer engagement without disrupting what is currently working within company. Engagement is all about consumer behaviors and connecting with them in a way that supports their lifestyle.

Consumerism and Trust in Healthcare

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Brian Solis talks about Connected Consumerism and Generation C in his book “What’s The Future of Business”. I believe connected consumerism in healthcare is an investment in product relevance and meaningful relationships to improve the state of a consumer’s health throughout their life cycle. In order to engage your consumers, trust is a required element before consumers will engage with you. The concept of providing health care is about being connected and remaining connected with your consumers and offer services that integrates with their lifestyle. However, a relationship needs to be developed in order to build trust. Why? Health is personal. The best examples of engagement in health are personalized services. Services should be local and embedded in the community since the community is a natural support group for people reaching for health goals or trying to change a behavior to fight a chronic disease.

Health is Special

Remember that health is very personal unlike many consumer product goods so the connection should be real and meaningful. Decades ago, doctors had genuine relationships with their consumers. They knew the consumer as they followed them along their life cycle. With increasing medical costs, doctors built larger practices and focused on cost efficiency and service speed. Consumers don’t visit the same doctor every time due to availability and scheduling in larger practices. As doctors lost the personal connection with their consumers over the past few decades, trust eroded and consumers left those doctors and chose their doctors from a list of provided by healthcare insurers. Consumers also began to obtain health advice on the Internet instead of from doctors since they were difficult to get a hold of and expensive if an office visit was required. In the consumer’s mind, doctors could be replaced easily as long as they could get a doctor covered under their medical plan. Keeping costs down instead of a continued relationship with a doctor was now a higher value to consumers. Most consumers with plans have to pay more to go out of network.

Commoditization

Commoditization for primary care was taking hold as consumers were sacrificing quality over cost and convenience. This was exacerbated as many employers switch health plans during renewal periods and with that; a consumer received a list of different in-network doctors. Now doctors are fighting to regain the trust once earned and grow their customer base. For a doctor, it is like pushing mud uphill as regional health practices form to manage operational costs and drive consumers to large practices. To lower costs, some doctors practice defensive medicine to avoid malpractice issues and push more consumers in a tight schedule. This is not an environment that nurtures and grows trust. Doctors are no longer connected to their consumers as consumers are now connected through social channels. Searching for health information is a top search category on Google and consumers also reach out to others seeking advice on a procedure or condition, or references about a doctor.

New Entrants

Some companies are trying to earn the consumer‘s trust so doctors have much more competition now. New entrants such as Google and Apple have entered the market and while they are not providing diagnostic services, they are providing information and acquiring health data from devices that support healthy lifestyles. These companies understand consumerism and how to deliver a great experience; qualities that are little used in established medical businesses. Other companies, such as Walmart and CVS are offering local, affordable basic health care services once provided by primary care physicians. Local urgent care centers are providing care services without the wait and cost issues associated with emergency departments. Doctors and hospitals are left with specialized health services as general health services move to other businesses.

Path to Trust

For a consumer, who do you trust? Trust is a key component to retention and consumer engagement so we know it is of upmost importance. What are the connections between trust, relationships, engagement, and behaviors?

  1. Behaviors drive consumer engagement
  2. In order to influence a behavior, you need to build trust
  3. In order to have trust, you need a meaningful relationship … a connection worthy of the consumer’s attention
  4. In order to build a valued connection, you need to interact where the consumer lives while combining a great experience with useful services and information that supports the consumer’s lifestyle and goals

For consumers trying to manage their health, they need tools and information to make informed decisions. Communications plays an important role in making this occur as a conduit for exchanges between the consumer and the business.

Payer Situation

Healthcare Payers operate in a transaction mode such as when a health transaction, such as a claim, occurs for the consumer. At that point, an interaction is started with the consumer. An example of this is an Explanation of Benefits (EOB). A claim is placed and an EOB is sent to the consumer explaining the transaction that occurred. Better communications during the claim processing phase with create a better experience such as sending an email to a consumer saying, “Your claim was received on January 3, and is being processed.” Interactions and communications could include additional suggestions for improving the consumer’s health around an existing condition or personal objective for health.  Extending the interaction with useful and relevant content helps the consumer manage their health issue and learn more about their health. A relationship starts to develop as content is exchange with the consumer. Relevant, trusted content is essential to a dialog between a Payer and consumer.

