Category: Technology

Streamline your workflow: 5 reasons to acquire a scheduling solution

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

“From maximizing productivity to delighting customers with punctuality, Scheduling solutions are the secret sauce for thriving in 2024’s business world.”

According to the World Economic Forum, 34% of all business-related tasks are performed by machines, with the remaining 66% performed by humans.

As businesses look to invest in modern technology that can guarantee maximum output in the most efficient way, scheduling platforms have emerged as a round-the-clock, multitasking maestros, effortlessly juggling a multitude of responsibilities.

In this blog, we discuss the 5 biggest reasons why your business may be ready to acquire a Scheduling Solution, and all the cost-effective benefits that come with it!

Why Does It Matter?

Batman has Alfred, Frodo has Sam, and a smoothly operating business in 2024 is likely to possess a scheduling solution. Here are some statistics to take into consideration:

  • The appointment scheduling software market is predicted to reach $633.47 million by 2025 (PR Newswire)
  • 78% of customers are more likely to buy from a business if they receive customized services (VentaVid)
  • Implementing appointment scheduling software can potentially boost revenue by 30% to 45% (Marketsplash)
  • A whopping 94% of customers would be more likely to find a new business, especially if it has its own booking schedule website (GetApp).
Batman has Alfred, Frodo has Sam, and a smoothly operating business in 2024 is likely to possess a scheduling solution.

In addition to being a highly profitable sector, Scheduling Platforms offer boundless potential for growth and remarkably consistent levels of client satisfaction.

But why should a developing business invest in a Scheduling Platform in 2024?
Within the rapidly-developing world of technology, are they a reliable long-term solution?

Most importantly, are they compatible with any kind of business?
Let’s find out!

1. You Want Efficiency in Operations

“Imagine your local coffeehouse, or luxury retail store, or even a university”.

Regardless of the industry, each of these businesses relies on regular customer visits and consistent transactions. Any missed appointments, meetings, follow-ups or requests can lead to lesser visits, and thus, lower income.

A scheduling solution can organize any type of appointment: in-person, phone, video, and web conference, to make sure a business never loses a client due to a lack of time.

2. You Want Something Easy to Implement

“The locals have decided to invest in a scheduling solution, but…”

Due to age, experience, or simply preferences, many business owners and managers are less inclined towards cumbersome, keyword-heavy solutions. They seek user-friendly, swiftly implementable solutions that evolve with their business needs.

SUMO’s Appointment Scheduler provides a user-friendly interface that not only gives an at-a-glance view of all customer interactions, but also the ability to personalize appointments for each individual client.

3. You Want Robust Scalability

“Business is booming, and the “locals” are looking to scale up”.

Whether launching a new retail chain or expanding with another branch, venturing into new investments introduces a fresh set of challenges, including heightened demands on time management operations.

Scheduling platforms can easily accommodate business growth and expansion by utilizing a flexible set of tools and solutions that adapt to evolving needs and increasing demand.

4. You Want Business Optimization

“The locals have gone global. Why use a Scheduler now?”

For businesses leveraging hierarchical structures with multiple managerial tiers, Scheduling Platforms offer an array of tailored solutions to optimize operations even further.

Solutions like Assignment Engine can ensure that a prospect meets with the right specialist, at the right location, at the right time, giving those specialists more control than ever before.

5. You Want 360-degree Transparency

“The business has become simply too large. Is it still worth it?”

For businesses leveraging hierarchical structures with multiple managerial tiers, Scheduling Platforms offer an array of tailored solutions to optimize operations even further.

SUMO’s Multi-Calendar allows a business to gain complete visibility & control over its entire workforce. With detailed Analytics, Reminder Engines, and Waitlist management, it empowers the business to grow even larger!

What Are The Benefits?

Whether you own a small business, an NGO, or an enterprise, scheduling solutions are versatile, efficient assistants that can help employees, managers and owners to optimize and upscale business operations.

Scheduling solutions can assist a business in a variety of ways, such as:

  • Optimizing resources like time efficiently through automation
  • Improving productivity & reducing down-time through time management
  • Reducing major costs through investing in existing, long-term solution
  • Enhancing customer satisfaction through personalized communication

Where Can You Start?

SUMO Scheduler is a powerful online appointment scheduling solution that automates record creation and maximizes performance, all within the Salesforce platform.

With a state-of-the-art interface, SUMO provides a 360-degree view of every interaction or meeting, which offers visibility into the entire scheduling process, all within the Salesforce Organization where the software collects and protects sensitive and essential information.

With actionable results and customer success stories like the ones below, business owners have truly found a game-changing solution.

Results Across All Industries

This global financial services client credits the SUMO Platform for helping them save up to 25% of the time by eliminating manual effort and minimizing scheduling errors.

