As health systems feel cost-cutting pressures from every angle, clinical asset maintenance has become a top opportunity for healthcare operations to streamline and reduce costs. Healthcare service organizations are frequently utilized by Healthcare Technology (HTM) and Facilities Management (HFM) teams to fill the talent gap, lower operating costs, improve service quality and ensure compliance with ever-changing regulations.
To build trust and improve customer retention, it is critical for HSOs to provide high-quality services to customers while effectively managing contracts with transparency, communicating pricing and adhering to contractual service level agreements (SLAs), especially when changes occur. At the same time, HSOs need the visibility and tools necessary to efficiently manage those complex contracts and amendments at an account level.
The challenge in using an outdated or manual process to manage service contracts and contract amendments is that it wastes time and can result in errors. Not to mention, healthcare systems are demanding lower cost-to-service ratios, requiring HSOs to scrutinize every single phase of their operations.
The following three steps can help your HSO build trust and retain customers, while streamlining operations.
Step 1: Build Trust with Automated Workflows to Manage Complex Contracts and Amendments
Gone are the days when everything in the hospital was covered under one contract. Healthcare systems are now more selective of what to include and what not to include. Budgets and circumstances also change regularly, such as when equipment comes off warranty, affecting the items covered in the SLA.
Not only do different customers have different SLAs, even within a single account, maintenance agreements vary with different equipment. Some equipment may be on a planned preventive maintenance agreement, others on an alternative maintenance agreement (AEM), and then there are reactive repairs when equipment breaks down unexpectedly.
A modern customer management system with automated workflows for contracts alleviates the burden of manual contract updates and increases accuracy, thereby increasing trust with your customer.
With Connectiv’s Customer Management, HSOs can automatically manage contract details including contract number, change orders and amendments, start and end dates, active status, terms and conditions statements, documents and renewal information.
Step 2: Increase Transparency with Detailed Account-Based Pricing
With the healthcare landscape continuously changing and hospital margins decreasing, hospital operations departments and CFOs are looking to lower the cost of asset management contracts. Blanket maintenance contract pricing for a hospital’s entire fleet of equipment is no longer the norm. Healthcare systems now want detailed, line-item contracts with the ability to immediately amend the contract when inventory changes, and they want all of this at a low cost-to-service ratio.
If your customer believes that all healthcare service organizations basically provide the same service, your s could lose the contract renewal without price transparency and updated inventory validations throughout the term of the SLA. Having accurate account-level pricing detail adjusted in real-time for contract adjustments increases transparency and trust.
With a modern CMMS and Customer Management system, your organization can easily increase transparency by offering account-based pricing by category, model and coverage level, as well as automatic price adjustments for inflation with an index-based price adjuster.
Step 3: Enhance Customer Satisfaction with Timely and Accurate Billing
There's no question that you’ll need to make periodic changes to a customer’s SLA as their annual revenues require inventory adjustments, or as services are added or deleted. If your customer has a current four-hour response time for on-site service but wants that changed to three hours, is your organization prepared to immediately make the contractual changes and have those reflected in the next invoice?
Surprisingly, those contract changes are often done manually. With manual changes, more than likely something will fall through the cracks from decision to invoice. When the invoice is inaccurate, you risk losing your customer’s trust. HSOs can build trust with customers by automating workflows, approvals and bulk adjustments in real time for all the variances and changes to their contracts.
Connectiv’s Customer Management provides automated contract workflows to manage services, effective dates and execution dates for new and retired equipment, as well as optimize billing with intelligent and flexible workflows. Faster response times, transparency and accurate billing build trust and improve customer satisfaction.
How Accruent Can Help with Customer Retention
Healthcare Service Organizations that leverage a modern CMMS and Customer Management solution can increase customer retention by automating workflows that manage complex contracts, increase the transparency of obligations and pricing, and improve operational efficiency in the field.
Accruent’s Connectiv solution is built on the ServiceNow platform, enabling efficient digital workflows and a modern user experience. Co-created with engineers, technicians and leadership from healthcare organizations, Connectiv is a mobile-enabled, cloud-based solution that manages all aspects of healthcare asset and facilities management (facility and biomedical equipment), work order management, financials and expenses, preventative maintenance, risk and compliance reporting, equipment distribution and more.
See the Connectiv Customer Management For Healthcare Service Organizations Brochure.
Contact us today to start a conversation about how Accruent’s Connectiv solutions can help your healthcare service organization.
