The Governance Perspective

A freer health care market brings new expectations and demands from its customer base. Whether offering self-diagnostics and information, setting complex appointments or providing test results, customers expect a choice of information delivery channels, integrated communications (eg test results) and rapid follow through to the next step. Processes, staff and systems involved in patient/customer correspondence need it to be sufficiently robust, reliable, flexible and accountable to deliver to this agenda.

Governance leaders in the Healthcare sector understand the challenges of ensuring that operational delivery with good service is balanced by effective controls and efficient cost management. Allowing customers to choose their communications channel preferences, for example, can be a win-win with client convenience and organisational savings as data entry tasks are performed by customers rather than staff.

Overcoming correspondence challenges means ensuring that the ways you communicate with customers is relevant, timely and via a route they prefer. To do this staffs need the ability to compose, send out and retrieve your customer documentation quickly and efficiently working within tight budgets. But you also need to know how to:

• Reduce manual interventions and handoffs across teams and within processes
• Quantify the true costs and opportunities of print and letter-production
• Maintain a central repository of communications for both efficiency and audit
• Overcome compliance failures and reduce document production timescales.

With Icon UK, all these challenges can be tackled head on.

The benefits of a comprehensive, responsive and properly implemented Customer Communications Management strategy for corporate governance include:

• Elimination of uncontrolled cost exposure to communication discovery
• Speed to launch global correspondence with material changes
• Downward management of litigation risks
• Easy absorption of necessary regulatory and legislative compliance terms

In short, control of risk costs, minimisation of management distraction, speed to execute legal and rule changes. At Icon UK we specialise in creating customer communications solutions, working with organisational leaders and senior management teams to guide them through the right choices to realise significant improvements in customer service, whilst ensuring regulatory compliance and substantial returns on investment - in some cases over 100% in year one…

Challenges

Lack of comprehensive management and capture of communications can result in:

• Exposure to litigation through simple errors in customer correspondence
• Uncontrolled cost exposure for “discovery” of communications in the event of litigation
• Potential loss of complete customer interactions’ picture
• Business impact of time to implement regulatory changes
• Competitive impact of time to deploy marketing initiatives

Against the backdrop of these challenges, Governance leaders in this sector need to an enterprise tool that will tackle these issues whilst under the watchful eye of regulators such as the Care Quality Commission and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). This means not only is their reputation and customer confidence at risk, but they may be subject to fines and loss of operating licences if these issues are not dealt with promptly and satisfactorily.

How Icon Helps

Icon Suite offers Healthcare organisations the opportunity to address all these challenges in one solution platform. Practically every type of document can be flexibly constructed from pre-approved templates, incorporating powerful re-use and multi-lingual features. Structured, Interactive and On-demand output types can be produced and include Proposals and Quotations, Appointment confirmations, Policies, Statements, Customer Self-Service, Correspondence and Third Party Communications, etc (see ‘Uses’ on Healthcare Overview).

Different modes of patient/customer engagement are supported across all media types. Through deploying this platform, with transformational change and operational services where required, we help organisations change the way they engage with customers. Customers benefit from highly personalised, flexible and positive experiences they are pleased to recommend to others. Icon provides many forms of industrial strength enterprise document solutions.

Icon solutions offer:

1. Process mapping & case flow analysis to identify & quantify issues and propose solutions
2. Appropriate benchmarking so the scale of improvement opportunity is known
3. Plans quickly in place to defines the ROI of a print-and-content rationalisation path
4. Cross- departmental coverage so all users can look in one place for view of customer
5. Business units the confidence of well-vetted, compliant communications
6. One repository provides that everything is in one place and re-use of assets increases

These in turn drive excellent efficiency ratios.

The use of customer communications management to minimise risk and enhance corporate governance in Healthcare sector is wide ranging.

Examples include:

• full 360⁰ view of all customer related correspondence, structured and unstructured, even buried in discrete silos, relevant to a particular situation, easily retrievable and easy to act on ­ vital to address litigation
• one local change with global reach ­ add or modify a key term to meet legal obligations and have the term perpetuated through all relevant documents and interactions
• respond to customer requests ­ self-service, call centre or written, with complete audit trail of interactions ­ a one hit response to customer queries helping to eliminate spurious complaints early
• Social Media collaboration is enabled as the ‘command and control’ governance approach of the ‘Systems of Record’ era morphs into the ‘Systems of Engagement’ era, helping a new future to be carved out with personalised but compliant customer communications.

Icon UK can assist in the all areas related to improving customer communications including:

Icon UK’s Customer Communications Management solutions can deliver these benefits ­ and more besides. Companies that engage Icon find they can understand what customer communications are really costing and translate this into a compelling Return on Investment case. By investing in the right solutions they can improve content and policy control, increased customer loyalty and achieve top-quartile performance in customer communications management. In doing so they develop a robust platform for meeting both strategic objectives [such as rapidly re-branding following restructuring] and tactical delivery [such as large scale personalised messaging on a multi-lingual, multi-country, multi-channel mass communication basis delivered cost-effectively].

Some of the world’s leading service organisations use our technology solutions. Call us to find out how we can help your organisation.