As a company with a growing customer base, one of our challenges has been propagating timely information to our customers in a user friendly way. We’ve tried it all, but every mechanism had its drawbacks:
Email – Some customers don’t check their work email regularly and there is a great deal of maintenance on our side to keep the list of email addresses up-to-date.
Online Forums – While forums are a great idea for people who are accustom to using them, the customer still has to proactively check the forum while also having to maintain yet another a login/password on the web.
Mailed Newsletters – We need to get information to our clients virtually real-time, so sending things in the mail isn’t really an option. Plus, it is then up to the office to send around the information and who knows if everyone is going to see it.
Our Requirements
We had a few requirements before we started designing a solution:
We wanted to create a new mechanism to get information to EVERY FlexMedical user in near real-time.
We didn’t want the user to have to proactively go looking for information. The information should present itself to them.
We didn’t want the user to have to maintain any additional login/password combinations.
Some users like to print things to look at later, so we wanted the information to be printable, but also permanently available and easy to find in FlexMedical for future reference.
Our Solution
What we came up with is FlexMedical Feed. It is built directly into FlexMedical version 7 and uses our new FlexMedical Cloud Services to listen for new information that we post. Users get “notifications” in real-time using the new notification mechanism, also being introduced in version 7. We can generate information with text, pictures and links that we want our customers to be aware of, publish it, and within minutes every user of FlexMedical is notified that new information is available to view. No extra logins, no other programs, and no need to remember to check for new information.
How We Plan To Use It
With FlexMedical Feed, we can now inform customers about:
Upcoming incentive deadlines
Important industry changes to billing or clinical procedures
Notification of upcoming version releases and new features that will be included
Real-time notification of payer issues (for instance, Medicare is rejecting all claims due to system error)
New FlexMedical product offerings
While we will occasionally use FlexMedical Feed to notify of new product offerings, it will NOT be used for marketing purposes. It will also never be used by third-parties to try and push information to our customers. We want the information to be timely and relevant as possible without a bunch of static.
We are excited about this feature and it has been a capability the entire team has wanted for a while. FlexMedical 7 will be released in April 2013.