CASE STUDY
Making healthcare more accessible in Kenya and beyond.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
TEAM SIZE
~70
VOLUME
200+ messages/day
HEADQUARTERS
Nairobi, Kenya
“Chatwoot offers us the ability to customize the omnichannel experience the way we want it, as opposed to other players. Plus: the Chatwoot team is always available to help. All I need to do is drop a message; they readily respond to any queries we ask.”
Ponea Health is your modern healthcare resource. Founded only in 2020, Ponea Health has provided a well-covered healthcare solution to the needful people in many African countries, including Kenya. To summarize:
- It is a healthcare aggregator which brings many health providers into one platform for people to compare and choose from.
- It is a marketplace of healthcare tools and devices – available online and offline.
- It has 24*7 ambulance services.
- It offers medical concierge services.
- It has chronic disease management programs.
- It runs campaigns on preventive health.
- And they connect with people who need support all over the country, with Chatwoot’s well-integrated and intuitive platform.
It began when Ponea Health needed to switch from its only helpline.
Ponea Health used to have a single hotline. People would often call multiple times, and even ask to be assisted over WhatsApp. In addition to this, they mostly communicated with their customers through alphanumeric (one-way) messaging. This, of course, caused problems for the staff as well as those in need.
So Ponea looked for a way to help its customers fast and to engage and re-engage them. They knew that they needed a system that could pull information about a customer instantly if it existed in their records. They also needed an integrated, omnichannel customer engagement platform to sync with their CRM.
After using 2 platforms, Ponea happily settled for Chatwoot.
Ponea tried two of Chatwoot's alternatives before settling on Chatwoot as the best option. Dennis Henry (Tech Lead) and his team started setting up various conversation channels on Chatwoot. This includes:
Mobile App
Chatwoot Widget
Social Channels
Dennis and his team loved the ease of use. They could easily tap into Chatwoot’s open APIs and connect that to their CRM––something they had lagged previously. They could also synchronize contacts directly from Chatwoot into their CRM. This enabled them to know if a person coming in Chatwoot was already a customer.
The Health Bot 🤖
Ponea has integrated a health bot with Chatwoot. It can do a preliminary analysis of someone’s condition and make recommendations on solutions and services based on how they’re feeling.
We (the Chatwoot team) constantly helped them through the process. In Dennis’ own words:
“We have never had any issues with Chatwoot support. It is always readily available. So if I need anything, all I need to do is just drop a message, an email to the team. They are just readily available to respond to us; to any of the queries that we ask.”
Today, Ponea Health gets most of its traffic through chat.
Ponea’s customers were anyway always looking to connect with the team over WhatsApp. Ponea Health saw an opportunity to connect with even more patients. They implemented multiple customer conversation channels on Chatwoot. This includes Ponea’s website and app live chat, as well as Ponea’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Telegram accounts. After Ponea implemented multiple customer conversation channels on Chatwoot, they were able to engage with and help even more people.
The Ponea team soon realized that their customers found the website live chat and almost every other social media channel to be the easiest to reach out from. This immensely leveled up the user experience. It also gave a much better and well-defined structure for the Ponea team to provide support from a single dashboard. They connected their Chatwoot account with their CRM through Chatwoot’s open APIs, implemented a central database of users, and took advantage of the omnichannel support suite. This meant that they could map their conversations with their existing customer databases and pick up conversations right where they would have left them––regardless of the communication platform used.
And it makes us happy to say that Ponea Health today channels most of their traffic through chat.