Luma Health + Zendesk: Healthcare communication in a new world

The events of 2020 turned the exchange of fast, accurate information between healthcare providers and patients into a global imperative, with unprecedented volume and urgency. Luma Health’s platform was ready to meet the new challenges. At major hospitals, local clinics, and community health organizations, Luma Health met the soaring demand for critical communication with patients.

Luma Health was founded on the principle that healthcare should be simple, seamless, and effective at every point of the patient’s care journey. Its digital health platform boosts access, streamline communication, and drives increased revenues—without the need for additional health system staff.

With personal, accurate, timely communication at the center of its business, Luma Health needed a platform for customers that could offer customer communication to that same standard. The company’s leadership saw an opportunity to turn a disjointed set of customer communication tools into a cohesive, efficient customer service platform that would offer visibility across the organization, as well as higher customer satisfaction.

They made the transition just in time. The health crisis of 2020 called for big innovations in the health tech industry, and Luma Health was ready to meet the new challenges with help from Zendesk.

Meeting new challenges

Operating in the healthcare space, with the range of customers that Luma Health supports, brings a unique set of challenges. Their platform needs to ensure compliance and data safety at all times, and customers need to be prepared for changes to the platform. However, the diversity in their customer base makes it difficult to streamline communication.

Kristina Kemp, Director of Customer Success at Luma Health, explained, “Being in the unique space of healthcare, It’s not like working in other platform apps where you can push releases and people just adapt. There are operational practices set up for end-to-end patient care, and even the smallest enhancements can have a really big impact,” she said. “We can build the best product in the world, but if people don’t know how to use it in their workflows, then we’ve failed.”

Luma Health supports a diverse set of customer needs—from the smallest clinics who might have few IT resources to the largest hospitals looking for customization and best practices. Each customer needs clear, effective communication, no matter where they fall on this spectrum.

As the company grew, Luma Health needed a way to maintain differentiated, personalized support at scale, with a limited-resource team. Zendesk helped them streamline their customer communication. “Zendesk is a HIPAA-compliant platform that expedited our workflows a lot. We don’t need external tools anymore to provide data or get data from customers. We can now do everything directly in Zendesk,” said Leo Magalhaes, Lead Technical Support Engineer at Luma Health.

Bringing it all together

Luma Health became a Zendesk customer in 2017, but in 2020, the company took a holistic look at its support infrastructure and how it served the needs of the growing business. Luma Health optimized its use of Zendesk— updated workflows, automated more tasks, and launched the Zendesk community forum.

“We found we had different systems running behind the scenes, and they weren’t in sync,” Kemp said. “But recently, we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from both Luma staff and our customers that communication feels more like a seamless experience.”

Magalhaes added, “The most important thing the customer needs is to feel assisted very quickly, and Zendesk provides the tools we need for that. For instance, we automated escalations through Slack, which helps us resolve tickets faster. It keeps them from getting reassigned a bunch of times as we’re collaborating.”

Luma Health also uses Zendesk to bridge the gap between customer service, product management, and customer requests with their community forum in Zendesk.

“It’s not sustainable for us anymore to have one-off product requests just come through the support team,” said Kemp. “The Zendesk community forum enables us to create visibility and transparency by posting our live roadmap, which fulfills our commitment to customers. It’s also become a place where customers bounce ideas off each other and network. It’s been really encouraging to see, and I’m excited about the future,” said Kemp.

Big results at a critical time

As Luma Health supported its customers throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and began expanding to larger customers with more complex needs, Zendesk helped the company reach its goals of better, more efficient communication with customers.

“As we’re starting to move upmarket, we’re expanding and we have more teams that work on resolving tickets. Zendesk gives us the visibility and transparency to track tickets, provide status updates, and have a more timely response,” Kemp said.

“Customer satisfaction and customer wait time are big KPIs that are important to us,” Magalhaes added. “With Zendesk, we’ve been able to increase our customer satisfaction by 5 points, and decrease our customer wait time by 30 percent.”

Despite resource constraints, Zendesk helped Luma Health scale to meet the 2020 demands of remote communication, both with Luma Health staff and onboarding customers. Efficient remote communication proved key when market and medical needs drove Luma Health to launch 3 new products very quickly, including a Covid-19 vaccine management solution that required hands-on implementation work with early adopters.

“Zendesk is indirectly helping our customers in Covid-19 vaccine distribution by streamlining customer communication. If there is a technical issue with appointment scheduling or wait lists, we can address it right away,” Kemp said.

As a growing business in unprecedented times, it would be easy to outgrow customer service solutions that worked at a different stage in the business. Instead, Luma Health found that Zendesk could be reworked and expanded to support that growth.

“When your business is growing pretty quickly, it’s a good idea to reevaluate your customer service processes and toolkit every six months to see if you’re meeting your customer needs—as well as making sure you get maximum value from your tools,” said Kemp. Zendesk is extremely easy to implement and it’s quick. It’s a no-brainer at the end of the day.”