The healthcare education solutions industry is booming. In fact, it’s expected to grow to $13.3 billion by 2023. Businesses within the sector are in high demand, but also experience close competition. To secure students, education solutions have to offer flexible, high-quality education—and a streamlined student acquisition system.
Dignity Health Global Education (DHGE) 
creates learning programs for various healthcare professionals—both clinicians and non-clinicians—alongside healthcare organizations and academic institutions. These programs aim to streamline and improve operations across health systems, so that medical providers can offer high-quality patient care. They provide education in nursing, leadership, analytics, project management, entrepreneurship, and other topics.
The DHGE enrollment team communicates with a lot of students within the healthcare space. With challenging healthcare jobs already, these students have no time for phone calls or emails. Plus, with thousands of leads in DHGE’s system at any time, the enrollment team needed an effective way to keep track of their personalized and extensive student communications.The enrollment team believed that text messaging, which was growing more popular within the industry, might be the answer. They began to look for a business text messaging platform that could help their team to send, receive, and organize texts within their CRM. Enter Heymarket.
The Search for an Integrated Lead Communications Tool
On any given day, the enrollment team has over 4,000 leads in their system. Each team member receives anywhere from 20-60 leads each day.
Following up with each of these leads via the phone would be nearly impossible. Most doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff simply don’t have the time to answer a phone call. It can also be challenging to reach them due to their irregular schedules. While following up via email can be easier on a mass scale, DHGE’s approach of ensuring their programs match student needs requires personalized and reciprocal communication. Emails tend to encourage one-sided messaging, since students often see them as incoming information rather than a call to action to connect.
In order to boost response rates, the enrollment team wanted to supplement these two legacy channels. Additionally, they wanted an easier, less time-consuming way to keep track of their various communication channels.
DHGE’s enrollment team began to search for a fast communication channel that might allow them to streamline the CRM process. After some searching, they found Heymarket.
Business text messaging seemed like an easy way to connect with on-the-go leads. Plus, Heymarket offered a robust Salesforce SMS integration that promised to make lead management easier.
How SMS for Healthcare Workforce Development Streamlines Lead Management
After just one week, the DHGE enrollment team was comfortable using the Heymarket platform, including the SMS Salesforce integration. They quickly identified tools that help them streamline lead management.
Salesforce SMS Integration. The enrollment team prefers to send SMS from within the Salesforce interface. They find it convenient to send SMS within the lead object in Salesforce, so they don’t have to switch between platforms so often. The Salesforce SMS integration also automatically saves texts sent from Heymarket to the correct lead, so team members don’t have to manually upload texts. Lists. The enrollment team arranges their leads into lists by profession, program of interest, and other segments. Then they can simply create an SMS template, leave space for custom fields, and send the message to the appropriate list. The business text messaging platform automatically inserts contact custom fields from Salesforce into each outgoing text as merge tokens. This is a fast way for the enrollment team to send personalized texts to dozens or hundreds of leads at once. Each lead receives a private, customized, and one-one-one message.Scheduled messages. Scheduled text messages make it easy for the enrollment team to plan out and send messages at the appropriate date and time. This way, leads receive texts at the perfect moment based on their timezone and projected schedule. The enrollment team uses this tool to ensure texts arrive right when it’s most convenient for leads. This dramatically improves reply rate and, consequently, the ability to engage with leads.
Private comments. It can be hard for DHGE team members to know the answer to every incoming question. DHGE offers a wide range of programs to various healthcare professionals who often operate under different regulations, tuition assistance programs, and requirements, depending on their state of residence and employer. That’s where private comments come in. Team members can mention one another in chats, inviting coworkers to coordinate behind the scenes. Leads never know that there are other team members in the chat, and only receive the messages directed toward them.
Reporting. Heymarket reports help the enrollment team compare the effectiveness of SMS for healthcare workforce development to their other channels. It provides key statistics like lead response rate and lead response time. They use it to decide which communications should be sent via SMS, and whether their team needs to speed up their own response rate.
The Impact of Business Text Messaging
Business text messaging has helped DHGE streamline lead management, which has come with additional benefits. Their enrollment team has seen SMS for healthcare workforce development:
Increase lead responses. Leads, especially nurses and doctors, are most likely to respond to texts. Currently, the DHGE team sees a 25% response rate from SMS for healthcare workforce development. Comparatively, phone calls have around a 5% response rate.
“You’re more likely to get a response via text.”
—Emani Knight, Enrollment Advisor at DHGE
Boost productivity. When dealing with 4,000 leads, each second matters. The DHGE enrollment team has been able to conduct lead management, including lead communications, within Salesforce. They have also been able to use tools like lists and scheduled messages to reach groups of leads with personalized messages. Because of these tools, they have been able to connect with more leads, faster than ever before. They have also been able to focus on personalized and reciprocal contact rather than outreach.
The Future of DHGE and SMS for Healthcare Workforce Development
As DHGE continues to see the number of incoming leads increase, they expect their enrollment team to grow. As they add more team members, they plan to scale their use of Heymarket’s SMS for healthcare workforce development tools to match demand.
As DHGE discovered, SMS for healthcare workforce development:
- Increases lead response rate. SMS is an easy, intuitive tool for leads. They are more likely to respond to texts than phone calls or emails.
- Boosts team member productivity. SMS offers tools that streamline the lead management process, empowering teams to answer more leads, faster than ever before.
Want to try SMS for healthcare workforce development? Try our text service for business today.