This health engagement provider deployed a customized platform that allowed its staff to match individual patients to specialist team members, greatly reducing downtime.

This renowned university has seen a dramatic increase in output with manual tasks being eliminated across all departments, from management to specialist employee positions.

This National Bank’s implementation of SUMO Scheduler allowed customers to schedule appointments with advisors at their convenience, increasing efficiency and positively affecting revenue.

Join these and 100s of other businesses that have utilized SUMO Scheduler’s secure, reliable, and game-changing scheduling platform.

Book your free demo to learn more about SUMO Scheduler, and take your business to the next level in 2024.

Leverage Salesforce flow automation to reduce sales rep workload & facilitate your company’s sales process

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

The role of the modern Salesforce administrator has evolved to encompass a broad set of responsibilities. Today’s admin is expected to collaborate with sales and marketing leadership to optimize technologies and processes that drive revenue growth, improve customer experience and ensure data integrity. To do so, they must have a deep understanding of their business’s go-to-market processes, customer needs, and the software technologies that turn company strategy into action.

In this article, we will explore the importance of modern Salesforce administrators and how they can leverage Salesforce automation alongside native applications to foster improved customer engagement, drive team collaboration and improve data management.

1. Email Automation: Automate Customer Engagement & Calls to Action

Automated scheduling platforms have revolutionized the sales and support processes by streamlining appointment booking, reducing manual workload for sales and support teams and providing customers with convenient self-service options that enhance their experience.

Salesforce admins can help their businesses to drive sales process efficiency and velocity by leveraging tools such as SUMO Scheduler alongside Salesforce’s flows and email alert capabilities to automatically send appointment invitations to prospects and customers. Salesforce Flows can be written to control when the invite is sent based upon the completion of specific data fields on the contact record. This can be done by creating a trigger that monitors changes to relevant fields on the participant record and launches the flow.

By automating this process, you can ensure that potential customers are always given the opportunity to schedule an appointment when they are ready, without the need for manual intervention from your sales team. This can help to improve conversion rates and streamline the sales process, ultimately leading to more successful outcomes for your organization.

Examples of process improvements:

  • Record update triggers flow to send emails with an invite link.
  • Implement automation to route support tickets to the appropriate agents or teams based on their expertise or workload.
  • Set up automated processes to calculate and update opportunity forecast based on historical data and sales trends, etc.

2. Automated Subject Updates – Make Your Appointments Stand Out On Customers’ Calendars

Customer-facing meetings are the lifeblood of any sales and support rep’s business – Missed or canceled appointments directly impact their goals and bottom line. Fortunately, by leveraging simple Salesforce flows in conjunction with appointment scheduling automation, admins can help their customer-facing teams reduce cancellations and increase appointment participations.

One way to do this is by updating the appointment subject to include the participant’s name and phone number. This makes it easier for clients to identify important appointments with your team, ensuring that they remain top of mind. This is important because most clients use their external calendar as the source of truth, and updating the subject line with this information provides greater flexibility and transparency for both parties involved. This is especially important if the client is juggling multiple appointments and needs to quickly reference the details of each one.

Source: SUMO comes with many email templates out of the box that you can customize to fit your needs.

Updating the appointment subject line also takes into account any internal meetings that may be taking up the participant’s availability. By allowing for flexibility in scheduling, you can ensure that appointments are scheduled at a time that works for both the client and the participant, without the need for manual intervention.

At the same time, maintaining the meeting category within Salesforce allows you to keep accurate records and generate valuable insights into the sales process. You can still track the meeting category and other relevant data points within Salesforce, while ensuring that the end user doesn’t have to go to Salesforce to find the information they need.

Overall, updating the subject of the appointment to include the participant’s name and phone number while maintaining the meeting category within Salesforce is a powerful way to optimize your sales process and improve the end user experience. By providing accurate and efficient reporting while also personalizing the meeting experience, you can drive greater success for your organization and strengthen relationships with potential customers.

3. Using A Different Email Field

As a Salesforce admin, you understand that every customer has unique needs and requirements, and that flexibility is key when it comes to meeting those needs. That’s why the ability to use a different email field other than the standard Salesforce email field is a powerful tool for admins.

First, it allows Salesforce admins to provide greater customization for their clients and a more personalized experience that meets their specific needs.
For example, a client may want to use a specific email field for regulatory compliance or to meet internal company policies.

Second, it can help to improve the accuracy of notification delivery.
Sometimes, the standard Salesforce email field may not be the most accurate or up-to-date source of contact information for a participant. By allowing clients to choose a different email field for notifications, admins can ensure that notifications are delivered to the most accurate and up-to-date email address.

Source: Salesforce allows you to define and manage email addresses that can be used as the “from address” when sending an email through Salesforce.

