Healthcare contact center agents handle a variety of tasks, including answering patients’ questions on calls and scheduling appointments with doctors. Additionally, they assist with medical billing, manage the verification process for insurance coverage, and handle many other tasks. To handle these tasks efficiently, agents need the latest tools and agent-assist technologies to assist patients and streamline the entire process.
A recent study indicates that more than 70% of patients desire healthcare providers to deliver interactions that cater to their personal needs. For this reason, healthcare companies are equipping their contact centers with emerging agent-assist technologies, such as IVRs, chatbots, and virtual assistants, to improve the way they engage with their patients.
Let’s explore the advanced features that healthcare contact centers can utilize to enhance patient engagement and satisfaction.
The Advanced Features of the Healthcare Contact Centers
Patients want contact centers to answer their queries instantly and efficiently, but with compassion. Healthcare contact centers are doing everything to evolve and meet patients’ requirements. These institutions are deploying tools that offer features such as omnichannel customer engagement, AI-powered sentiment analysis, and more.
AI-Driven Sentiment & Emotion Analysis
In the healthcare industry, patients just don’t want a casual conversation. They want agents who can hear and understand their issues and show genuine care for them.
While connecting with contact center agents, patients may appear anxious about test results, seek guidance from caregivers, or inquire about coordinating care for family members. This situation can be effectively handled with the aid of AI-driven sentiment analysis and emotion detection. It involves identifying the various emotional stages patients experience during interaction, such as happiness, positivity, or negativity.
By analyzing millions of comments and chats across various interaction channels and examining language, tone, and conversation patterns, AI-powered tools can find out whether patients feel frustrated, satisfied, or anxious. By getting insights into such emotions, agents can include the right level of empathy in their answers to the patients
Using sentiment analysis can bring various benefits to any healthcare organization. We can understand this concept through the use case of AI-driven sentiment and emotion analysis.
| 💡Download Use Case | Reducing Wait Times in Healthcare Contact Center |
AI-Driven Sentiment and Emotion Analysis Use Case Example
Let’s take the case of Emily, a 45-year-old who recently underwent a blood test at a healthcare center and called its contact center to know the status of her test results.
When she calls, an AI-powered virtual assistant greets her through the contact center’s interactive voice response (IVR) system. Once the system authenticates the hospital’s EHR through a CTI Connector, the AI assistant delivers the update to the patient without routing the call to a live agent if the results are available. This reduces call volume and average handle time.
If lab results are not yet available, the IVR system detects Emily’s intent and her emotional tone using sentiment analysis. If it detects signs of concern or frustration in her voice, the system prioritizes her call and routes it to a live agent skilled in handling sensitive queries.
Additionally, AI provides predefined empathetic responses, such as offering reassurance, explaining possible delays, and scheduling a follow-up SMS once the result is available.
Improving Data Security & Compliance
Imagine the pressure contact center agents face when they function for a large healthcare provider. They have to deal with thousands of patient interactions daily. These interactions often include inquiries related to prescription refills, appointment scheduling, insurance verification, and other matters. Patient data is highly sensitive, and healthcare providers take every measure to protect it at all costs. Additionally, healthcare providers take measures to ensure full compliance with HIPAA regulations.
However, ensuring such a level of compliance is not easy. It becomes challenging as agents need to access patient records immediately, which may threaten data privacy. Manual authentication often slows down the entire interaction process and increases compliance risk. Supervisors need real-time monitoring to ensure adherence to HIPAA guidelines.
Modern tools are capable of dealing with the problems mentioned above. With secure login, strict access control, and data encryption, healthcare contact centres can ensure that only the right people access the patient’s records. Supervisors receive real-time alerts that help them identify and resolve issues before they escalate. Likewise, smart screen pop-ups and automation help agents save time by allowing them to access patients’ records instantly.
Omnichannel Patient Engagement
Patient want a consistent and seamless experience when they reach healthcare contact centers through various channels, including phone, email, SMS, chat, or social media. They don’t want to repeat their problems and questions each time they switch communication channels. This is what we refer to as omnichannel patient engagement.
However, managing such a large number of interactions also brings huge challenges. Healthcare providers aim to streamline their entire process of maintaining medical records and communication through Epic, a telemedicine software provider and other EHR platforms.
| 💡Also Read | Everything You Need to Know About Patient Engagement |
AI-Powered Virtual Assistants & IVR
AI-powered virtual assistants and interactive voice response systems reduce agent workloads and streamline routine interactions. That’s why healthcare contact centres are integrating these technologies within their systems. These latest tools work behind the scenes and automate everyday tasks such as confirming appointments, answering billing questions, checking the status of lab results, and more. So, patients receive quick answers and don’t need to wait on hold.
AI-Powered Virtual Assistant & IVR Use Case Example
Let’s take the case of Lisa, a tuberculosis patient who wants to schedule a follow-up appointment with her doctor and also inquire about a prescription refill. She initially interacts with the healthcare center through an AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) via chat or an interactive voice response (IVR) call. For simple patient issues, the virtual system provides instant assistance. However, if Lisa needs to reschedule her appointment—something that requires more coordination—the system routes her call to a live agent.
Workforce Optimization & Agent Assist
A healthcare center receives thousands of calls daily from patients inquiring about their insurance coverage for specific medical procedures and other issues. In this scenario, agents may need to verify the patient’s information, check his eligibility, and explain the claim process. Amid all this, they may also need to ensure compliance with privacy regulations. This entire process places significant work pressure on agents and requires contact centers to deploy agent-assist technologies and innovative workforce management strategies to cope with such an immense workload.
Agent assist and automation tools deliver real-time prompts, automated call documentation, and context-aware screen pop-ups. These functionalities help in reducing manual workloads and allow agents to respond accurately without switching to multiple screens. Additionally, workforce management tools can help supervisors to monitor their agents’ performance, adjust schedules to maintain service levels during peak hours, and forecast call volumes.
Wrapping Up
Managing the large volume of daily interactions with utmost efficiency, while maintaining a high rate of patient satisfaction, requires healthcare contact centers to focus on effective workforce management. Apart from this, healthcare contact centers can also benefit from various other features, such as smart screen pops, AI-driven recommendations, data security and compliance, and sentiment and emotion analysis, by integrating NovelVox solutions into their internal systems, Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. These integrations help you boost agent productivity, patient experience, and reap numerous other benefits.
