About The Customer

A prominent, NABH-accredited multi-specialty hospital chain in South India with 12 hospitals, 2500+ beds, and an 8000+ strong workforce. Committed to providing high-quality medical care and patient-centric services, the hospital chain has established itself as a leader in specialized care areas such as cardiac sciences, organ transplantation, and emergency trauma care.

With centers of excellence in a wide range of specialties such as cardiology, orthopedics, neurology, oncology, urology, nephrology, gastroenterology, and more, the hospital chain is equipped with state-of-the-art medical technology and facilities.

It has a strong presence across tier 1 and tier 2 cities, making it a key player in providing world-class healthcare services in South India.

Background

The brand had excellent standing with consumers in the south and tremendous brand recall – they continue to invest in community building, promoting their doctors and procedures on popular media channels, including digital. Their website was detailed with specific landing pages for hospitals, doctors, and departments. 

However, one aspect they had overlooked was Google search for doctors & their ability to attract high-intent patients doing such searches to their hospital. Why is this significant? 

2 in 3 searches for healthcare services are hyperlocal, and over 70% of such searches are for a doctor, specialty, or condition. “Pediatrician near me,” “best gynecologist in Noida,” etc. More importantly, consumers doing these searches have an immediate need – 76% call, visit, or book an appointment within 24 hours. 

As part of our digital audit, we realized that they were ranking for branded searches but not for generic, high-intent hyperlocal doctor/specialty searches on Google. Why? Because they were missing out on the two primary drivers of hyperlocal search discovery: 

1. Having verified doctor profiles on Google for their doctors
2. Collecting Google reviews from patients consistently for these doctors

Typically, there are 2X-3X more hyperlocal doctor/specialty searches than branded searches. This meant that, at every location, they could not attract high-intent patients doing hyperlocal doctor searches, missing out on significant revenue opportunities.

Business Challenges

The hospital chain had a clear goal –  boost visibility and get more patients from hyperlocal doctor searches.  

Paid promotion was not an option – the Indian Medical Council expressly disallows ads for doctors. Winning the organic Local SEO game by creating verified doctor profiles on Google and collecting patient reviews regularly was essential to achieving this goal. 

Implementing this at scale across 10+ hospitals and 300+ doctors was a significant challenge, 

so Zceppa stepped in to help them. 

Solution

Once Zceppa got into the picture, our experts realized we needed a multi-pronged and multi-phased approach to solving this problem. We worked closely with their marketing team, creating a 3-phase solution – AAA – Audit, Automate, and Amplify.

Phase 1: Audit

Audit, create & optimize business profiles for doctors on Google with Zceppa Listings. Zceppa created all the doctor profiles, verified them, and ensured completeness & accuracy. This immediately made the doctors’ profiles searchable and visible on Google for relevant hyperlocal doctor/specialty searches.

Phase 2: Review Automation 

Once the doctor profiles were set up, collecting patient reviews manually proved difficult. Averaging less than 40 new reviews per month across 30 doctors is a testament to this challenge. 

To overcome this challenge, Zceppa enabled review automation for the 30 doctors spread across multiple hospitals. How did this work? Immediately after a meaningful interaction with a doctor (trigger event), the patient would receive a Whatsapp-based review invite to provide feedback on their interaction with that doctor. This was possible due to Zceppa Review API’s direct integration with the hospital’s Hospital Management System (HMS). 

Further, Zceppa’s Whatsapp integration and white-labeling features ensured that the patients received review invites from the hospital’s verified Whatsapp account (with a verified badge from Meta), and the feedback link had hospital branding. Both these enhanced trust and credibility among patients, resulting in higher open rates.  With this process, the 30+ doctors collectively got 400+ genuine new patient reviews on Google within 30 days of going live.

Phase 3:  Amplification of patient centricity with Smart Replies

Zceppa’s Smart Reply enabled the hospital chain to respond seamlessly to all new patient reviews across 30+ doctors. The Smart Reply feature ensured that replies to Google reviews from patients, while automated, stayed context-sensitive and meaningful. Negative reviews were flagged to the experienced team for triage and follow-up. This empowered the hospital’s marketing/experience teams to focus on issues that truly mattered.

Business Outcomes

30+ doctors who were part of the implementation had the following outcomes:

400+ New Google reviews – Within a month, the hospital could go from 0 to 400+ reviews for these doctor’s profiles.

3X more search views – Google Insights at the end of the month showed a 3 times increase in search views for these doctors

132% more inbound inquiries – The proof, however, was right in the pudding; the number of calls from the profiles increased dramatically.