Third, it can help to improve efficiency and automation.
By automating the process of selecting the appropriate email field for notifications, Salesforce admins can save time and reduce the risk of errors or manual input mistakes. For example, if a client wants to use a specific email field for notifications based on a certain set of criteria, this can be easily set up using flow automation, saving time and reducing the need for manual input.

Practical examples of the use of a different email field for notifications could include:

  • A client who wants to use a different email field for appointment notifications based on participant location, so that notifications are sent to a local email address.
  • A client who wants to use a different email field for appointment notifications based on the type of participant, such as a customer vs. a partner or vendor.
  • A client who wants to use a different email field for appointment notifications based on the type of appointment or meeting, such as a sales meeting vs. a training session.

Overall, the ability to use a different email field other than the standard Salesforce email field for SUMO Scheduler appointment notifications provides greater flexibility and customization for clients, improves accuracy and efficiency, and allows Salesforce admins to better meet the unique needs of their clients.

4. Automate lead creation in Salesforce when an appointment is booked

Leveraging a Salesforce native scheduling tool can help your sales team to automate the lead creation process and ensure that all prospect information and demographics are accurately captured in your CRM.

As soon as an appointment for service A is scheduled, the system will automatically generate a corresponding lead in Salesforce with all the relevant fields populated. It can save valuable time for both the sales rep and the admins while also ensuring that your sales org remains free of redundant contacts and data errors.

Let’s see some real Use Cases.

  • Medical Clinics:
    A medical clinic using Salesforce can integrate its appointment scheduling system with the CRM. When patients book appointments for specific services or treatments, a corresponding lead is automatically created in Salesforce. This lead can contain important patient information, appointment details, and the service required. This automation streamlines the patient onboarding process, reduces manual data entry for the clinic staff, and ensures accurate and up-to-date patient records.
  • Education Institutions:
    Educational organizations can use Salesforce to manage student admissions. When prospective students schedule appointments for campus tours or admissions consultations, the scheduling tool can trigger the creation of a lead in Salesforce. This lead can include the student’s contact information, academic interests, and appointment details. The automation helps admissions teams to efficiently track and manage prospective students, ensuring personalized interactions and a smoother enrollment process.
  • Financial Services:
    Financial institutions can leverage Salesforce to automate lead creation when clients request consultations or financial advice. When clients schedule appointments with financial advisors through an online scheduling tool, a lead is automatically generated in Salesforce with relevant client information and appointment details. This automation allows financial advisors to have a complete view of client interactions, track follow-ups, and provide personalized financial advice.

By automating lead creation in Salesforce when appointments are booked, businesses across various industries can enhance their sales processes, improve customer experience, and optimize their CRM data management.

In conclusion, automated scheduling flows on Salesforce can be used to make work more simple and reliable, especially when it is used with the automated online scheduling application SUMO Scheduler. The combination of these two tools provides a seamless and efficient scheduling process that saves time, reduces errors, and improves customer satisfaction. Businesses that want to streamline their scheduling process and improve their performance should consider using automated scheduling flows on Salesforce with SUMO Scheduler.

By embracing automation, Salesforce administrators can drive significant improvements in efficiency, productivity, and overall business performance. So why wait? Join the automation revolution today and take your sales team to the next level!

SUMO offers GDPR-compliance tools

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is a new European Union law took effect May 25, 2018. The GDPR gives persons in the EU greater control over their online data and adds new requirements for businesses that handle that data.

Does SUMO Scheduler comply with GDPR?

Yes, SUMO has taken a number of steps to ensure we are able to comply with the GDPR regulations. We have updated our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, created a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) and made changes to how we store and process data. As an interpretation of the GDPR regulations continues to evolve, we will continue implementing new practices and tools as needed to ensure continued compliance.

Does SUMO Scheduler allow clients to comply with GDPR?

Yes, SUMO has tools to allow customers to comply with the GDPR. This feature allows customers to display their own Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policies. SUMO also provides users with the tools necessary to delete client data upon request, or to provide customers with copies of their data, or to comply with a client’s data portability request. SUMO clients can query all appointment data relating to a particular appointment. Client data deletion requests can be made by emailing support@sumoscheduler.com and including in the request the names of all persons whose data should be deleted.

However, the determination of whether you’re impacted by the GDPR and what steps you must take to comply is ultimately up to you. This includes how you configure and use your SUMO account, the data you choose to collect from your customers, and other issues. Your company is ultimately responsible for upholding your obligations under the GDPR and SUMO Scheduler is not responsible for your lack of compliance or misuse of the software.

How can my organization use SUMO Scheduler in a GDPR-compliant manner?

