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Buyer Intelligence in Healthcare Tech: How EVIVE Uses Personalization to Drive Engagement and Retention

In healthcare benefits, the buyer journey is notoriously confusing. Prices are hidden, guidance is vague, and the process often leaves employees and employers frustrated.

Dr. Prashant Srivastava saw this gap back in 2006 and co-founded EVIVE — a platform that turns mountains of healthcare data into personalized, timely recommendations for employees, while helping employers improve benefits utilization, reduce costs, and retain talent.

It’s a case study in how SaaS companies can position themselves around buyer intelligence and personalized engagement to create measurable value for both sides of a B2B relationship.

Positioning the Product for the True Buyer

EVIVE sells B2B — to employers — but the real users are employees. Early in the company’s journey, Srivastava made a strategic decision: Rather than chasing direct-to-consumer adoption, EVIVE would work through self-insured employers, where the buyer controls the budget and feels the financial impact of smarter healthcare decisions.

By aligning positioning with the buyer’s economic reality — healthier employees, lower claims, and higher retention — EVIVE created a win-win:

  • Employers reduce healthcare costs and improve productivity.

  • Employees get easy, personalized navigation of their benefits without the guesswork.

Turning Data Into Buyer Intelligence

Healthcare generates huge volumes of transactional data every time an employee visits a doctor or fills a prescription. Traditionally, that data is only used for retrospective reporting. EVIVE flipped the model, using it for predictive, next-best-action recommendations — similar to how Amazon suggests products or Netflix suggests shows.

Examples:

  • A mammogram reminder for an employee based on age, risk factors, and claims history.

  • Cost transparency for a recommended procedure.

  • Guidance on benefits they may not even know they have.

This is buyer intelligence in action: using behavioral and contextual data to anticipate needs, surface relevant options, and make the next step frictionless.

From Direct Mail to Digital Engagement

In its early days, EVIVE delivered these recommendations via personalized direct mail — a smart move for 2007 when smartphones weren’t ubiquitous. As mobile adoption grew, the company made a decisive pivot to a tech-first SaaS platform, building its own apps, expanding engineering teams in Bangalore, and retraining customer support to deliver digital-first experiences.

The transition shows a key user retention principle for SaaS: Meet the user where they are today, but evolve to where they will be tomorrow.

Scaling Through Visionary Customers

Srivastava credits much of EVIVE’s growth trajectory to forward-thinking buyers who asked for more:

  • Could EVIVE’s personalization engine be applied to onboarding?

  • Could it connect employees to internal training programs?

  • Could it support financial wellness initiatives?

By listening to customer signals and filtering them through scalability criteria, EVIVE expanded its platform beyond healthcare benefits into holistic employee experience personalization — deepening value for existing clients and opening new market segments.

Lessons for SaaS & Tech Company Growth

EVIVE’s journey offers clear takeaways for founders, CMOs, and growth leaders:

  1. Align Positioning With Buyer Economics – Understand how your buyer makes or saves money, and frame your value around that.

  2. Leverage Buyer Intelligence for Engagement – Use predictive analytics to surface the right action at the right time.

  3. Evolve Your Delivery Model – Be willing to sunset outdated channels and invest in the future.

  4. Expand Based on Scalable Buyer Requests – Not every customer ask is worth building; prioritize those with broad applicability.

  5. Protect Critical Functions In-House – For EVIVE, data security and personalization algorithms remain core competencies.

The Next 12 Months

Looking ahead, EVIVE plans to:

  • Extend its personalization engine to smaller employers with faster, easier deployment.

  • Expand from benefits navigation into onboarding, training, and financial wellness — making it an employee experience hub powered by buyer intelligence.

It’s a move that will further strengthen EVIVE’s positioning as a retention and engagement driver for HR leaders.