Hello Humankindness: How Dignity Health Uses Sprinklr to Make Patients Happier

“Hello humankindness” is Dignity Health’s tagline. The power of humankindness – of taking care of those around us – is at the very core of Dignity Health’s mission. For over 100 years, Dignity Health has worked to inspire change in health care that leads to more empathy, listening and respect. A few years ago, the company wanted to transform its social media listening and engagement strategy to align with its mission of humankindness. As one of the largest health systems in the nation with 400 care sites across the western United States, Dignity Health took on the challenge of creating a company-wide social strategy that consistently delivered the kind of compassion a patient would experience in-person by caregivers in any of their locations.

Julie Rose, social media manager at Dignity Health, spoke with me about the company’s social media challenges and why they chose Sprinklr to help them create a strategy rooted in humankindness.

What are the challenges Dignity Health is trying to solve with Sprinklr?

We’re a healthcare organization that has many different physical locations (hospitals, ERs, clinics, medical offices, foundations), online pages and social channels to manage. We need a tool that provides us with collaboration opportunities in order to easily share and deploy our brand assets to different teams across states and across channels for use in both organic and paid social. Our brand is the core of what we do and who we are, so brand storytelling is a pillar of our social media strategy. Another challenge I identified pretty early was that we were not consistently tracking, measuring, and analyzing our social media performance. This presented a huge opportunity for us to identify key metrics to track and benchmark against, both at the enterprise and division level and even at the account- or post-level, and share out leverageable insights to the teams. We also didn’t have a way to audit whether or not a staff member had addressed or responded to an inquiry or complaint sent to one of our pages. As a result, I’ve deployed a formal social media response protocol and process in order to ensure that all inbound messages are seen and that a human decision is made to respond, ignore, or escalate, measuring the time it takes to do so. Sprinklr helps with all of this.

What benefits did Dignity Health experience after increasing Sprinklr usage and implementing a social media response process via Sprinklr?

Dignity Health has been using Sprinklr since 2015 for social listening, publishing, reporting, advertising, competitive benchmarking and, in late 2017, location insights. When I joined the company in 2017, there was an opportunity to increase usage and optimize Sprinklr’s capabilities. I started offering formal training on Sprinklr and office hours. As a result, as of July 2019, Sprinklr platform adoption is at an all-time high at 93%. We now also have unified goals across the organization. We’re responding to more messages, more quickly – our average response time during business hours went from 18.5 hours to 4h and 18m and our response rate to customer queries more than quadrupled. We’ve noticed brand engagement breeds fan engagement, and as a result, our average post engagement rate has nearly doubled over a 1-year time period.

How does your team ensure they do their part to protect patient privacy when chatting with patients on social media channels?

Protecting the privacy of our patients and employees is paramount. Sometimes people reveal too much in public social media posts and reviews; to include clinical information, like their diagnosis, and demographic information, like their phone number, all of which are PHI (protected health information). We respond publicly, but we ask to move patient conversations offline. We also advise fans not to disclose any information regarding their care or their condition publicly, and if they already did, we suggest they delete their post in order to protect their privacy.

How does Dignity Health use Sprinklr to monitor and respond to a crisis?

I receive email alerts when there is a message, tweet, post or review that contains highly negative keywords related to a patient experience. I can then quickly connect with a teammate to take immediate action or share it with others in the organization to address. Sprinklr’s listening module helps me keep a pulse on the real-time conversations around our brand and locations, through a number of always-on topics we’re listening to. But sometimes, unique, never-before-seen situations come up. When this occurs, I mobilize a few other teammates to develop a listening query with all the keywords of the issue and put together a reporting dashboard to monitor across social media channels, news sites, blogs, and forums. This keeps us from being caught off-guard when something of importance is shared on social media.

All that data is then used to inform whether or not we should issue a response or take other action.

Any future plans you’re excited about that Sprinklr will help support?

I’m excited to fully leverage the AI capabilities and understand how they can work to support the healthcare industry. Our industry is very different from others. If someone posts the phrase “I was injured…” it may not be negative feedback, perhaps unlike other industries that offer products or services. They could instead be talking about the excellent care they received at one of our ER’s. So leveraging AI when it comes to message tagging and sorting will really help us quantify message tone and sentiment at a high level.

Learn more about Dignity Health: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Connect with Julie: Email | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube

Check out more Sprinklr case studies: Customer Stories