SUMO customers who are subject to the GDPR will need to make some changes to the way they use our system. Step-by-step instructions about how to use SUMO in a compliant manner can be found here. SUMO users are also responsible for upholding their obligations under our Terms of Service and Data Processing Addendum (DPA).

Salesforce AppExchange Recommends these 9 Apps to Crush Your Goals

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

The Salesforce AppExchange is a veritable treasure trove of business applications. As the world’s largest application marketplace for businesses, every application listed endeavors to help companies further improve the functionality of their Salesforce accounts and their reach to their customers.

However, with over 3,000 apps, it can be a little hard to keep up with everything that happens on the AppExchange. Fortunately, the AppExchange team has a helpful resource available to all partners and customers. One of the ways you can keep in the know is by accessing articles on the Ohana page of the AppExchange.

Delivering an assortment of content and information, Ohana has something for everyone.

Last week SUMO scheduler, along with 8 other Salesforce applications, was included in an Editor’s PIck listing of apps that can help you and your team not only end your year with a bang but also set your business on the path to nailing your 2018 goals.

Check it out here: Close 2017 Strong with These 9 Apps

Cloud Native vs. Cloud Enabled SaaS and Why It Matters

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Before we get down to it, let’s start with a basic explanation of the terms SaaS and Cloud-native.

SaaS (software as a service) is a software distribution model. Companies purchase a subscription to a software application that is hosted or managed in the cloud rather than buying the software outright and installing it on their own hardware. SaaS is one of the three top cloud computing categories, along with IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service). SaaS is also referred to as web-based or on-demand software.

A cloud-native application is developed to be used on a particular platform or device. These type of apps are entirely built in the cloud which is why they are also referred to as cloud-native. Non-native apps are built outside the cloud then transferred over into one. They are also known as cloud-enabled applications.

Now let’s work through a few pros and cons to decide what’s so great about a SaaS app being native (cloud-native). There are a few cons to using a native app and here is a list that we think will help inform you about the key points and allow you to decide if a native app is the best choice for your organization.

Pros of Using a Cloud Native SaaS App

User Experience: This is perhaps the thing that native apps do best. The operations are smoother and provide a more intuitive experience for users accustomed to the functionality of a particular platform.

Speed: Native apps are inherently faster. This affects implementation and data retrieval which in turn affects productivity levels. Everything lives within the app itself so there is no dependency on browsers or internet speeds to keep things moving along quickly.

Data Access: Native apps tap into a platform more easily than a non-native app. Since data is retained in one place, there’s no need to have a request leave the platform to retrieve information being housed in another location outside the platform.

Scale: By being built in the cloud from the ground up, a native app doesn’t have any hardware limitations. This allows for continuous app development which means the application is more scalable, more adaptable to your business’ needs. The savings on hardware and software maintenance can also be significant.

For example, SUMO Scheduler is an online appointment scheduler built native on the Salesforce platform. This means the application can easily be implemented into an organization’s Salesforce org. Being a native application, SUMO allows users to interact with Salesforce’s many features and affords the same security parameters. It creates a seamless Salesforce experience that is highly customizable to your organization’s requirements and business processes.

Cons of Using a Cloud Native SaaS App

Platform: Native apps only live on the platform they are designed for and moving information between platforms requires integration.

Cost: There certainly are native apps that are free to install and use. However, most of these apps are not capable of supporting an enterprise level organization. Technical support is also not a given with even documentation not being available to reference. The other potential cost could be in the form of licenses and other fees that may be associated with implementation.

The cons are certainly shorter than the pros list but this does not mean the cons are not worth considering. Having the right personnel in place within your company to manage the app from implementation to daily use can help mitigate any potential issues. As for the costs involved, an enterprise-level application is generally an investment that provides tangible returns quite readily within a short period of time.

If you are operating a department within a large enterprise or foresee a significant growth spurt coming down the road for your area of the business, then a native application may be the best choice. It delivers a more cost-effective alternative to a traditional software purchase, allows your organization to respond to marketplace changes and capture new business opportunities much more quickly.

3 Answers to Your Appointment Scheduling Automation Objections

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Scheduling appointments are common tasks in any organization but an efficient method of managing this process is essential for profitability and productivity. While traditional methods have evolved over time, they do present many drawbacks. Automated systems have innovated to address those issues, and go a step beyond in providing scheduling solutions that can easily improve upon current practices. While investing in a new application or platform can be a cause for concern, the risks experienced when not implementing such solutions are far greater.

My staff can schedule their own appointments.

