State-of-the-art customer relations for hospital network

Executive vice-president of marketing Chatree Duangnet said the three-year investment plan was aimed at improving customer services, increasing customer relations, expanding the group's customer base and boosting its annual revenue.

BDMS's main brands include the Bangkok Hospital Group, the Samitivej Group and Bangkok Nursing Home. Under the plan, the Siebel customer relations management (CRM) system will be deployed in all 19 hospitals by 2010.

"BDMS will enhance our response time to patient inquiries, streamline the care process and improve clinical outcomes. The solution delivers an improved user interface which results in enhanced ergonomics and productivity, easy features and quick access by authorised departments to various levels of information," Chatree said.

Previously, BDMS provided medical treatment and healthcare services to customers who arrived at its hospitals off the street. Its in-house customer relations management system allowed the hospitals to provide the best services only while patients were in the hospitals.

"When patients went home, we did not follow up with them until they came to hospital again. But the new CRM system will allow us to be more proactive in providing medical services and will enable us to gain more new customers," Chatree said.

Currently, around 80 per cent of total customers of all 19 hospitals are repeat patients. With new system, BDMS aims to increase the repeat rate to 85 per cent.

About 35 to 40 per cent of the 1.6-million customers attending the group's hospitals are foreigners.

The first phase of implementing the new CRM system will cost about Bt30 million, and will begin before the end of this year. It will allow BDMS Hospitals to provide a seamless service and contact system for its patients. In the first quarter of 2009, the second phase of the new system will include analysis tools to help the hospitals to do business intelligently and enable the provision of individually customised medical services.

"Customers are an important asset of us. In the past, each of BDMS's hospitals invested in technology separately. From now on, we will consolidate our customer database and analyse it so that we can develop new services for individual customers as well as improving the relationship between our hospitals and their patients,' Chatree said.

In the future, a patient's information will go with them when they arrive at any one of the group's 19 hospitals. It is planned to give each patient a single hospital number that applies throughout the group's network.

"Siebel CRM solutions will enable us to implement Preventive Health Management, offering tailor-made health programmes and packages to both local and international patients. It will also enable us to present and summarise patient-specific information at various customer touch points, including e-mail, telephone, the registration system and the Web, in a seamless working environment," Chatree said.