"It's absolutely transformed our business"

Hanley Consulting, based in Hertfordshire, UK, is a specialist provider of digital solutions for the primary care sector. Founded in 2009 by Sharon Hanley, who has 20 years of primary care experience under her belt, Hanley Consulting know first-hand the tech problems faced by the NHS. "The mission is to enable healthcare organisations to deliver better care through more efficient use of their tools," says Sharon's son and Hanley Consulting's Digital Consultant, Max Gattlin.

Working with institutions across each tier of the NHS - from individual GP surgeries to ICBs (integrated care boards) - the health-tech firm improves patient and employee experience, communication, appointment access and operational efficiency through the use of superior technology. "We work at scale, reduce cost, and improve impact," adds Sharon.

When Max joined the business in 2020, he noted that the firm's internal tech was disjointed and cumbersome. "I quickly realised there was some inefficient and clunky use of technology," he says. Employing software from a range of vendors, including Trello, Mailerlite, Slack, Hootsuite and SurveyMonkey, Max saw that the team were reguarly downloading and uploading data between platforms and that it was hard to get a complete overview of the business's performance. Alongside improving the NHS's tech, he resolved to improve Hanley Consulting's own tech by bringing harmony to its software stack.

It was during a discovery call with a Zoho representative that Max saw the power of Zoho One. "In that conversation, I listed out certain things like SurveyMonkey, and I was told that Zoho Surveys comes with Zoho One. I also mentioned that we were communicating via Slack and he mentioned the Cliq messaging service within Zoho One. It became apparent that the Zoho One suite could cover all of the tools that we were paying for ... with the added benefit of integration. It was a no-brainer."

By onboarding the Zoho One suite of applications, Hanley Consulting was able to bring its data, communication channels, tasks and more into one operating system. This transition brought about increased effiency, streamlined workflow processes and significant cost savings. "By consolidating...we've been able to do it cheaper", says Max.

Hanley Consulting started by collating all of its client data inside Zoho CRM, using parent and child fields to accurately reflect related records and unique identifier fields to sync data across applications. "Practices can sit within PCNs (primary care networks), and the PCNs can sit within the federations and so on. And in the NHS, every organisation has an ODS (organisation data service) code, and we've set that as an identifier so we can map any data from other apps like Zoho Forms", explains Max. Hanley consulting also employed CRM's kanban view of the sales pipeline to improve its financial planning, and forecasting.

Next, the team leveraged Zoho Surveys to collect patient and employee engagement insights on behalf of their NHS clients, migrating from SurveyMonkey. Ellyn Gattlin, Hanley consulting's Patient Engagement Lead, explains that Zoho's drag and drop builder, white-labelling capabilities and extensive analytics make it the perfect survey software for her needs. "It's brilliant because you can brand it, which is particularly important with the NHS, we need that for trust. People need to know it's coming from their practice." Because of the trust it garners, and its easy and intuitative user interface, Ellyn directly attributes improved response rates to Zoho Survey. "It's difficult in healthcare to get feedback... we see 10% as a good response rate, and we reached 16%", she adds, reflecting on a recent survey of 300,000 patients in Buckinghamshire.

Hanley Consulting also employ Zoho Projects, in tandem with Zoho Sprints, to divide and conquer task lists and product release deployments. Paul Harvey, the business's Governance and Operations Manager, enjoys Project's streamlined worklows and automations, which stop tasks slipping through the net. Newly onboarded CRM clients trigger a new project creation and an automated script names it after that client. The project is also auto-populated with a set task list and all of the team members that need to collaborate on the job are assigned. "We found it really improves the way we operate as a business...everything's delivered on time nothing's missed," Paul says. Meanwhile, Zoho Sprints allows the team to be very agile with new product launches, bug fixes and updates, particuarly for its hero product EDATT ("Enabling Digital Access Through Telephony"). The build of this popular automated assistant for general practices was easily project-managed using Zoho Sprints. "I found that Sprints has made it a lot easier to prioritise the different changes to a product. Before, using an Excel document, it was hard to see what needed to be done on what date," recalls Paul.

Other Zoho One applications that Hanley Consulting use on a daily basis include Zoho Forms to capture new client onboarding details, SalesIQ to interact with website visitors and Zoho Marketing Automation to send personalised email sequences to its subscribers. The team are continuously striving for digital excellence and plan to expand the use of Zoho applications to drive further effiencies. "Zoho One is full of surprises...there's 30 apps we haven't even explored yet!" says Max. But although the team have barely scratched the surface of Zoho One's potential, it's impact is already clear to see. "I don't think we would be here delivering the change that we have for clients if we didn't have Zoho. It's absolutely transformed our business," Max adds.