Customer story
How TheSocialMedwork improved their product with user research
The Challenge
TheSocialMedwork is a pharmaceutical intermediary that provides medicines to patients in countries where they are not yet approved. The team works with patients from around the world in a high-touch manner to provide them with much-needed medicine, manage physicians’ relationships, work with strict import regulations, and arrange complex logistics processes.
They were looking to improve the service and product to serve their patients better and help them access unapproved medicines.
The team wanted to understand how their patients experienced the service at all stages of interaction with TheSocialMedwork. Namely, their journey on the website and interaction with Patient Support before they were ready to order, and their experience with the Sourcing and Logistics team after receiving their medicine.
The information collected would:
- drive the development of their product roadmap;
- help the team prioritize the parts of the patient experience that needed further improvements.
One important building block of the research was conducting NPS and CSAT surveys to measure patient satisfaction. The service they were searching for had to meet precise requirements:
- must be very customizable and not restrict the team to standard questions and ways of working;
- must be able to offer a high level of automation to save valuable time;
- must be able to run surveys on the website and also send them an email based on specific triggers;
- must seamlessly integrate with other crucial tools they were running.
The requirements proved to be obstacles as the TheSocialMedwork team worked with half a dozen services that not only did not meet all the requirements but sometimes broke important functionality of their product due to a conflict in integration.
The Why
The team eventually arrived at the SatisMeter’s door and decided upon adding SatisMeter to their long term toolbox due to:
- SatisMeter’s ability to run on multiple environments (development and production) which enabled the team to test and perfect the integration and the surveys before a patient laid eyes on them;
- smooth integration with Zendesk, their CRM that allowed the team to set up email surveys based on specific points in the patient journey;
- a tight integration with Segment CDP, which made it easy for the team to trigger surveys based on very specific events;
- fast and effective customer support, the second it was needed;
- ability to completely customize the surveys and not be stuck with a one-size-fits-all tool that only does NPS.
This flexibility and granularity in control enabled TheSocialMedwork to target very specific visitors or users and collect customer insights that helped them understand which parts of the website and product to focus on.
They have seen the number of patients requesting unapproved medicines grow substantially since the start of the year, doubling in September compared to January, which has reflected in the number of survey completions, thus offering the team an accurate overview of how patients experience their service.
”“What kept us working with SatisMeter was their fantastic support that goes far beyond the price we pay each month. The CTO helped us personally to get SatisMeter working with Magento2. Since Magento2 uses some older JavaScript frameworks (require.js), we initially had some errors with installing, but SatisMeter resolved this in no time.” ”
Marko Jak,
CGO at TheSocialMedWork
The Solution
TheSocialMedwork has been running multiple website surveys targeting users at certain times in their interaction with the website. One of the most valuable surveys has proven to be one that the team set up on the medicines page. When the users go through the onboarding flow and then drop off, they activate an event that then triggers a modal on the side of the screen with the purpose of answering why the user has abandoned the flow.
At the same time, the team has set up CSAT surveys at different stages of the patient interaction with their teams. Through Zendesk, their customer service software through which they carry on every patient interaction, the different teams automatically trigger particular surveys.
- the Patient support team will mark a Zendesk ticket as On hold when the patient has placed a medicines order (so the patient is ready for the Sourcing and Logistics team to take over), and a survey is then sent out by email to the patient enquiring about their experience with the Patient support team;
- the Sourcing and Logistics team will then mark the Zendesk ticket as Solved when the medicines reach the patient, and a survey is automatically sent out to the patient enquiring about their experience with the S&L team.
”“The surveys were beneficial to us to understand which parts of the business to concentrate our efforts on. What helps is that we don’t need to spend time and manually send the surveys, it’s all automatically triggered from Zendesk while we focus on helping our patients.””
Akshi Sudan,
Patient Support Team Lead at TheSocialMedWork
The Results
The website surveys have provided valuable insights into the patients’ needs and helped the team adjust their product to meet their expectations, most notably focusing on what type of information they wish to find on the website and at which specific stages of the interaction to offer them.
Aside from zooming into parts that could use improvement, the surveys brought reasons to honor the Patient support and S&L teams – the glowing feedback boosted morale as the teams were celebrated internally, and the strategies that were proven successful were solidified.
The TheSocialMedwork team does not wish to stop here. They plan to streamline every aspect of their service, starting with collecting feedback from first-time visitors, reordering patients, and partnering physicians.
”“We are excited about the future with SatisMeter, which contains conditional logic in questions and more fine-tuned control over event triggering.””
Marko Jak (and the team),
CGO at TheSocialMedWork