The average sales rep spent up to 4 hours per day sending email, following up on calls, sending faxes, and other admin which can be reduced using templates and automation. Source: Insidesales

Scheduling an appointment is simple, right? Much as you’d like to believe otherwise, scheduling an appointment is cumbersome and typically takes multiple phone conversations and/or email exchanges before one is finalized. It’s not always the best use of your staff’s time either. Your people could be focusing on closing deals, providing support or services, and adding to the organization’s bottom line, not taking away from it. With appointment automation scheduling, steps are set in motion for reminders heading out prior to appointment, a ready history is captured for any follow-ups and reports can be generated for management or available documents for reference without the drudgery of scrolling through past correspondence. A lot of time can be saved with an appointment scheduling application, and you will also observe monetary savings since staff is now more involved in their primary responsibilities.

We’re winning customers without it.

There is a 10x drop in lead qualification when you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond, and a 400% decrease when you respond within 10 minutes versus 5 minutes. Source: Harvard Business Review

No deal ever came from an unqualified appointment. Scheduling software can help your conversion rates, customer satisfaction and churn. When you trade manual processes for automated scheduling, you can deliver a better customer experience. Greater flexibility and convenience is a given since automated scheduling can be available on your lead or customer’s schedule, not just during your business hours. When you make it a part of your sales campaigns, it can also speed up your sales cycle. Appointment requests are delivered immediately to your calendar, and the quality of the lead is highly increased. Automating scheduling reduces errors like double-bookings and no-shows, ultimately cutting down on all the back and forth of calls and emails that a traditional appointment scheduling method entails.

Our data may not be secure with an external application.

40% of salespeople still use informal means such as Microsoft Excel or Outlook to store its lead and customer data. Source: Hubspot

Manual scheduling cannot provide the sense of professionalism and a greater guarantee of security like an automated appointment scheduling application. Go with a native application and you can have the added benefit of your data staying within the same scheduling system, retained in one place for easy retrieval time and again. No client wants to work with an enterprise that has lost, or worse, mistakenly shared, information that is intended solely for the parties involved.

There are many appointment scheduling application vendors in the market and each has a different purpose/ value proposition. If you are looking to engage a service, the first step is to identify your objective and qualification criteria. Do your research on scheduling solutions, take the time to ask a lot of questions, and choose the scheduling system that best fits your organization’s particular needs. You will find one that can address the workload you demand of it, will integrate with your current software and processes, and can be easily navigated for your industry, staff and clients.

The tangible and non-tangible return on your organization’s investment in an appointment scheduling application can be immediately measured. You won’t be disappointed by the outcome.

Evaluating a Cloud Application in Four Steps

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

SaaS applications, also known as web-based, on-demand or hosted software, are growing in scope and adoption. They help enterprises get things done efficiently and competitively. There are, however, choices aplenty in the marketplace, so it is in your best interest to choose the right application for your organization.

One study states public cloud platforms, business services, and applications (software-as-a-service [SaaS]) will grow at a 22 percent CAGR between 2015 and 2020, reaching $236B. The much larger cloud application market will also grow faster, with the 2020 total of $155B being 17 percent higher than their 2014 projection!*

Better get well acquainted then with the cloud applications available – prepare for the four main areas that are generally a concern in terms of adoption:

IMPLEMENTATION – Making the move

Many Fortune 500 companies are willing to pay for a familiar cloud-based CRM app like Salesforce. Migration to other tried and true systems, like email or ERP, to the cloud is also an easy choice. But it’s adopting a new cloud application that tends to be a hard decision. Understandably so. Change is always accompanied by apprehension. This is where the innovation that cloud applications have been bringing to the marketplace, combined with user demand, plays a role in the decision-making process. Your C-suite needs to see how the business can evolve from the inside out. Cloud applications built into an intentional strategy can serve the needs of an organization’s workforce and its corporate requirements.

MANAGEMENT – Ready to play

Who is going to manage your applications, from overseeing the installation to the everyday activities like training, bugs and renewals? A couple of stakeholders are involved in this area. Even before you can think of the applications you will use, you need to cultivate the workforce that will account for its smooth functioning before, during and after adoption. You’ve made the investment in researching your options so you know the application you’ve chosen not only is a fit for your use case, but you’ve also confirmed it comes with enterprise-level training, security and support. Now it’s important to ensure that the internal team is in place as well. More often than not, the barriers to adoption rest in the lack of skilled human resources to facilitate the process.

SECURITY – Locking it down

Security today, while still a topic for discussion, is not as great a concern for enterprise companies as it used to be when cloud technology was still relatively new. Sacrificing innovation and being able to compete in the marketplace is perhaps a greater fear. Security parameters are built into applications and the cloud, so a thorough review of privacy, reliability, infrastructure, supports and standards is warranted. But the other review that you should not overlook is internal. Remember that AWS shutdown earlier this year? The effect of that simple command typo by an employee was a critical error experienced worldwide. Be aware of potential errors that could occur and have checks and balances in place to address those issues should they arise.

