Is it possible to use data with empathy? A seven-year-old startup not only thinks it’s realistic to build synergistic, empathetic customer relationships at scale, it is nurturing a growing business to prove it.

Cordial Experience Inc. was founded in 2014 to build a next-generation email marketing platform powered by real-time data. The firm’s goal is to provide marketers with the tools to deliver personal, relevant and emotionally intelligent communications across any channel.

“Our clients can collect all of their unstructured customer and business data from wherever it lies in their tech stack, use that to build audience segments, discover trends and insights, and automate super hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale,” said Christy Parrish (pictured, left), director of client success at Cordial. “The key to creating that great customer experience is using data with empathy.”

Parrish spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. She was joined by Hailey Pettit (pictured, right), CRM manager at Nurx Inc., and they discussed the solutions offered by Cordial to make messaging personal, how the company’s technology is being used by telemedicine provider Nurx, and the role of AWS in supporting compliance and processing for a sizable data platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Filling personal knowledge gaps

For Cordial and its clients, the process of using data with empathy involves creating a more holistic understanding of each individual customer. This means using data to drill down on where knowledge gaps may exist and crafting timely messaging to address those and other potential concerns.

“It’s being able to not just go out and check a box, look for the next logical data point, but grabbing that data and making it into thoughtful cohorts, thoughtful automated customer journeys,” Parrish said. “Address pain points or gaps in the knowledge on behalf of the consumer. This will make or break the customer experience.”

One of Cordial’s clients has put this approach into practice through more focused communication to users of its services in the healthcare field. Nurx is a telemedicine platform, staffed by a team of physicians and healthcare experts to fill requests for medications without the need to visit a doctor’s office or clinic.

Its services include filling prescriptions for birth control and test kits for sexual health. The startup’s board of directors includes Chelsea Clinton, author and vice chair of the Clinton Foundation.

“We’re really focused on sensitive health needs,” Pettit said. “We’re a leader in the birth control space right now, so we prescribe and deliver online directly to our patients. We really believe that healthcare should be accessible and affordable to everyone no matter what their circumstances.”

Nurx uses Cordial’s data-driven tools to send messages that reflect both sensitivity and a thorough understanding of a user’s health situation.

“In the healthcare space, it’s all about patient care and understanding how each patient is different in their needs,” Pettit explained. “We use that data to craft empathetic messaging. Using the data and understanding where they are in their journey with healthcare is so important, and Cordial allows us to do that.”

Timely messaging

Patient education plays an important role in Nurx’s approach, and the firm has made adjustments to its communications in response to patient and healthcare provider needs. At one point, Nurx discovered that providers were being deluged with questions from patients as soon as the company would send an alert notifying users that a particular medication had been shipped.

The company adjusted its communications process so that more than an alert was generated, with messages that more thoroughly addressed patient questions, thus taking the burden off the healthcare providers.

“We launched a post-prescription flow,” Pettit said. “We put that data into Cordial, and we were able to build out a really successful automation that proactively addressed those questions. Putting that in a user-friendly format within an email worked really well in addressing questions providers were taking a lot of time to answer.”

Cordial’s platform is designed to draw from the flow of information a client is receiving in real time. Its immediacy is a change from previous views of message communication or marketing, which might be generated from reams of data that were weeks or months old.

“The traditional way was to sort of wedge our customers into little boxes or even big boxes and then send out messages that we think will resonate with them,” Parrish said. “Now we’re looking at it in real time as the messages are being generated; we’re actually sending content that is relevant at that time. It’s vastly different from that way that we’ve traditionally marketed.”

To help its customers with timely, empathetic messaging, Cordial relies on Amazon Web Services Inc. to process mountains of information from multiple sources. Housing data in the cloud allows the company to deliver messaging at scale.

“It allows us to store and manage that massive amount of customer and business data for our clients,” Parrish said. “We have to be HIPAA compliant, so we rely on the AWS architecture to not only enable our scalability and reliability, but also with high security compliance standards.”

With its telemedicine model during a global pandemic, Nurx has found itself inundated with requests from users over the past year. The company has reported a 75% increase in new patient requests and has provided over 1 million virtual consultations. It is meeting an important need for health education at a critical time, powered by Cordial and AWS.

“There’s a lot of stigma in the healthcare space, and education is a key factor around these service lines,” Pettit said. “It’s exciting to have a voice in this space, to educate our patients and address those needs.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. (* Disclosure: Cordial Experiences Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cordial nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE