Software is used across a multitude of industries and can be directly attributed to cost savings and improvements in services. You can get generic software which crosses multiple industries, such as your Microsoft Office packages, or you can get software specific to certain industries. The one’s you pick all depend on how much return you think you will get out of them! 

But what is the benefit to picking tools in the Mental Health and Wellbeing arena? What can they help with and how do they do this? Below we summarise some of the advantages you can get. 

Optimisation of Services 

We all know that the first time we do something we make mistakes, and then hear the classic line “it’s just about how often you get back up again”; well this is true in the case of service optimisation, we are constantly getting back up again. We want to keep eliminating mistakes from our services and constantly improve the service we deliver. Technology can be great in helping us achieve this. 

Firstly, how do you currently run your project management? Are you able to set action plans for your clients? How are these delivered to them, in a Microsoft Word Document? How do you know the Microsoft word document will not be misplaced or lost in emails? When supplying a wellbeing service, how do you make sure all the companies you deal with are reminded promptly about all the different actions they need to achieve? How do you know projects are being delivered on time, with the right materials? There’s so much to remember! This is where software can really help. 

The second area we need to look at is the area of feedback. If we are going to optimise, we need to know what is working and what is not. If you ask people directly, you will always get a slightly biased answer, particularly as emotions come in to affect. So how do you get anonymous feedback and ratings, from clients as well as their employees? Again, wellness tools can help here. In addition to this, how do you collect the data about the employees in the organisation and their current mental health – send out an annual survey?  

The problem here is that you only get a snapshot at one point in the year, and this could be reflective of that time point alone. Also, a lot can happen in the middle! It may even take 2 years before you have 3 data points for comparison. Ideally, you want to be capturing data more often; but this becomes difficult when you have so much to do, and in addition to this, will employees always answer the same questions every month?  

So, do you need to keep coming up with new questions? How do you check what’s working and what’s not?  

Wellness tools can be superb at handling all of this for you, collecting data across an organisation at varied time points and through various methods (e.g. surveys through to collection of HR analytics data). To get more info on different data collection methods you can start by reading about HR analytics here. 

You constantly need to be optimising your service in order to improve this. Once you begin to optimise, you will begin to retain more clients. But how do you keep this up? 

Client Retention 

There’s nothing more important in business than client retention. We all know that keeping customers and offering more is an easier process than finding new ones. Therefore, we need to be continuously working on improving our current services, and making them run like clockwork. Again, wellness tools can really help out here, particularly when it comes to all the admin overhead reductions.  

Most importantly though, it allows you to stop focussing on keeping basic tasks going and allows you to focus on what is making customers happy. As your business grows, it is important to make sure everything continues to run and grow. If you have the right software, you can make sure this is deployed across all your clients, and not just one at a time. 

Another great area that software tools can help with is demonstration of outcomes. If you can use them to crunch the numbers and deliver the correct data you can begin to demonstrate outcomes and calculate ROI (Return on Investment), and even VOI (Value on Investment) (If you would like to read more about this, you can read about ROI vs VOI in wellness programs here). To add to this, in terms of service continuation, this can also allow you to be continuously presenting the benefits of your service, without having to worry about doing this for each individual company. 

Finally, you have probably noticed that the modern organisation needs to move towards being employee-centric if it wants to survive. This is the idea that if you look after your employees, they will in turn look after your customers. Wellness tools can assist in this by giving employees constant access to systems, rather than just emails here and there which inevitably get lost in the inbox bonanza most people experience! You can also get feedback from these employees and make sure this keeps going! 

Expand your business 

Once you’ve used wellness tools to achieve everything set out above, and you have a service model which works across multiple clients, you want to begin to automate as many processes as possible. What you currently have is a repeatable and scalable business model and this is something you should be looking towards all the time. This starts to become very difficult and require a lot of manual processes without the technology described previously.  

It very much becomes about keeping track of everything going on and running small A/B tests (testing a slight variance in one organisation to another to see what works best). Technology can be great here at staying on top of these processes and collecting all the data you; whilst running the analysis to help you crunch the numbers and show you what is effective. 

Finally, you may also want to look at tailoring services and interventions, which are slight variations of your core service. This can be much easier if you have everything else automated.

Software tools can be great in helping you achieve the following: 

• Automation 
• Project management practices 
• Anonymous feedback
• Anonymous data collection
• Reminders and alerts (for yourself and clients!) 
• Reporting
• ROI calculations
• Ongoing access to resources and materials. 

But the main thing you’re looking to do is taking away any tasks which are repeatable, and allow you to focus on doing what you love: delivering wellbeing services! 

If you are interested in improving your wellbeing services with an employee wellbeing platform that helps you achieve all of this under one roof, as well as having access to free marketing resources for your wellbeing services, being able to create action plans, calculate ROI and much more, please see our Lumien Partner Network. 

As a Lumien partner, you can distribute the platform to your clients at no cost to your company; but improve your services along the way. Simply click this link to find out more.