How integration of intelligent chatbots helped enhance ROI on digital spends.

This work was done for a leading healthcare brand which provides healthcare services such as nursing, physiotherapy, critical care setup amongst various others at home. A significant part of the brand’s direct to consumer (retail) revenues come from the digital channel. The brand wanted to explore ideas to enhance the ROI in order to scale spends on the digital channel. Our performance marketing and technology team worked together to create a chat bot enabled customer experience, which helped to significantly improve all funnel metrics.

Marketing Objective

• To improve the advertisement to conversion funnel metrics, i.e., improve click to lead, cost per lead, cost per qualified lead and cost per conversion metrics.
• To reduce the cost of selling qualifying leads using technology.

Challenges

Three challenges we needed to overcome included:

1. Understanding clinical aspects to qualify the lead. To qualify the lead the team needed to understand the clinical qualification methodology – how does one assess whether the patients need is acute. This understanding was critical to program the chat bot’s conversation flow.
2. Multiple functions needed to work together. Creation of the chat experience involved inputs and coordination with different disciplines. The functions involved: performance marketing team, clinical & sales team (at the client side) and technology team.
3. Technology integrations. Needed to integrate the chatbots with the existing CRM to not change the way the sales team pursued leads.

Solution approach

This engagement involved different teams across business, clinical, sales, technology and analytics. The approach is described in the schematic below:

Two significant changes were made the way the campaigns were run:

• We did away with landing pages and replaced these with bot conversations. This was a significant change from status quo.
• All click-to-call ads on mobile were replaced by ads leading to the bot conversation on mobile.

This approach was significantly different than the conventional method our performance marketing team was using. The assumption was that bot driven conversation will be able to elicit information from visitors much more effectively than an information heavy landing page.

Chatbot to CRM: Enabling continuous ‘qualification’ of lead through the customer’s conversation with the bot.

The innovation in utilizing the bot was to simulate a “form fill” through a very natural conversation. It was important to achieve two things:

1. Mimic an actual patient-physician conversation: To ensure that the conversation flow is as close to how a physician would engage with a patient, starting with basic information and going all the way to collecting information about symptoms, acuteness of such symptoms and so on.
2. Continuously qualify the lead. As the patient or the care giver provided more information about the patient, the lead was automatically getting enriched with this information in the CRM. This simulated a multi-stage form, with the difference that the customer would not feel that she was filling out a long form but was in fact speaking with a trained physician doing a diagnosis.

A typical flow is shown in the image below – this chat flow is similar to conversations on popular mobile app, WhatsApp, a familiar chat platform for patients.

Results

All performance metrics across the funnel saw a significant change. Here are some of the results: