Welltok
Fast-Growing Consumer Health Innovator Replaces Dozens of Other Tools with the RingCentral Platform
Industry
Healthcare
Hq
Denver, CO
Year founded
2007
Employees
423
Industry
Healthcare
Hq
Denver, CO
Year founded
2007
Employees
423
The typical audience is around 100 people, but there can be as many as 300 at times. RingCentral Webinar lets us scale the number of attendees as demand grows.
Jeremy Lesch
Director of Collaboration and Automation Technologies, Welltok
100%
Calls viewed and analyzed
50%
Increase in support team capacity
What if your health insurance provider didn’t just pay the bills when you got sick, but also rewarded you for achieving or maintaining better health? That extra motivation makes it easier to stop smoking, eat healthier, or get in those 10,000 steps.
This is the thinking behind Welltok, the leading consumer health enterprise software as a service company. Welltok’s award-winning CaféWell app creates a personalized health action plan and connects participants with relevant benefits, resources, and rewards.
Welltok’s typical customers are insurance companies, healthcare providers, and large employers who want to reduce costs by motivating people to get on the track to better health. In addition to CaféWell, Welltok provides services ranging from advanced analytics to multichannel communications that reach and target consumers through the right channel with the right message.
Welltok is obviously on to something. The company is on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for the third consecutive year. This year, it moved up to #278 with a 1,576% growth rate.
Rigorous selection process for unified communications solution
Making sure the company has the appropriate IT resources and tools to handle this growth is the primary responsibility of Jeremy Lesch, Director of Collaboration and Automation Technologies at Welltok. Welltok, and specifically the IT department, is faced with a challenge that many IT startups face around not introducing more tools to achieve the business goals, but consolidating the existing library of tools to reduce redundancy, improve efficiency, and reduce cost. “Between growth through acquisitions and the lack of a good process for tool acquisition, we ended up with approximately 274 different technology solutions and platforms in our portfolio,” Jeremy explains. “Focused on collaboration and communication tools, our goal is to minimize that footprint and reduce the noise created by having five different chat tools and six different online meeting options. Having this many contracts, all with different end dates and start dates, is a mess to deal with.” He felt that minimizing that “noise” would also improve the overall collaboration—one of the main goals that Welltok is focused on in 2018 and beyond.
Jeremy, along with his due diligence team, decided to replace the conglomeration of solutions with one UCaaS platform and designed a rigorous selection process to pick the best one. The process lasted five months and included extensive proof of concept (PoC) trials with a number of UCaaS providers, including RingCentral.
The strategy for the POCs was to have as many people involved, from as many different areas in the company as possible, all with open lines of communication back to the team. “The more voices you get, the more buy-in,” he says. In addition to evaluating the performance of the tools, he looked at things like how much money the different providers put into R&D and how open they are to feedback from customers.
RingCentral has it all, including webinar hosting
After the five-month process, RingCentral was identified as the clear choice. Welltok deployed RingEX™ for telephony and online meetings, and RingCentral Video™ for real-time team collaboration. Beyond the standard Office offering, Welltok also rolled out several RingCentral Webinar™ accounts for health and wellness coaching, as well as hosting industrial conferences and educational seminars for clients, investors, and others.
Jeremy will continue the migration of the Welltok workforce to the RingCentral tools over time, targeting completion about six months from the start of the project. Some team members, such as the executive leadership team (ELT), moved to RingCentral solutions immediately while others switch over as the contracts for their other tools expire. Starting with the leadership team is a strategic move on his part. “The ELT likes the ease of the RingCentral tools, such as Meetings, as their enthusiasm and usage helps with buy-in for the rest of the company,” he says.
RingCentral Video also solved the company’s multiple-chat-application problem. Welltok has reduced its footprint from five very different solutions to just RingCentral Video and one other, and when its license is up, RingCentral Video will be used exclusively.
Welltok continues to achieve high adoption rates with RingCentral Video, in part due to help from the RingCentral teams around deployment and training.
Jeremy sees the benefits in efficiency from things like having one source for task management and a place for shared files. “I see RingCentral Video as a centralized launching platform,” he says.
Welltok’s revamped vision for a unified communications system didn’t initially include a web-hosting solution, but when he learned he could get that from RingCentral along with the other solutions, the teams took the tools for a drive and included it in the package. A previous webinar hosting solution, embedded within their wellness platform, was integrated with the company’s communication system through an active API. A vendor upgrade broke the integration, and when the vendor wouldn’t fix it, Welltok was determined to find another solution.
Several of the company’s employees are life and health coaches who interact with clients via the CaféWell Health Optimization Platform. They utilize RingCentral to present coaching sessions and nutrition seminars to hundreds of consumers nationwide. “The typical audience is around 100 people, but there can be as many as 200 at times. RingCentral lets us scale the number of attendees as demand grows,” Jeremy notes. The flexibility of the host tools in RingCentral allows the coaches and presenters to easily manage the audience and broadcast content, as well as record sessions for future distribution. Thanks to the ease of use and the quality of the audio and video, Welltok has more than quadrupled its number of Webinar licenses.
The ELT likes the ease of the RingCentral tools, such as Meetings, as their enthusiasm and usage helps with buy-in for the rest of the company.
Jeremy Lesch
Director of Collaboration and Automation Technologies, Welltok
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