Coordinated, Consistent, Relevant

Coordinated, consistent communications that are relevant supports a valuable dialog and the relationship begins to form. This is much the way a doctor communicated with their patients many decades ago. The desired goal is to be embedded in a relationship that impacts the consumer’s lifestyle and daily living. The consumer is able to better manage their health and make proper decisions when equipped with relevant information and tools. The triad of healthcare, Payers, Providers, and Pharma, must work together and share consumer information and speak to the consumer in a coordinated manner; speak in a singular health voice. This approach offers the consumer a superior experience and the value of the combined effort would be multiplied as opposed to speaking as 3 separate voices. Relationships can grow as Payers, Providers, and Pharma jointly build relevant interactions around consumer’s lifestyle. What could the next C level position be? Perhaps it could be a Chief Alliance Officer responsible for making the connections between businesses, leading joint initiatives, and readying technology systems and processes to be able to exchange information readily and support a singular voice.

More about consumer behaviors, trust and building relationships, and consumer engagement in my new book titled, “Commercializing Consumer Engagement” at http://www.commercializing-consumer-engagement.com/

The Power of Personalized Newsletters

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With so many different channels to engage customers in order to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones, including a myriad of digital methods, it can be difficult to figure out where to focus an organization’s efforts. There are a few tried and true methods though that should not be forgotten amidst all the new technologies and media. Newsletters, both print and digital, are a well-known way to engage customers. But in many industries they have been virtually swallowed up by other forms of communication such as email, blogs, social media pages and other digital mediums. Digital newsletters however, continue to be highly effective for certain industries, particularly for the healthcare and insurance industries with an open rate of 32.2% and 43.7% respectively according to MailChimp, a leading email service provider.

The Benefits of Personalized Newsletters

The idea of digital personalized newsletters may be generally associated with the advertising and marketing days of the past, but there are many ways to reinvent this medium to benefit healthcare and insurance providers as they engage the demand generation consumers. The consumer’s appetite for relevant and real-time health information is insatiable as proven by searches for health information on Google. This “old” idea can be reinvented in many new and engaging ways to deliver personalized, relevant health content. Just think about some of the current advantages personalized newsletter can provide:

  • Can position your organization as a trusted advisor and dispenser of dynamic, one-of-a-kind personalized health information offering transparency to your knowledge bases
  • Has the potential to show customers that an organization cares about their customers and has the customer’s best interests at heart
  • Helps build trust with customers by maintaining a top-of-mind presence
  • Helps to remind customers of the positive value an organization can bring to them

Why Personalized Newsletters are Ideal for Healthcare Members in 2014

Digital personalized newsletters compared to their printed counterpart are particularly appropriate for healthcare and insurance payers in 2014. The digital communication piece offers an ideal way to build relationships and engagement with healthcare customers regardless of changes in the landscape of the industry. Healthcare payers have a great deal of incredibly useful health-related data that they can use to create personalized newsletters to form a deeper relationship with each individual. Here are just a few of the ways healthcare payers might use this format to engage with their customers:

  • Include personal health tips specific to the needs of that customer
  • Provide healthy recipes based on that customer’s health information
  • Create different informative health-related articles based on the different segments of the healthcare market
  • Utilize graphics and other custom touches based on demographics, ethnicity, and other factors
  • Include upcoming appointment reminders to healthcare customers in their newsletters, along with click-to-call functionality connecting the customer with their physician
  • Remind customers of their health benefits when entering into a health event, such as pregnancy as well as special programs to keep you healthy during that time

The Importance of Segmentation and Personalization of Newsletters

The fact of the matter is that there are few promotional tools that can do as much to promote a brand for as little money as newsletters. There is a world of ways to reinvent the medium for very modern results. Health food stores and other businesses in niche markets understand how important newsletters can be in building and maintaining personalized relationships with their customers, and the same can be said for healthcare. The key is segmentation, personalization and relevancy. When talking about personalization, we are not referring to only changing the recipient’s name, but including specific health-related information that pertains to each customer individually. No two newsletters are the same. Sending the same newsletter to every healthcare customer would be highly impersonal and for most it would be useless. By changing the format with relevant content based on the needs of the specific customer, healthcare payers can truly personalize and build their relationships with customers like never before. This entail would provide a great deal of value by improving public perception and implementing a personal presence in the lives of healthcare members.

