A New Approach For Non-Payment

BACKGROUND

A top-five durable medical equipment (DME) company knew the importance of a strong outreach strategy for payment billing and customer retention. They needed a better way to engage patients to prevent and resolve missed payments.

An Important Message Vs A Noisy World

CHALLENGE

Before working with Drips, the DME company was primarily using a five-step direct mail campaign for non-payment. They also used simple push texting which included the account balance and a link to pay online, but no follow-up or conversation. Even though non-payment could be due to a relatively simple reason such as a declined credit card, this one-way push approach was often insufficient to engage patients and help them correct the issue. In an increasingly noisy and busy world, the company needed a more engaging outreach strategy to assist with non-payment as well as drive autopay enrollments. That’s when they discovered Drips.

Empathetic 1:1 Outreach At Scale

SOLUTION

Outreach about non-payment can be complex. (We do it a lot, so we get it!) So, how did the company successfully handle this difficult and time-sensitive use case? They partnered with Drips to create conversational outreach SMS campaigns. These campaigns engaged patients empathetically, starting with a question like, “Can we schedule a call to tell you about payment options?” Then, Drips’ AI-powered platform continued the conversation until the patient was ready to make a payment, enroll in autopay, or talk to an agent. Because these conversations were driven by Drips’ natural language processing (NLP) model, they didn’t require live agent time or additional client-side resources.

Drips implemented three campaigns. One contacted patients using conversational SMS and drove them to enable autopay online. The other two campaigns assisted with post-due date billing communications: one for patients 30-60 days past due, which drove patients to a web link to make a payment, and one for 60-90 days past due, which drove patients to a phone call with a live agent to discuss payment.

Increased Engagement And Retention

RESULTS

Drips enabled the DME company to engage efficiently with patients on a large scale. The campaigns contacted over 400,000 patients, with 29% positively engaging by sending a response or taking a desired action. For the autopay campaign, Drips achieved a 9.7% enrollment rate, lowering the chances of future missed payments for those patients. When driving patients to a phone call, 9.9% successfully transferred to an inbound call to discuss their payment.

These improvements resulted in over $7,000,000 in revenue, giving the company a high return on their investment. In fact, they experienced a 57-times ROI with Drips.

Importantly, Drips assisted with every aspect of set up and implementation — including scripting, split testing, and message deliverability — making these results much easier to achieve compared with a do-it-yourself approach. Drips’ AI-powered outreach dynamically engaged patients at a massive scale that would not have been feasible with a traditional approach.