How Doktor24 Grows Customer Loyalty at Scale With Braze

Founded in 2017, Doktor24 is a Swedish-based digital and physical healthcare company whose mission is to provide the right care at the right place and time.

I spoke with Sebastian Scheuer, CRM & Marketing Automation Lead at Doktor24, to learn how Braze enables the team to create powerful segments that support the company's goals of driving long-term customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.*

What made you decide to try out our customer engagement capabilities?

When I started at Doktor24, the company was already in the middle of an integration process with a local partner agency of Braze. Together we identified how Braze could help us to create meaningful and personalized customer experiences, and the capabilities to do that at scale.

What I was looking for in a platform was the ability to smoothly connect with our marketing stack, to connect our user journeys with the platform, and for messaging support across multiple channels.

Secondly, working with data in healthcare, there are a lot of additional considerations—how can we in the best possible way create value to our users, while at the same time managing compliance with data privacy and medical regulations (meaning we don’t know what visits are about). We love to empower our users and share content so they keep us in mind as an expert within our space for the moment when they need to seek care. Braze allowed us to follow our vision to connect technology to better provide meaningful relations in our journeys. So another thing I was looking for was a deep way of building sophisticated segments with these considerations in mind, and from there, be able to build out automated journeys to onboard, activate, or retain our users.

Ultimately, I wanted to drive growth and retention by focusing on creating valuable user experiences and testing multiple channel strategies, as a large part of our audience is used to seeking content or help with their mobile devices—when they travel, when they commute to work, are hiking in the mountains, or home with sick kids late at night. And it doesn't matter if they live in large cities or in the countryside. To engage and be in touch with our users at the right time, in the right place, with the right content is very crucial for us.

And fortunately, I found all of that with Braze. But I was most impressed by both the Braze Customer Success and Support teams, who showed such dedication in making me succeed and at a speed I’d never experienced before.

Who are the primary day-to-day users of Braze at Doktor24?

Aside from me and our content producers, our engineering teams work in Braze to assist with any new data points, fixing or deploying new events, and helping us think about how to structure data. We have weekly standups to get Braze running the way that we want with all of the features and all of the channels that we want to use.

Can you tell us about your process for coming up with and running campaigns?

We have an always-on broadcast to keep our users' engagement running with seasonal health related content, such as campaigns tied to vaccination, flu, and allergy seasons.

Then, when it comes to targeted initiatives, whether that's to activate audiences or reduce churn, I come up with the concept, explain the idea with a brief and a mission statement, and run that by our content, commercial, and product development teams. I also evaluate and discuss in each single step very closely with our data privacy, medical quality, and legal teams to find the right path for communicating with our audiences. Then, combining all of this knowledge, I hand over the brief to our content team members who produce our engagement or campaign assets and then I turn on the magic to implement everything.

As with most companies, we also have business teams that guide us with more commercial-related goals, product owners who contribute with their insights and experiences where we can drive the most value, and data scientists that help us set up dashboard-specific scenarios—say, typical medical prescription renewals for women between a specific age range—and then we evaluate if we are successful in helping and growing that particular segment.

For our CRM efforts, we have about five to six teams involved every time. It's such a central function that we require a lot of different expertise from different people. Basically, everybody touches user relationships.

What advice do you have for effective customer engagement collaboration with other teams?

1. Have teams made up of people who can specialize in what they are good at. Start early to discover and go through the entire user journey and understand what the key activities (high-value actions) are that you want your users to perform to be more successful and how you can contribute to make them achieve and reach that milestone.

2. Take advantage of the full knowledge base of the entire company. Even if you think your marketing team has covered all considerations, there are often additional insights you can gain from other people or teams who are more frequently or directly in touch with your users in your outlined customer journey to enrich strategies and outcomes with even more insights.

3. Set up a plan and goals. This depends on the company, but we at Doktor24 like to focus on creating great user experiences and understanding what we need to change or grow in each single step. And when we set a plan, we always keep that in mind when we define our goals at the beginning, and that thinking needs to be baked into everything to support our goals.

4. If you want to avoid churn, for instance, all of your important analytics related to churn need to be built or implemented within your app and engagement platforms, like Braze.

5. What's most important post-launch is to measure outcomes. Measure, refine, repeat. Measure, refine, repeat.

What are your most important metrics?

We have a variety of important metrics that vary by department. But I would say that, across the entire company, we are focused on customer satisfaction. For instance, after every doctor visit or after specific actions in the customer journey, we ask about the user's experience in order to continuously improve our services. And then from a commercial perspective, our goal, of course, is to have satisfied customers come back, which is my top priority when working on loyalty and retention initiatives. My KPI is loyalty in terms of retention—that is, how many times a year users come back to us for their needs. But in order to make that happen, there are a lot of engagement KPIs I focus on, like app sessions, content clicks, and conversions for reaching certain high-value actions.

How does Braze enable you to be agile and efficient?

Braze helps us to better understand our users, how they feel, and what their needs are.

We work with a lot of complex data. From early on, Braze helped us build really sophisticated segments out of this data and see if these segments are working. Now that we have these segments set up, they're helping us achieve our goals more quickly, and that's something that never would have been possible with other platforms.

Braze has helped us evolve our entire thinking about how the customer journey works and how to build from a technical database setup standpoint to enable scalable communication. Building user relationships at scale, that's my goal, and that's what I'm able to achieve with Braze.

Final Thoughts

Hundreds of innovative small and growing companies like Doktor24, YNAB, IDAGIO, Branch, and Grover are using Braze to disrupt their categories and achieve success within their industries. See for yourself why Braze is the secret weapon startups turn to gain a competitive advantage, engage thoughtfully with their users, and ultimately drive business outcomes like user growth, conversions, revenue, retention, and more.

*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.