This article was written by Steve Leaden, President of Leaden Associates, Inc., an independent consultant company.
In the ever-evolving healthcare landscape, patient experience has become central to every healthcare provider. Healthcare providers are continuously exploring ways to improve patient care, building trust and maintaining long-term provider-patient relationships. A key aspect of achieving this is through enhancing the overall patient experience. And an often overlooked yet incredibly powerful tool to achieve this is the contact center.
The growing trend of appointing Chief Experience Officers (CXOs) in healthcare organizations underscores the importance of the patient experience. These leaders are tasked with ensuring that every aspect of the patient journey is seamless, compassionate and patient-centered.
Feedback forms and post-appointment surveys are good go-to tools for measuring patient satisfaction after an appointment. However, one of the most crucial touchpoints in a patient’s journey — the contact center — is key to driving improvements and deeper insights into the patient experience.
Contact center tools available can be critical to measuring SLAs within the contact center. And they can provide details on overall patient satisfaction and feedback through speech and text analytics.
Today, healthcare providers can leverage advanced tools within the contact center, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and workforce engagement management (WEM), to offer a profound and long-term impact on the patient experience. In this article, we’ll explore how these tools can enhance communication, streamline processes and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
The Power of the Contact Center: More Than Voice
Traditionally, the contact center has been a place for answering calls, booking and confirming appointments, and handling basic inquiries like billing. While these voice functions remain important, the modern healthcare contact center is much more than just a voice calls-only system. The contact center is now a hub for multichannel communication, where patients can engage through:
- Voice calls
- Emails
- SMS texting
- Social media platforms
SLAs can be measured across each of these channels, too — providing staff with tools to maintain their objectives. By leveraging contact center tools, healthcare providers can help ensure that patients receive timely, efficient and compassionate communication at every stage of their journey — whether they’re making an appointment, reaching out with billing questions, following up on prescription refills or seeking information about their treatment. The ability to track all touchpoints across multiple channels can help give providers a holistic view and a way to measure each patient’s experience.
When patients interact with the contact center, whether it’s through a phone call, email, SMS or social media, these touchpoints can provide a wealth of feedback that contributes to the overall patient experience. By integrating tools that capture and analyze this feedback, healthcare providers can gain a more accurate picture of the patient experience, identify pain points and address issues quickly.
For example, by monitoring interactions through AI-driven sentiment analysis or speech and text analytics, providers can instantly detect patient frustration or if they’re particularly dissatisfied with a service. This can allow them to resolve issues before they negatively impact the patient’s view of the healthcare organization. This also helps prevent the patient from going elsewhere to another provider and ultimately losing the patient.
AI Enables Smarter, Faster Service
I believe AI is revolutionizing the way contact centers function. With intelligent voicebots or chatbots on the front end that offer immediate assistance for scheduling appointments, confirming appointments, FAQs and basic billing questions, AI can significantly reduce wait times and improve overall satisfaction.
Advanced bots can sound like a real human and help with the number of full-time employees required in any contact center. This could help improve the SLAs of each contact center.
In my experience, bots can not only improve on SLAs, but can also facilitate a hard monthly ROI, sometimes impacting as much as 20% or more of scheduling calls. An intelligent bot can also help reduce call time by 10-20%, allowing agents to handle more complex calls.
AI-powered systems can also replace the traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to triage calls, directing patients to the appropriate department or care provider. They can also handle multiple queries by interfacing with the provider’s EMR system.
An intelligent bot, for example, can not only handle an appointment, but can recommend a prescription refill due, as well as notify the patient that a visiting nurse is scheduled to come by on a specified date, all in one call. This has the potential to not only enhance the patient experience, but also reduce the burden on overworked staff, allowing them to focus on more complex patient needs.
AI tools can also help healthcare providers analyze patient sentiment across interactions. By using natural language processing (NLP), these AI solutions can identify common themes, frustrations or positive feedback from patients. This provides actionable insights for improving patient care. And this data is invaluable in refining the patient experience and addressing issues before they escalate.
Lastly, healthcare providers can use AI tools at the agent level through a copilot or agent assist, leveraging speech and text analytics. This provides immediate feedback to an agent during a call to answer the call faster and thereby reducing the length of the call. And it can improve the overall patient experience by managing the length of each call.
These AI tools are advancing at a record pace and improving daily in the industry. Some of the voice and chat bots we have tested are not only amazingly accurate but can have a ‘real’ conversation with the patient fulfilling basic patient needs.
How WEM Empowers Staff for Better Service Delivery
Another crucial tool available in modern contact centers is workforce engagement management. WEM includes technologies that help manage, train and motivate contact center agents to deliver better patient services. This includes workforce management (WFM) for accurate agent scheduling, speech and text analytics, real-time coaching, sentiment analysis, and gamification features that help keep agents engaged and empowered to deliver exceptional care.
When contact center staff is technically well-supported, trained and motivated, they’re more likely to provide better service to patients. With WEM tools, healthcare organizations can help ensure their agents are prepared to handle a variety of patient needs, including working toward higher volumes of calls during specific peak periods (i.e., flu season) or addressing complex inquiries from patients managing chronic conditions.
By leveraging WEM, healthcare providers can help ensure that their agents are not only operationally efficient but also more empathetic to their patients with less pressure on the agent. This can lead to agents having more personalized interactions, which are crucial for building strong patient relationships and fostering loyalty. This can also help to reduce agent turnover by providing the agent better tools to fulfill calls and creating a more satisfying experience.
Personalization and Efficiency: Creating a Human Connection
The integration of advanced tools in the contact center can facilitate personalized interactions that go beyond scripted responses. AI and WEM can help contact center agents access the full patient history, preferences and previous interactions — allowing them to provide tailored and empathetic support.
For instance, AI tools can recommend appropriate responses or offer real-time insights on how to best address a patient’s concern (through copilot or agent assist), while WEM tools can equip agents with real-time training and coaching. By knowing the patient’s history and preferences, agents can create a more personalized experience, making patients feel more connected to their healthcare provider.
Efficiency in the contact center is also key to delivering a positive patient experience. Long wait times, long handle times and long hold times, abandoned calls, poor communication, or complex appointment scheduling systems can lead to patient frustration and patient dissatisfaction. By leveraging advanced tools in the contact center, including AI and WEM, healthcare providers can streamline processes, reduce wait times and enhance communication channels.
For example, AI-powered self-service options can allow patients to make appointments or find answers to frequently asked questions without the need for a live agent. This not only improves on SLAs in the contact center but also frees up agents to focus on and answer more complex inquiries. And patients can quickly find the information they need, whenever they need it.
The Future of Patient-Centered Care
In today’s highly competitive healthcare market, I think improving the patient experience is no longer a luxury, it’s an absolute necessity. By leveraging the tools available in the contact center, including AI, WEM and multichannel communication, healthcare providers can dramatically enhance the patient journey. These tools not only can improve the quality of care but can also build stronger, more loyal patient relationships, which are vital for both patient retention and attracting new patients.
The contact center is a vital component of the healthcare ecosystem that, when equipped with the right technologies, can provide a transformative impact on patient experience. As healthcare continues to evolve, those who embrace these tools will be better positioned to lead the way in providing outstanding, patient-centered care.
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