PatientSky used Appcues to engage their customers more effectively. Within 6 months of using Appcues, PatientSky has gathered contextual feedback and provided product updates to thousands of healthcare professionals. By turning their product into their main customer engagement channel, the team at PatientSky has also been able to generate customer referrals, improve demo environments, and reduce support burden. 

We reached out to Iselin Johnsen, Product Manager at PatientSky, to learn about the impact Appcues has had on their customer engagement metrics. 

About PatientSky

PatientSky develops innovative IT solutions for both patients and healthcare practitioners in Norway. It was founded in 2014 and has facilitated more than 3.5 million unique patient visits, handled 185,000+ dialogs between practitioners & patients and 520,000+ scheduled appointments. Approximately 80% of Norwegian doctors use PatientSky and their patient mobile app is one of the most downloaded healthcare apps in Norway. 

Running targeted feedback campaigns

Iselin and her team were looking for new ways to leverage their product as a means of growth. They understand that gathering contextual feedback from their users is an essential part of creating a product their users love. The team had tried their luck with email, but the response rates were low. They decided to give Appcues a try in order to engage their users in a more timely and contextual manner. 

Iselin started by gathering NPS feedback. The Appcues NPS survey is a simple way of keeping a pulse on users' sentiments. It provides quantifiable feedback that can be used to run follow up campaigns. Iselin built an Appcues slideout to follow up with all the users who gave an NPS of 0 to 6 (out of 10).

Of these users, 55% completed the feedback form. Iselin and her team now review this feedback every week in order to identify major trends and make improvements accordingly. 

“Appcues has helped us create a robust feedback loop. We can now act upon the constant stream of feedback. For us, this is the first step towards becoming more product-led” 

Turning users into champions

Iselin and her team know that word-of-mouth plays a powerful role in the healthcare industry. They wanted to leverage their users’ positive feedback through a sustainable referral campaign. To that end, PatientSky used Appcues to create a slideout targeted to happy customers—more specifically, users who gave an NPS of 8 to 10.

Prior to creating this in-app referral campaign with Appcues, the sales team had been cold calling users to request referrals. Healthcare professionals have limited time to respond to these requests, which meant that these phone calls rarely showed results. Within the first week of publishing this in-app experience, Iselin collected 2 references. 

“Generating referrals in an automated way has been amazing for us. Our sales team is really happy they don’t need to randomly call our users for references anymore.”

Announcing product updates

As Iselin and her team can now gather contextual feedback, they have been able to make product improvements faster than ever. PatientSky recently launched an update to their planner module and wanted to inform their users about the improvements in usability and functionality. They used Appcues to launch a flow that announced the update, informed users about how it would impact their workflow, and asked them to rate how satisfied they were with the update. 

Iselin and her team were not expecting a lot of feedback and were pleasantly surprised to find that with the Appcues flow, almost 20% of users who saw the update announcement did indeed provide their feedback on the product update. 

Before using Appcues, Iselin and her team relied on email campaigns to announce product updates. But the open rate of these emails was less than 37%—meaning 63% of the intended recipients never got the news. With Appcues, Iselin now can ensure that all the active users who should see an update actually do. 

“The best thing about Appcues is that everyone sees the relevant information they should see. You don’t have to worry about the open rates. Secondly, Appcues segmentation is super powerful. We show relevant updates to users who actually use that specific feature. Designing an email and creating a list of recipients takes a lot more time and is highly ineffective.”

As Iselin and her team make frequent product updates, they now use the Appcues Launchpad to provide minor product updates in an unobtrusive way. 

Introducing a product demo with Appcues

All doctors and practitioners follow a journaling system to keep track of their day to day activities, patient visits, prescriptions, medical history, and case details. 

Getting practitioners to modify their journaling system proved to be an uphill battle. According to the team’s research, practitioners changed their journals every 13 years, on average—it was a decision equivalent to buying a house.  Moreover, they found that practitioners had a tendency to avoid new technological tools. 

In order to provide practitioners with an exceptional user experience that would encourage them to make the switch, Iselin and her team created a demo that helped their users see the value of PatientSky’s journaling product for themselves. Iselin created a 9-step tutorial with Appcues that set the right expectations for users from the onset. The purpose of the tutorial was to encourage practitioners to at least try the demo. 

“We really wanted them to see the value of our product. The problem was that most practitioners were reluctant to try something new. We had to create a tutorial that showed them the value upfront and encouraged them to use the demo the right way”

The result?

88% of users who saw the tutorial went on to use the demo. Iselin also created a flow to gather feedback about the demo. Almost 80% of the users shared their thoughts on whether they found the demo helpful, how the demo environment could be improved, and if they wanted to buy the full version of PatientSky. 

This information proved to be invaluable for Iselin and her team. 

“Collecting all this feedback through Appcues helps us build a demo environment our users really want to see. Appcues is helping us build experiences that break old habits.”

Alleviating support burden

Finally, Iselin and her team also used Appcues to create hotspots and feature tours to provide contextual in-app guidance throughout the user experience. These in-app messages had a significant impact on PatientSky’s support load. 

Before using Appcues, the support department received an average of 70 inquiries per day. Since PatientSky started using Appcues, they have seen a decrease of almost 30% in daily inquiries. Although the customer base has been growing, the daily support inquires average 50 calls a day. 

The average call time has increased from 5 minutes to 6 minutes. The team’s analysis shows that this increase in call time is indicative of issues that need personalized attention. That’s because most non-technical issues were now being headed off by the hotspots and feature tours that helped users get most of the information they were looking for within the product itself. 

“Appcues allows us to quickly inform our customers about new updates to our product, downtime information, and reminders of helpful tips. Some of the customers who used to call our support for information are now self-served via Appcues. This means that our support department today can spend more time on customers who need wider technical help.”

Want to learn more? Find out how Appcues can help you communicate with your own users more effectively.