In case you’re still not convinced, consider a few more of the possibilities of personalized newsletters to engage your healthcare members:

  • They allow an organization to market new services and products immediately to those who would be most interested in them
  • They allow an organization to describe the benefits of their  programs in a detailed manner, considering the needs of each target audience
  • They allow an organization to reemphasize the value of their services in a friendly, conversational format
  • Newsletters may be the only comprehensive opportunity for positive interaction between the customer and the organization
  • They allow the customer to obtain health information and reminders because no one has the time to sift through Google and customers can’t remember all the do’s and don’ts in their busy world

Many experts agree that personalized newsletters are going to be a strong and effective tool to engage healthcare customers in 2014. As long as healthcare payers remember to personalize with relevant content, there are many contemporary possibilities.

 

Consumer Insights: Profiling Consumers to Target Personalized Communications and Sustainable Health Programs

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The healthcare climate has changed, and consumer centricity in healthcare is now more important than ever. In order to better serve consumers, enact more personalized healthcare communication programs and develop more sustainable health programs that influence the lives of consumers for the better in the future, it is necessary for health providers and payers to leverage big data in new and innovative ways. There are huge stores of data available for healthcare industry insiders to take advantage of in order to profile consumers and ultimately better serve them through programs such as digital dashboards that are easily accessible to consumers, employers and healthcare payers.

What Kind of Data is Most Useful?

Successful healthcare consumer centricity programs take many different kinds of information into account. Healthcare payers and providers can better serve consumers with tailored communications and personalized programs by first obtaining the following types of data in a central repository:

  • Behaviors – Information about lifestyle choices and behaviors that pertain to diet, exercise, activity, sleep patterns and other habits can be very helpful. These may be obtained through information from various databases, surveys and other records of interactions with consumers.
    Claims – All claims tell a story, and can be used to tailor more personalized experiences for and communication with consumers in the future. A well-managed electronic records database is essential here.
  • Rx – Tracking and measuring pharmacy metrics can be very beneficial to healthcare payers, not only because it provides an opportunity to streamline cost initiatives, but also because it provides another opportunity to see what health choices consumers are making and where they’re spending their healthcare dollars.
  • Biometric Devices – Since the dawn of the digital age, many advances have been made in the healthcare world, including the development of biometric devices that identify doctors and staff and gather vital information about patients. Statistics from these data records can be used to pinpoint trends, develop more customized healthcare products and services and make better predictions about healthcare outcomes.
  • Tests (Blood) – The records of blood tests can also be used to develop better products and services for consumers. The more information that healthcare payers and providers have about the unique populations they serve, the more personalized communications, experiences and programs they can provide.
  • Master Data (PHR, ethno-, techno-, socio- and demographic) – Perhaps the most useful chunk of data for profiling healthcare consumers is a master data file that includes demographics, personal health records, ethnographic information, socioeconomic information and all varieties of useful digital information about the group of consumers that a given healthcare organization serves.

What Can We Do With All This Data?

The goal of any successful consumer-profiling program should be to achieve the kind of strategic analytics that will support better health initiatives. Analytics can fuel tailored dashboards for consumers, employers and payers, which epitomize the new drive toward consumer centricity for healthcare payers. Such a dashboard provides a more convenient way for consumers to receive information from and communicate directly with healthcare payers and providers, which allows payers in particular to foster relationships with consumers that were not always possible in the past. These dashboards can also be used to gather more information about consumers in the future, and do so in a more organized, cost effective and streamlined way. In the end, the more insights a healthcare payer and/or provider can gain about the consumers they serve, the better prepared they will be to target personalized communications and develop more sustainable health programs in the future. It’s a win-win-win for the healthcare payer, the consumers who use their products and services and the employers who help provide health plans to their employees, when applicable.

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