When the team at Bright Health noticed that something was lacking in the process behind their sales system, the decision to build a proprietary customer relationship management system was made that much easier. But in their pursuit, they also realized how such a tool could feed into their mission of making the healthcare system better and simplifying the way patients connect to and afford their care.
Although CRM technology is traditionally seen as a functional database that builds a foundation for the relationship a company’s sales team has with their customers, what if teams like Bright Health’s considered how to create their own tools to make a bigger impact?
Andy Mao explained that one of the guiding lights in the process of designing their new pipeline pointed to thinking differently. “A custom CRM gives us the ability to break the mold and explore new avenues for getting the job done,” he shared. The most important element of all was keeping the company’s long-term mission to improve existing healthcare systems in mind.
This may sound like a tall order, but with the support of stakeholders and internal teams across the business, Bright Health found their CRM solution rather quickly. Built In Austin spoke with Mao about the CRM pipeline tool he and his team built. We learned about the issues that led them to design this tool and the lessons that were brought to light along the way.
How did you identify the need to build something new in-house? What was the main issue you were looking to solve?
The choice to build our own proprietary CRM was driven by three main needs. First, there was the business need to improve legacy behavior and make things more efficient. The CRM needed to not only be flexible enough to accommodate our use cases, but also be able to interface with many predecessor systems. Second, Bright has a mission to do things differently and make improvements over existing healthcare systems. A custom CRM gives us the ability to break the mold and explore new avenues for getting the job done. Lastly, we needed speed. We needed a solution that was customizable, but also easy to spin up quickly.
What did the timeline look like? Which stakeholders were involved, and how did you focus on creating the outcomes needed to solve the issues you’d identified?
Our CRM solutions stood up very rapidly. Our first application went live about four months after inception. On our first-year anniversary, we had five applications live and serving different business teams. Our stakeholders included our sales teams, network development teams and operational support teams. We relied on a strong partnership between product, engineering and our business stakeholders to prioritize work.
It is too easy to focus on a specific implementation and forget how components need to work together and operate in the future.”
What did you learn from the process, and what advice would you give others looking to create their own software solutions to common sales technology problems?
The biggest lessons learned revolve around obtaining a clear vision about where the solution will go long term — topics like modeling cross-application behavior, data entities, security and general user experience must always take the big picture into consideration. It is too easy to focus on a specific implementation and forget how components need to work together and operate in the future. Poor planning and architecture can lead to maintenance and administrative nightmares. You can also implement a solution that requires significant refactoring or worse yet, a complete rewrite.
