Stakeholder relationship management: Reaching out to staff and stakeholders their way
Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) takes tools that have been used by big businesses for many years and applies them to communication in healthcare. As Paul Bray finds out, this means that you should be able to deal with your staff and stakeholders as individuals, while automating many of your communications with them.
The NHS is the UK’s largest single employer. Many of its staff work away from offices; on busy wards or out in the community. Many of them also work shifts. So managing to communicate any message to them is something of a minor miracle.
At the same time, the NHS is part of a bigger picture. To deliver on many of its policy goals, it needs to communicate with other stakeholders; from neighbouring NHS organisations to councils and charities.
“You need to know your stakeholders as individuals... but you also need to automate your dealings with them as much as possible.”
Treat stakeholders as individuals
Each of these interactions will be unique and require specific knowledge to be fully effective (nobody wants to be invited to an irrelevant meeting or to receive a mail-shot they received last month). And yet most interactions conform to a repeatable pattern, so that it's a waste of time and effort to hand-craft every one.
This means you need to know your stakeholders as individuals - not only their names and job functions but their interests, their needs, the communications they've received or sent in the past; even how they prefer to be contacted. But you also need to automate your dealings with them as much as possible, so that communication is as efficient and timely as possible.
An apparently ad-hoc communication - such as welcoming a new GP to a practice - may actually be a routine operation with a series of steps: sending a welcome pack, inviting them for some induction training, asking for their feedback, and so on. If you do this from scratch for each new GP, you're wasting time; plus you may forget an important step.
Conversely, a major engagement or consultation process sounds like a routine matter of sending out information and processing the resulting feedback. But individualising the invite process will save money and improve the response. If, for example, a stakeholder’s focus is physical fitness, they're unlikely to respond to an engagement about mental health services - but they'll be very interested in something about diet and obesity.
The challenges of stakeholder data management
These twin tasks - recording, accessing and sharing information about stakeholders, and streamlining the processes of communication with them - can pose considerable challenges for health organisations.
“Stakeholder relationship management (SRM) can record a single view of each stakeholder and the full history of communications sent to and received from them.”
Often, the necessary information isn't recorded in the first place or can't be accessed when needed. Different departments plan communications in different ways so there's no consistent experience for the stakeholder. Comments, complaints, survey results and other inbound communications aren't properly recorded or can't be integrated with other data, so the response is delayed or simply never happens.
These issues have been faced for years by commercial firms striving to offer a tailored and timely service to their customers, whether consumers or other businesses. Most have addressed them using customer relationship management (CRM) systems, so it's not surprising that there's growing interest in CRM among health organisations that are under pressure to improve their communications.
Tailored and timely: SRM
To move the same technologies into the public sector, simply replace “stakeholder” for “customer”. Stakeholder relationship management (SRM) can record a single view of each stakeholder and the full history of communications sent to and received from them.
This enables communications to be tailored to individual recipients, in terms of both its content and the media used. It means that anyone with access to the system can at least usefully answer a phone query - without the clinician or community group making it having to recount their entire story from scratch.
Any standard task, from inducting a single GP to the presentation of reports, commissioning plans and other communications to a whole community, can be formalised as a predefined SRM workflow process, saving time and improving consistency and accuracy.
These workflows can be combined with stakeholder information, for example to create a mail-shot that's relevant to the recipients, or to invite the right people to an event. To create an email, for example, to ‘everyone who attended the pathology CPD session on 4 September and who didn’t submit their feedback forms’ can take moments instead of days.
Engagement processes can be initiated and tracked in SRM, from identifying the right participants, to assembling and delivering all the necessary documents, and from providing a response mechanism such as a web form, to enabling online registration for meetings and and tracking progress with each stakeholder to maximise the number and timeliness of responses.
By making the process easier to manage, SRM can enable more engagements to be conducted. Communications with entire clinical networks can also be tracked and related using SRM.
Microsoft SRM is tried and tested, safe and secure
Microsoft's SRM solution is based on the highly successful Dynamics CRM software. It includes a secure stakeholder portal that allows stakeholders to update their own profiles and request information.
It also includes a helpful Business Process Designer that enables health organisations to create their own stakeholder-centric processes. The solution also includes segmentation, search, reporting and dashboard capabilities, event management, mail-merge and electronic survey capability.
"Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been designed to be easy to learn and use, simple to install, and powerfully configurable," says the company's SRM expert, Philip Rawlinson.
It relies heavily on standard, web-based services, making it easy to interface with existing clinical and administrative systems. And it can be configured easily by users themselves to enable a high level of granularity and accurate targeting of both stakeholders and the information they receive.
As well as being easy to set up, Dynamics CRM is also easy to use. It operates through familiar Microsoft interfaces like Outlook email, as well as through a standard web browser and on mobile devices, maximising uptake and minimising the need for retraining.
"SRM can improve the whole lifecycle of stakeholder communications, and provide a clear view of past and planned dealings with the stakeholder to anyone who needs to interact with them," says Rawlinson.