Balancing Compliance and Customer Experience
One of the strongest drivers of customer loyalty in healthcare is brand name recognition. A known brand with a strong reputation builds trust and communicates to patients that they’ll receive quality care. Brand reputation also helps recruit the most qualified physicians and incentivizes payors to include your organization in their network because plan members want care from brands they recognize.
Conversely, when brand recognition isn’t strong, it has the opposite effect—it can reduce trust and negatively impact the customer experience. This is why brand compliance is so critical. In a survey by Edleman, 81% of consumers said trust was the deciding factor in their decision to buy from a brand.
Protecting the brand, which includes ensuring the message, voice, tone, and design remain consistent, is tough, especially at large healthcare organizations where many teams create and publish branded assets. Not surprisingly, 81% of companies say they deal with off-brand content.
Even if you do have good brand compliance, you might still struggle to manage the approval process efficiently. Only 21% of content requests are fulfilled in one day, according to a State of Brand Consistency report by LucidPress.
If these issues sound familiar, here are three ways you can maintain strong brand compliance while still ensuring that you’re able to deliver high-quality customer experiences in a timely manner.
1. Create Brand Guidelines
According to the State of Brand Consistency report, only 31% of organizations say their brand guidelines are well-known and used by the entire organization. If your organization hasn’t already established and documented your brand guidelines, that should be at the top of your brand compliance to-do list.
You’ll need to clarify and create guidelines for items such as:
- Logo use
- Color palette
- Design
- Fonts/typography
- Writing style, tone, voice • Photography, video
Include a description of what defines your organization’s brand so that if something isn’t included in the guide, anyone using your guidelines—whether a creative, reviewer, or approver—will have a sense of direction based on the overarching identity.
Your guidelines will likely also include things your brand will never say or do. For example, a managed healthcare organization may choose to always refer to its customer base as “members” instead of “customers.”
2. Use Templates
In addition to having guidelines, templates help standardize processes and track all the steps necessary to ensure brand compliance. Content creation templates can help standardize items like the brand logo, colors and fonts, but allow others to modify the content itself. Workflow templates can also help by including information about the review and approval process, such as a reviewer’s checklist, timelines for reviews, and how to submit feedback.
Templates prevent missed steps and inaccuracies because they are all set out in advance. Automating template use also saves time and ensures the right template is applied every time.
3. Streamline the Approval Process
One of the biggest bottlenecks around brand compliance is the review and approval process. Moreover, if there isn’t good version tracking in place, version confusion can happen, which inadvertently leads to publishing the wrong version, which may not comply with the brand guidelines.
Digital proofing software is the best way to ensure a smooth and efficient review and approval process. It consolidates all feedback and provides version control. This is especially useful for healthcare marketing teams with a tremendous amount of digital content to manage.
Better Compliance Equals a Better Customer Experience
Healthcare marketers have a lot of branding and legal considerations to keep track of when creating marketing collateral—and brand compliance can feel like a full-time job. But, if you put the right processes in place and have the right technology to help you manage those processes, ensuring compliance can become almost automatic.
Adobe Workfront is a cloud-based work management platform that helps support brand compliance processes. Adobe Workfront allows you to store all assets in a centralized location and streamlines the review and approval process through automated workflows, centralized feedback with a reliable audit trail and strong version control.
Moreover, when integrated with Adobe Experience Manager, marketers can manage both their workflow and the process of creating and delivering experiences all from a single
tool. With an intuitive interface, Adobe Experience Manager makes it easy for marketers to develop and deliver content to any channel or device without needing IT support. It also helps with brand compliance by allowing marketers to create, edit, and re-use templates across multiple sites. As a result, marketers can get more brand-compliant content out the door faster, which helps improve the customer experience.
About LeapPoint
LeapPoint Consulting is changing the way companies connect work, technology, and talent to solve big business challenges and drive successful outcomes. Established by Big 4 alumni who sought more flexibility and agility in meeting clients’ most critical business needs, LeapPoint is committed to making life and experiences fundamentally better for employees, customers and those they serve. As the go-to Adobe and Adobe Workfront partner in healthcare and across industries, LeapPoint’s break-through Connected WorkTM services are the essential framework for the Future of Work. To learn more about LeapPoint and its Connected Work services, visit www.leappoint.com.
