Communications and CRM: WhatsApp, SMS, Teams, telephony and email, in the core

One record of every communication with a patient, a member of staff, a board member, a supplier or a journalist, on seven channels, honouring each person’s recorded preference. What is live, what is demonstrated, and exactly what leaves the building.

1 The CRM is part of the product

Most clinical systems treat communication as somebody else’s problem. The letters go out of a document tool, the texts go out of a messaging gateway, the phone system is a separate contract, the campaigns run in a marketing product and the internal announcements go out on email. Five suppliers, five audit trails, and no single answer to “what have we sent this person?” commvita holds all of it in the core: letter, email, SMS, WhatsApp, phone, portal and Teams, for patients and for staff, board members, stakeholders, suppliers and press.

2 One person, one line of contact

Open a person and you get everything the organisation has sent them and everything they have sent back, in one column, whatever the channel. That’s the thing that’s hard to buy and easy to describe.

Three details on that screen do the work. The preferred channel is printed above the compose box, so the person sending sees it before choosing. Each row carries the module that generated the message, so a recall, a screening invitation and an ad hoc reply are told apart. And inbound is on the same timeline as outbound, which is the only way a query from a patient and the answer to it end up next to each other.

Staff get the same thing about themselves. A member of staff can open their own communications from the staff portal, set the channel they want to be reached on and their quiet hours, and read the timeline of what the organisation has sent them. A missed message becomes something you can check instead of something you argue about.

3 Permission has a basis, and the basis is recorded

Most systems answer “can we text this person?” with true or false. That isn’t enough to act on. Somebody who was asked and said no needs their decision respected. Somebody nobody has ever asked needs a conversation. A single boolean sends staff to the wrong remedy, so this platform records which of the two it is.

4 Campaigns, templates and what came back

A campaign is a named piece of work with a cohort, a template, a channel, a schedule and a result. The library keeps drafts, scheduled sends and sent campaigns in one list with the sent and delivered counts on the row.

Underneath, an analytics view computes the month’s totals, the average open and click rates and the average did-not-attend reduction from the campaign rows themselves. The cohort definitions the studio offers are fixed with illustrative population sizes; the campaign counts against each one are real. Separately, the CRM will resolve an ad hoc cohort from the patient register by age band, condition and risk tier and send to it.

Two columns there are the governance. The WhatsApp category tells you whether a template is a utility message or a marketing one, which is what the platform rules turn on. The consent column marks the templates that can’t go without a recorded opt-in. A character count next to each is the mundane thing that stops a two-part text being sent by accident.

5 The phone, and the record it should leave

The telephone is still the busiest channel in most organisations and the least recorded. A call happens, and the only trace is a line in a phone system nobody in the clinical service can search. The telephony hub puts the call on the same timeline as everything else and gives the clinician a button to code it into the record.

The counter that says three of six calls coded to record is the useful one. It measures the gap between the calls that happened and the calls that left a clinical trace, and it’s a number a practice manager can work on. Routing rules, a mobile mode for staff working away from a desk phone, and a WhatsApp thread view sit alongside it. Click-to-call writes the call to the person’s CRM timeline as it dials.

6 What leaves the building, and what doesn’t

This is the part of a communications module where suppliers are least honest, so here is the position plainly. In this environment no transport is provisioned. Nothing you press send on goes to a phone or an inbox.

Where it lives in commvita