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While many of us agree that healthcare should be a basic right, it is not yet universal. One area of medical science where that is starkly apparent is imaging. Roughly 80% of diagnostic dilemmas in the medical industry could be solved by medical imaging, yet 2/3rds of the world’s population don’t have access to it.
Dr. Jonathan Rothberg ran into these limitations when trying to care for his ailing daughter, which led him to found Butterfly Network.
Butterfly’s innovation is the world’s first and only portable ultrasound delivered via a computer chip. This technology, which cost-effectively enables whole-body imaging, underpins Butterfly’s simple, yet bold mission: “to democratize healthcare by making medical imaging accessible to everyone around the world.”
Butterfly Network is still young and has only been commercially available for a few years. Like many emerging businesses at this stage, it was challenging at first for the company to reliably deliver timely and high-quality client support. They found it tough to source, hire, and train a team on such a specialized product.
“While ease-of-use and simplification is a tenet of our innovation, it’s still a medical imaging device,” says Spencer Starley, the Senior Director of Client Experience & Support Operations at Butterfly Network. “It’s still fuzzy lines on a screen that you’re supposed to use to make healthcare decisions.”
Training and enablement for a fresh team without medical background or education was a big challenge—especially doing so in a cost-effective, scalable way.
Beyond that, the target users for Butterfly’s products are healthcare providers who work around the clock, often on the front lines of care, such as in emergency rooms or ambulances. The business recognized a need to optimize services for late night and weekend contacts. They knew saying, “Sorry, we don’t offer support right now” to a provider dealing with a life-and-death situation wasn’t an option, and they realized additional external resources were necessary to provide the level of support their clients needed.
Finally, rapid global expansion necessitated the need for specialized language skills that Butterfly didn’t have access to. All this together limited their ability to achieve their CSAT and budget targets and, without change, the company felt their ability to further grow would be inhibited.
Spencer had worked with BPOs in the past, and while he considered outsourcing a key part of delivering operations at scale, he also knew that implementation could be tricky—especially in the medical industry.
Not only are there very real regulatory and quality considerations, there is also the ever-present risk of alienating customers the company had worked so hard to obtain. Especially with a technical product, Butterfly Network had concerns around any outsourced team being able to learn and understand the product, let alone support the clients that were calling in expecting fast resolutions during tense situations.
Spencer made a list of requirements and created a full rubric for evaluating potential outsourcing partners. They then ran every BPO option that matched their needs through that process to figure out who would best serve their needs. The process had to be rigorous, because as Spencer says, “The future of our customer interactions were in our new partners’ hands!”
They learned about PartnerHero as a referral from a past BPO partner and soon realized that it was a perfect fit.
The flexible functionality that PartnerHero provides for smaller teams was super impactful for Butterfly Network. With clients all over the world, they needed to deliver 24/7 real-time support and language capabilities which they had never been able to deliver on before. What really made PartnerHero stand out, though, was our ability to design a custom solution specifically for Butterfly’s needs.
"To be able to work with PartnerHero on those very specific requests and have them actioned in unique and cost-effective ways was super helpful,” says Spencer. “We were never constrained to fit into a specific product offering box, and that cemented our decision that PartnerHero was the right partner for us.”
“Generally, any time you are dealing with a transition like this, things get dropped or lost in translation,” says Spencer. “No transition like this is perfect, but I think it went pretty well. There were very few bumps in the road.”
The Butterfly team worked to set the right tone by collaborating with our Launch team on a daily basis as we were setting the new outsourced team up. Working closely with Spencer, they put together a detailed project plan, owners, and a progress tracker towards key objectives.
The partnership has been a resounding success. Prior to partnering with PartnerHero, Butterfly Network only offered email and asynchronous communication. Now, they have 24/7 global support, across multiple channels. They’re able to answer the phone immediately, which is incredibly important for medical clients that prefer the phone, and often need in-the-moment support.
They have also introduced new capabilities, such as real-time social media monitoring, and a chat function in their store, to support their ecommerce teams.
“This is our path to deliver future scale,” says Spencer. “PartnerHero enables us to do what we want to do.”
