While company partnerships can be powerful ways to achieve mutual goals, success depends on how well each company integrates and supports the other. In this article, we’ll explore how we at Air Doctor, an innovative travel healthcare app, partnered with a global emergency assistance giant to train, implement, and engage their employees in using our service.
Focusing on tailored training, continuous engagement, and a collaborative approach ensured that our solution seamlessly fit into our partner’s operations, leading to improved employee engagement, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
Addressing the Main Challenges Head On
Our partnership started because of critical issues and operational hurdles impacting efficiency and customer satisfaction. The main challenges included:
- Complex case handling: Multi-step medical cases took longer, creating bottlenecks and slowing workflow.
- Ineffective follow-ups: Multiple customer interactions resulted in unsatisfactory outcomes, affecting overall customer experience.
- Extended resolution times: Cases could take weeks to resolve, significantly impacting efficiency and satisfaction.
- Diverse customer base: With varying needs across different demographics, delivering consistent, high-quality service was difficult.
Clearly, a flexible, innovative solution was needed to meet customer needs while reducing employee burden. Our partnership focused on simplifying case handling to speed up processes and slash resolution times while remaining adaptable to different demographics.
Building a Solid Foundation for Training and Activation
The first step in establishing successful partnerships is ensuring the partner company’s employees are adequately trained and understand your offering. From the beginning, we took a hands-on approach. We worked closely with the assistance company to develop comprehensive training materials for their needs.
We then integrated training sessions into their weekly schedules and hosted initial training sessions to get everyone up to speed:
- Training and Awareness Sessions: We led training sessions to help agents understand the app’s functionalities. Sessions were clear, practical, and relevant to the agents’ day-to-day responsibilities. On top of understanding the app, training highlighted the benefits it could bring to their workflow. After all, who knows how to adjust routines and processes for improvement better than the staff?
- Weekly Educational Meetings: We included brief educational sessions in the company’s weekly meetings to ensure steady progress. These sessions provided ongoing learning, informing agents about new features and best practices.
Maintaining the Momentum with Continuous Engagement and Support
We didn’t just step back after laying the foundation. Instead, we fostered close partnerships with the assistance company to fully integrate our solution into their daily operations and address emerging challenges. Our approach was twofold:
- Strategic Cross-Departmental Alignment
We set up regular meetings between corresponding departments – VP Marketing with VP Marketing, VP Product with VP Product, IT with IT, and so on. These touchpoints facilitated quick communication and action on issues or improvement opportunities, which was key to building a strong partnership and ensuring smooth integration.
- Gamifying Engagement: The “Winner of the Month” Initiative
To increase employee buy-in and app use, we launched a “Winner of the Month” competition, rewarding the agent who generated the most Air Doctor links. This fun initiative boosted awareness, usage, and healthy competition, creating a more engaged and enthusiastic team.
By staying proactive, we kept the partnership dynamic and responsive to evolving needs, setting the stage for long-term success and mutual growth.
The Outcome: Data-Driven Success
Our partnership yielded transformative results. By streamlining processes, we cut the steps needed to manage a medical case by 80 percent, significantly boosting operational efficiency. Case resolution times, which once took weeks, were sometimes reduced to minutes.
Key highlights include:
- Operational Efficiency: Generating appointment links became a simple daily task for agents, reducing workload stress and boosting productivity
- Customer Satisfaction: Faster, more effective service delivery led to higher customer satisfaction.
- Employee Engagement: The competition and ongoing support kept staff motivated and engaged, ensuring smooth integration of our solution into their workflow
This success story highlights the impact of strategic collaboration and well-executed partnerships on business transformation.
Tips for Setting Up a Successful Partnership
Based on the success of our collaboration with a global assistance company, here are key tips for setting up effective partnerships:
- Tailored training: Design practical, relevant, and easy-to-understand training material for your partner’s needs.
- Continuous engagement: Regularly communicate with all partner departments to address issues quickly.
- Incentivize engagement: Use competitions and incentives to boost usage and promotion of your offering.
- Agility and adaptability: Be flexible and adjust based on feedback to ensure long-term success.
- Holistic support: Provide ongoing support with regular check-ins and updates to keep your partners and their staff engaged.
Conclusion
The partnership between Air Doctor and the global assistance company highlights the value of a well-planned integration strategy. Air Doctor helped their partner significantly improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction by emphasizing tailored training, ongoing engagement, and employee incentives. This case is a valuable example for any company aiming for long-term partnership success.
