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When Microsoft announced the acquisition of Nuance Communications, it signaled that the healthcare industry is serious about leveraging technology to advance the industry into the future. For several years now, healthcare has been applying technology across patient care, physician charting and documentation, medical technology and procedures, and especially facility amenities. The deal with Nuance will enable more physicians to leverage speech recognition technology to increase the speed of patient documentation through dictation rather than traditional note taking. If anything, the pandemic expedited the way healthcare and insurance professionals are leveraging technology to increase patient care and overall efficiency 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 the important information they need in a speedier manner are just a few areas where technology has already been playing a major role for the industry. For several years, patients have been increasingly interacting with technology during their medical experiences, whether at home or in a medical facility. The interaction has not always been smooth, and at times has created more problems and confusion when patients simply can’t get the answers they need. Patient concern resolution is a critical and necessary part of the healthcare process, and it’s important that healthcare organizations and insurers leverage the right technology to reach resolutions faster and more accurately.
Helping Patients Resolve Issues Quicker
Today’s patients want customer service representatives to meet their unique needs and provide them with answers while serving 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 sophisticated customer service technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), self-service, and 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 being embraced on a wide scale. 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 simple, DIY answers many patients are looking for also help to reduce contact center volumes, reserving agents to address more complex customer inquiries.
Self-Service for Patients and Members Can Be Empowering
Tools that allow a patient to solve most of their needs themselves also put 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 like interactive tutorials and videos can also aid customers in their healthcare journeys 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; but contact center agents can also retrieve AI-curated content from the same source materials, creating a fast and personal experience for the member versus agents relying on scripts. What’s more, an AI-powered information hub often allows agents to be quicker and more accurate in resolving a customer issue. Furthermore, patients can be 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 day that health and insurance organizations that embrace and accelerate their digital and AI investments can improve patient outcomes, the most important goal, while also successfully reducing costs, scaling appropriately, and accelerating customer resolution.
About the Author:
Becky Watkins, Senior Vice President, Relationship Management, of ResultsCX, leads account operations for all healthcare support services and serves as the senior point of contact for its healthcare clients. She brings over 30 years’ experience in the BPO industry with 10 years dedicated to healthcare solutioning and outsourcing. She joined ResultsCX 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