SPEND – But first you gotta pay!

When you are accountable for a departmental budget, a free version of an application is always more appealing than a pay-to-play option. The temptation to do more with less is enticing, and might even pose an exciting challenge. The problem with this scenario though is the free version often does not live up to your expectations. These freebies are typically built with a ‘one size fits all’ outlook and tend to lack the level of security and technical support that is necessary at the enterprise level. If the free version of the application does not implement easily with existing systems, then management and compliance are also not guaranteed. Before you invest financially, invest in the research to understand the applications available and their value to your enterprise.

Having a plan to navigate the options available is crucial, and a list of requirements is a good starting point. Keeping these in mind, you can narrow down the choices that cater to your enterprise’s specific needs while addressing any concerns in these above-mentioned areas. A failure to plan can cost you time, and money, and let’s not forget the sleepless nights trying to THEN find the right solution.

*Source: The Public Cloud Services Market Will Grow Rapidly To $236 Billion In 2020.

Why is a Native Application so important?

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

SUMO is the only online scheduling solution built 100% native on the Salesforce® platform, which we firmly believe has serious advantages you should consider. This article aims to outline:

  • What is a native, false native, and non-native application?
  • What are the risks of a solution that is not native?
  • What are the benefits of native?

Native

This means the app runs on the same the platform you are using. You have access to a data warehouse in the cloud that you can access with business intelligence software running as a service. It’s a plug and play set-up so no additional work or expense is required, outside of the native setup.

False Native

This is why you really need to dig into the back-end. There are applications that can be labeled native but are actually not built 100% native on the Salesforce® platform. With a false native application, there’s only a percentage of the app you are using to access your data that is claiming to be built native on a platform. In this scenario, native is a misleading label.

Non-Native

Your data gets shipped in and out your Salesforce® org to your non-native solution as it lives outside of the Salesforce® platform. There is also additional setup and assembly required in a non-native solution.

Risks of False-Native -and- Non-Native Apps

There are a number of risks you inherit when adopting a false-native or non-native scheduling solution. You should investigate the following:

1. Data Privacy, Security, & Speed Risk

Is your data 100% stored, processed, administrated, and accessed in Salesforce®?
A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution means your data does NOT fully live in Salesforce®. This type of app provides a user interface in Salesforce, but your data may be stored, processed, administrated, and / or accessed in another system. This poses a data privacy, data security, and data speed risk.

2. Compliance Risk

A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution means your security is compromised and the solution does not inherit the Salesforce® platform comprehensive privacy and security assessments and certifications performed by multiple third parties.

3. Administration Risk

Can your Salesforce® Administrator operate 100% of the necessary configurations from within Salesforce®?

A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution requires you to make some configurations in Salesforce® and login to another system to make other configurations, so now your staff must manage the application in two places. This also poses a security risk, since the application does not rely on Salesforce user provisioning, profile, and sharing controls. Worse yet, some require you to file a case to make configuration changes and you can not even make them yourself.

4. User Adoption Risk

Does the user interface look exactly like Salesforce®?

A FALSE NATIVE or NON-NATIVE solution often means the application is embedded inside of Salesforce®, but does not have the same Salesforce® Classic or Lightning look and feel, which confused the users, hurting user adoption.

Benefits of Native

Now that you understand the risks in adopting a false-native or non-native solution, it’s easy to understand the benefits of using a truly Salesforce® NATIVE application:

1. Your data is SECURE.

A native app has a single data location: the Salesforce® cloud. The Salesforce® platform employs bank grade security with SAS70 compliance. Sharing one location with Salesforce® means you have full control to ensure your customer info and appointment data reside in the cloud. The need to connect to a 3rd party API to access your data is eliminated, so data loss between databases is avoided. Native applications use the same Salesforce security model, eliminating the need to manage multiple security policies and procedures across enterprise systems.

2. Your data is PRIVATE.

Since your data resides in one database (Salesforce®), your data is private and you have full control of it. You may learn more about how SUMO offers GDPR Compliance Tools here.

3. Accessing your data is lightning FAST.

This single data source solution also helps increase the speed of accessing data or generating reports because there is no delay from the data making trips back and forth from the database.

4. Your data is always up and running.

Salesforce® has invested over a $100,000,000 into their cloud infrastructure, making it geographically distributed, monitored 24/7, and ultimately enabling true 99.9% uptime. As a native salesforce platform application, our applications (and your data) inherit all the benefits of the considerable investments made by salesforce.com in infrastructure, data management, controls, security and certifications including Truste and ISO 27001.

5. A native app leverages your investment in Salesforce®.

Installing updates and upgrades is minimal, because they are all completed in one place, instantly available through a native application. It’s easy to integrate them as they are all built on Salesforce®.

