Saudi German Group UAE
Overview
Saudi German Hospitals Group is the largest healthcare brand with the largest footfall in the Middle East and North Africa. Saudi German Hospitals (SGH) started its first hospital in 1988 in Jeddah.
The Group is now the leading provider of healthcare services in MENA with ten hospitals in Jeddah, Aseer, Riyadh Madinah, Hail (Saudi Arabia), Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman – UAE, Sana’a- Yemen, and Cairo – Egypt.
In the UAE alone, hundreds of thousands of patients in the UAE walk through the doors of Saudi German’s hospitals and clinics each year. Each one has their own expectations of a brand that promises prestigious healthcare experiences.
Sheraz Ayyub,
Director,
Saudi German Group
Velocity Consulting has done wonders for Saudi German Group’s business progress. Digital transformation is crucial to our core growth strategy. With Omar and his team’s expertise, we have been able to make rapid inroads in the past 2 years and are achieving outstanding results. Velocity has assisted us in the strategy, planning and deployment of a national strategy across the UAE, which was a very complex task given the scale of customers we serve every year in all our hospitals and clinics. Our goal was digital transformation, revenue optimisation, cost efficiency, bolstering patient experiences, and building strong one-on-one relationships in a tough market. Their ability to leverage the real value out of new and existing technologies has helped us define the optimal configuration for our enterprise. Today, we are able to successfully transform our go-to-market strategy for every single healthcare facility in the UAE with quick results as well as long-term growth prospects in place.
The Challenges
Being the largest healthcare provider in the Middle East and growing at breakneck speed came with its unique set of challenges for SGH Group.
- At an enterprise level, the Operations, Marketing, and Customer Service teams were functioning in silos. The multiple healthcare facilities in the form of 3 large hospitals and many clinics made it complex to have unified patient experience across the UAE. Importantly, this was posing obstacles to operational efficiencies, technological gaps, and leading to tactical performance bottlenecks.
- Dependence on legacy applications which were costly to maintain, and not compatible with modern enterprise solutions, thus preventing the evolution towards a more integrated digital enterprise.
- Analytics: SGH was missing out on multiple sets of useful data, but also the data that was collected proved to be difficult to access by the many business units across the group and country. Collectively these issues presented a significant hindrance to effective, forward-thinking decision making.
- SGH was seeking a technology roadmap that could unify their technology ecosystem, optimise patient experience and service delivery, while reducing costs. Most importantly, which could drive the next phase of SGH’s growth story catalysed by technology and digital transformation.
- Improve the in-facility and online patient experience while getting more insight into the patient journey and the personas. This needed to happen in a way that it would have demonstrable impact on company revenue, patient footfall and overall Net Promoter Score (NPS).
- There were marketing campaigns that were not generating the ROI that management had planned for. We detected lapses in the way they were not aligning with the sales funnel for lead nurturing and conversion.
Our Approach to Problem Solving
- The first thing that Velocity’s team did was conduct an enterprise-level review of all SGH Group entities across the UAE. There was significant collaboration with their Executive Team, including the CEO on identifying challenge areas, and pinpointing new value-creation opportunities in Marketing, IT, Customer Service, and Operations.
- Velocity advised on a strategic technology roadmap that would serve as the cornerstone of digital transformation. This included providing consultation on migrating legacy HIS applications as well as innovative tools and applications that would enable better patient experience, client support, and provide unified integration from multiple sources leveraging modern cloud solutions, as well as artificial intelligence (AI).
- We designed a sophisticated analytics plan to collect critical data, unify it in a central location from all business units, and help company stakeholders make more informed decisions. By creating a data framework, we enabled a key component of digital transformation that paid immediate dividends.
- Velocity launched a national Customer Success campaign for SGH that began through nationwide surveys of patients for a 360-degree understanding of the customer journey. We identified opportunities across all touchpoints; for improvement in patient experience, contact center efficiencies, the booking process, as well as aftercare transition. We also performed Net Promoter Score (NPS) diligence to establish benchmarks.
- Our team also worked on the digital marketing strategy for SGH across the UAE, looking at every single channel, from SEO to SEM, and Social to Influencer/Brand Ambassador engagement through celebrities. We also conducted deep competitive intelligence with a view to increase SGH’s visibility through online campaigns.
Results and Successful Outcomes
- Our work has made a demonstrable impact that SGH’s C-suite intended. We’ve put SGH on a course to attain a revenue increase of AED 13 Million annually, along with many other tangible benefits.
- A more cost-effective, agile, and efficient technology and applications ecosystem that has saved thousands of dirhams while boosting organisational productivity. The new systems are more flexible, innovatively modular, and can easily adapt to scale as SGH continues to grow in a future-proof way while enjoying savings of at least 17% Year on Year (YoY).
- Analytics and Business Intelligence allowed SGH to increase customer engagement across the journey and develop more effective campaigns with a practical tab on Return on Investment (ROI).
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) saw double-digit growth as Velocity enabled SGH Group to have better insight into customer segmentation (using RFM analysis techniques) and deploy an omnichannel experience for patients to seamlessly benefit from SGH’s services. We also trained Customer Service and Contact center staff on better customer engagement techniques and addressing performance issues which led to an impact on the amount of calls handled and customers acquired via phone.
- Our digital marketing efforts resulted in 17x increase in web traffic with a 37% increase in conversions that were otherwise being lost to competitors due to various issues. Rankings on Google improved by at least 25% for hundreds of high-volume, high-opportunity keywords while social engagement also enjoyed double-digit growth.