When Microsoft announced its recent deal to acquire Nuance Communications it told the world that the healthcare industry is serious about leveraging the latest and greatest technology solutions to advance the industry significantly into the future. For several years now, healthcare has been leveraging more technology – in all facets including patient care, physician charting and documentation, medical technology and procedures, and especially facility amenities.
The deal with Nuance is of particular interest because it will enable more physicians to leverage speech recognition technology as doctors seek to increase the speed of patient documentations through dictation rather than traditional note taking.
If anything, the recent pandemic has certainly expedited the way healthcare and insurance professionals are leveraging technology to increase patient care and overall efficiencies to improve the all-around customer experience.
Technology Today Isn’t Just Assisting Doctors
Resolving customer inquiries faster, and helping patients and their families connect with more of the important information they need in a speedier manner are just a few areas where technology has already been playing a larger role for the industry.
For several years now, patients have been increasingly interacting with technology during their medical experience, either at home or within the walls of the medical facility. This interaction has not always been smooth, and at times it has created more problems and confusion when patients simply can’t get the answers they need to questions they have.
Patient resolutions are a critical and necessary part of the healthcare process today, and it’s important that healthcare organizations and insurers are leveraging the right technology to reach resolutions faster, and more accurately.
Helping Patients Resolve Issues Quicker
As an example of this, today’s patients want customer service representatives to meet their unique needs and provide them with answers that serve as an extension of their medical providers’ offices. When a question needs to be answered, patients want the right assistance at their fingertips.
To meet this need, healthcare providers are leveraging highly sophisticated customer service technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), self-service and new, advanced chatbots to provide a resolution-centered, stress-free solution.
With technology adoption at an all-time high, tools that allow self-service customer response techniques are more important than ever – and embraced. Expanding online options can help alleviate healthcare facilities’ high call volumes. Self-service is a rapidly growing customer care pathway that can make a significant impact on workforce load for hospitals, healthcare facilities and insurers.
Self-discovery tools such as interactive tutorials, adaptive FAQs, interactive guides, and videos that contain the simple, DIY answers many patients are looking for reduce contact center volumes, reserving agents to address more complex customer inquiries.
These tools allow the patient to solve most of their needs themselves, putting the power back into their own hands. A patient can tap into multimedia-support materials for productive learning that mimics the experience of chatting with a live agent. Self-service tools such as interactive tutorials and videos can also aid patients in their customer care journey by visually showing them how to resolve a problem.
In a fully AI-enabled customer support environment, not only are patients relying on self-service and FAQ tutorials themselves; contact center agents can also retrieve AI-curated content from the same source materials, creating a fast and personal experience for the patient versus agents relying on scripts. What’s more, the AI-powered information hub often allows agents to be quicker and more accurate in resolving a customer issue.
Furthermore, in some instances, patients are seamlessly redirected from a chat bot to a live agent on more technical questions where a higher skillset level of expertise is required to field questions.
With the AI-powered resolution technology available today, more healthcare and insurance contact centers can empower the delivery of healthcare through technology. It is becoming clearer each and every day that health and insurance organizations that embrace and accelerate their digital, AI investments can improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, scale appropriately, and arrive at quicker customer resolutions.
Editor’s Note:
Becky Watkins
Senior Vice President, Relationship Management
Becky leads account operations for all healthcare support services and serves as the senior point of contact for our healthcare clients. She brings over 30 years’ experience in the BPO industry with 10 years dedicated to healthcare solutioning and outsourcing. She joined ResutsCX in 2017 following leadership roles at Alorica and APAC Customer Services. Becky has earned a reputation for delivering personal and empathetic human connections between her “health advocate” agent teams and her clients’ customers and members. For more information visit www.results-cx.com.