6. Administration is immediate.

Your Salesforce Administrator or IT Department can easily administrate a native solution, since all of the user and application settings are in Salesforce.

7. User adoption is assured.

Your new software investment is worthless if the users do not adopt it. A native solution should run 100% inside the Salesforce solutions (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Console, Communities, and more) and looks exactly like Salesforce, so user adoption is not a risk.

In closing, the above key points, along with the structure of the application, are important things to consider as you look for tools to help add value to your organization or your Salesforce® investment.

No-shows cost health care system billions

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Things had gotten so bad at the Bronx veterans hospital that doctors were, in effect, begging their patients to show up as scheduled.

Three years ago, the James J. Peters VA Medical Center began a “Don’t Be A No-Show” campaign, reminding veterans of the importance of keeping appointments.

The campaign explained the detrimental effect on everyone — not just surgeons and clinical staff, but also fellow veterans — when a patient skips an appointment without canceling.

“It means one less patient will see the doctor and it means someone waiting for an appointment was bumped to another day needlessly,” said Bronx VA spokesman James E. Connell III. “It’s not good for the patient, and it’s an inefficient use of clinical resources.”

Such inefficiency, by one account, costs the U.S. health-care system more than $150 billion a year. And while it’s easy to point the finger at the chronic no-shows, a growing body of research suggests clinics themselves are as much to blame because of scheduling and other issues.

The problem is particularly acute at urban hospitals and smaller specialty clinics with low patient volume. While pediatric clinics might see a no-show rate of below 5 percent, urban family clinics often see no-show rates between 10 and 20 percent.

And certain outpatient and surgical clinics — think colonoscopies, endoscopies, pulmonary tests and other procedures that require special prep or diets by the patient — have even higher rates. In a given week, a 50 percent no-show rate — while quite high — isn’t unheard of at some specialty clinics.

“It’s really a flip of a coin whether they show up or not,” said Patricia Alafaireet, director of applied health informatics at the University of Missouri.

Built into the cost of care

That sort of uncertainty might kill off a restaurant, a hair salon, an auto mechanic and pretty much any other appointment-based business model.

Within medicine, it’s all part of the game — and built into the cost of care for the rest of us. Those who skip regular appointments often end up needing more costly emergency care down the road.

“It differs very widely by practice type,” said Kevin Bennett, associate professor at the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.

The family medicine practice where he works — which is somewhat like a primary care practice, except that as a teaching institution it has regular faculty as well as residents who rotate through infrequently — has a no-show rate that fluctuates from month to month, even from year to year, as is the case with many clinics.

“We’d gotten it down to 10 percent” a few years ago, Mr. Bennett said. Now, it’s up to 15 percent. “In a bad month, it creeps closer to 20.”

That jump, he said, demonstrates the culpability of the clinic in creating — or at least, not fully managing — the no-show problem. After all, it’s not as if the practice’s patient population started forgetting its medical appointments at higher rates for no good reason.

Instead, in the case of the family medicine practice, a switch to a new electronic medical record system — complete with a new appointment system — drove up the rates. “We’re getting operationally back up to speed,” Mr. Bennett said, after a 12- to 15-month “loss of productivity.”

Why does a booking system matter so much? Lots of experts point to poor scheduling as a top culprit in creating no-shows. Some clinics, for example, book appointments on a rolling basis, one open slot after another.

But if you book a patient for an 8:30 a.m. Monday appointment without checking the patient’s preferences, there’s a good chance that appointment will be skipped. And if you schedule a patient’s follow-up appointment for six months down the road or with an unfamiliar physician (which happens often at teaching institutions with young doctors), expect a similar result.

Life’s complications often prevent a patient from showing up in the first place, said Ms. Alafaireet, of the University of Missouri.

It’s not about ‘bad people’

It’s important to get away from assuming that no-shows are bad people or bad patients, she said. “Typically that’s not the case — it’s a set of circumstances,” including a clinic’s scheduling process, the nature of the appointment, the patient’s related health issues, even issues like transit.

She doesn’t like the term “no-show,” either, suggesting it places too much blame at the feet of the patient. The clinical phraseology for a missed appointment is “treatment non-adherence,” while some docs refer to no-shows more casually as “dinks” (as in, “Did Not Keep” the appointment).

Patients most likely to miss appointments are those who are single, under the age of 34, carrying Medicaid insurance (or no insurance at all), as well as older patients recently divorced or widowed. By varying accounts, men and minorities are more likely not to show up, but other studies suggest gender and race have little bearing on no-show rates. (One study said that “racial differences in no-show rates are likely to be proxies for disparities associated with access to a telephone and convenient transportation.”)

And those living far away from the clinic or hospital where their next appointment is scheduled — 60 miles away or more — are a safe no-show bet.

