This Week I Learned
Sometimes the only solution is dogged pursuit
While we are unapologetic tech evangelists, the promise of tech is easier to talk about but much harder to achieve. As much as technology can solve problems it can also create new ones too. I call these problems that pop up “The Whammy” and if you’re not careful in how you press your luck, the whammies may end your game.
We recently encountered one such whammy and it was a healthy reminder that the best solution is not another spin of the wheel, but rather dogged pursuit to root out the whammy.
The admin team of Stokes Counseling is the engine of the company. They manage intakes, scheduling, insurance verification and overall customer service as the face of the organization. It’s an absolutely critical function for us in striving towards a best-in-class patient experience. Software can help facilitate these functions but there is no replacement for a smiling face greeting you at the office helping direct you and answer your questions.
Recently the admin team surfaced an issue they were encountering with a large number of inbound calls looking for Husky Health (Connecticut’s Medicade program). The volume was not only disruptive but the callers were often angry and confused when they learned they were not actually contacting Husky. While Stokes Counseling accepts Husky insurance, we could not determine why so many callers believed they were actually calling Husky Health itself. Was a number for Husky somehow redirecting to Stokes? Maybe our number was listed in a directory for Husky since we were a Husky provider? We scoured the web and tried test calling Husky ourselves to see if we were redirected. All to no avail. We only knew 2 things for certain — this was a relatively recent phenomenon and people were convinced they were calling Husky Health. The EBH team was stumped. There was no software solution to solve this problem and yet our admin team was carrying the burden of this issue every single day.
Thankfully, Stokes’ Office Director refused to let the issue go. There was a problem and we needed to solve it. There was no technical solution, only dogged pursuit of the issue. She asked all the admins to forward her every call for Husky so she could attempt to understand how the caller got to Stokes. People were dialing our number but how and why? After many rounds of this, finally a breakthrough — she was able to convince one caller to send her a screenshot of what they clicked on to make the call. When she forwarded the screenshot to us, my heart sank.
Stokes Counseling was the top search result for Husky Health on Google. When searching from your phone (66% of our website visitors are mobile), the one-tap, click-to-call takes you directly to Stokes Counseling. I knew it immediately — we discovered the source of the problem, but what’s worse is that we caused the problem.
When beginning our partnership with Stokes, a primary initiative for us was to improve the performance marketing and lead gen capabilities of the practice. To continue to grow the practice requires being effective at growing the patient and clinician populations you serve. While we receive patient referrals from a broad number of sources, Google is still a primary driver, but we had been flying blind. We had no data to understand our marketing spend so in conjunction with building a new web presence we brought on a new partner to help us make smarter use of performance marketing to drive conversions, target keywords more effectively, and drive down CPAs. It turns out, one of our most effective keywords was Husky Health and as soon as we blocked it, the wayward calls magically vanished.
This one hurt a lot. Not only could we not source the root cause, WE WERE the root cause. In addition to that, we created unnecessary burden for our administrative team, and to top it all off, we were spending money to have people click on an ad who were ultimately not real patient leads for us. A massive triple whammy. With the benefit of hindsight the cause seems obvious, but we had no real way to pinpoint the truth without the dogged pursuit of our Office Director. Oftentimes, the only way to truly solve a problem is to roll up your sleeves and dig deep in the muck until you find your solution.