That’s why it’s important to take special care with those populations when it comes to scheduling, experts believe. In analyses done by Ms. Alafaireet and her colleagues, research showed clinic schedulers control as much as one-third of the probability relating to whether a patient will show.

At her Missouri outpatient psychiatric clinic, some fixes were obvious, Ms. Alafaireet said. For example, public transit in the region shuts down early, so it didn’t make sense to schedule Medicaid patients — who are more likely to rely on transit — late in the afternoon.

Other clinics use historical data and predictive modeling to overbook the clinic (a clinic that tries to see 100 patients a day, with a 15 percent no-show rate on Fridays, might schedule 117 patients). Still others try to reserve a window of time each day for walk-ins and short-notice appointments, so that people who missed their visit can make it up quickly.

Follow-up is important, too, especially for far-off appointments. A reminder postcard helps, an automated phone call helps a bit more and a personal phone call a few days before the appointment helps most of all.

A study published in the American Journal of Medicine in 2010 reported that, at a multidiscipline clinic in New Jersey, the no-show rate was 23.1 percent for those who received no reminder, 17.3 percent for those receiving an automated appointment reminder and 13.6 percent if a staff member made a call.

But human calls can be unreliable on the clinic end because on extremely busy days the staff has little time to make them. Robocall services never take a day off, and they cost less.

Generally, studies agree that reminders work better than punitive measures. Charging patients for missed appointments hasn’t proven to be much of a help. Some practices do it to remind patients that their provider’s time is valuable and to make up for a bit of the lost billing revenue.

“Is it really worth it to go after 20 bucks?” asked Brandon Betancourt, practice manager at Salud Pediatrics in suburban Chicago. “In order to really make up for that open slot, you’d have to charge $150 or $200. So what’s the message?”

The message, he noted, may differ from practice to practice. Pediatric clinics are high-volume — each physician at Salud sees 25 to 28 kids a day and the no-show rate is less than 4 percent. But at a specialty surgical clinic, “If you only see four or five patients, and two of them no-show, then that’s a problem.”

Meanwhile, at high-volume clinics, a missed appointment — while it is an opportunity-cost money-loser — gives doctors a chance to catch up on paperwork, check lab results or spend a few extra minutes with patients who have shown up.

Telling a patient: ‘You’re fired’

The most drastic step a clinic can take with a chronic no-show is “firing” the patient. Mr. Bennett, at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, said his practice dismisses a few patients each year, and Mr. Betancourt said the same.

But that’s a short-term fix, Ms. Alafaireet said.

“The issue with firing a patient [is] that patient doesn’t go away. They just show up later, some place in the health care continuum, and the condition is more acute,” she said.

Focusing efforts on populations more likely to miss appointments makes sense, something the Highmark Foundation in Pittsburgh is doing as it teams with Accenture, a global management and outsourcing consultancy, to build “patient navigation” pilot programs at St. Vincent Health System in Erie and Allegheny Valley Hospital Natrona Heights.

The program trains community members to connect with patients in high-risk communities, guiding them through the health care labyrinth, educating them, preparing them for procedures, even arranging transportation.

“The heart of this is really about enabling access,” said Jean-Pierre Stephan, director of Accenture’s health consumer and services strategy unit in Pittsburgh. “The underserved have barriers to access that typically aren’t dealt with” in the traditional health care model.

The field of patient navigation is about much more than minimizing no-show rates, but that’s among the intended byproducts. One goal is getting patients to show up at their primary care appointments and screenings in the first place because doing that decreases inpatient hospital admissions and emergency room visits, according to Accenture.

Part of the goal, too, is to recruit new patients. While the navigation services are pro bono (and will be paid for using a $254,500 grant from the Highmark Foundation), the new patients — and, in theory, the reduced no-shows — present an opportunity for increased health system revenue.

“Patient navigation is one tool that can help providers ensure that [revenue] isn’t lost when patients unexpectedly miss appointments,” according to a 2012 report from The Center for Health Affairs in Ohio.

Which takes us back to the Bronx.

At the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, a 347-bed public hospital, the diverse, low-income patient base manifested itself in chronic no-shows, across specialties. But navigators working with the patients in the colorectal oncology unit helped drive down the no-show rate for colonoscopy appointments from 67 percent to 10 percent.

And the number of colonoscopies conducted annually grew from 774 to 3,000 over a three-year period, a dramatic increase in the procedure that helps check patients for colon cancer and pre-cancer, and is considered a vital health screening for people over 50.

That sort of upswing illustrates that cutting no-show rates isn’t just about lost revenue. “There are very real quality of life issues here,” Ms. Alafaireet said. “We’ve got to get these folks in.”

SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette