By Kathrine Williams, VP, Healthcare Services – RCM and Anne Barton, VP, Client Services, Sagility
Twitter: @SagilityHealth
Hospitals and healthcare systems are well acquainted with the rise in demand for an optimized and frictionless customer journey—from a patient’s first appointment call to automated reminders, wayfinding, and essential provider information. And that’s because, by the numbers, an omnichannel patient experience delivers on customer loyalty. A 2021 McKinsey survey of more than 3,000 U.S. healthcare consumers found that satisfied patients are 28% less likely to switch providers. A successful patient experience means a strong foundation for compassionate issue resolution, for every contact point in healthcare: not just high-tech, but a high-touch experience, with empathy.
High-Tech
Today’s patients are well-connected consumers that expect the same high-quality experience at healthcare facilities as they get when shopping online or staying at hotels. Patients have grown accustomed to a concierge level of customer service, and this has altered their perceptions of what a high-quality healthcare experience should look like.
From a patient’s perspective, even small hospitals can be difficult to navigate and engage with via telephone. Partial or full automation of inbound phone calls from patients allows providers to create a “single front door.” This digital front door is a touchpoint, surrounded and supported by a robust knowledge base of unified truth across member, provider, and claims data. Adding automated patient identification and authentication not only personalizes the interaction and ascertains the primary reason for the patient’s call, but it also leads to complete resolution for a host of common inquiries such as appointment confirmations, directions, hours, and payments without ever needing to engage an agent.
When framing and enveloping a seamless experience across every step of the customer journey, three concierge care accelerators are increasingly critical: speech analytics, the post-call survey, and the analytics center of excellence.
- Speech analytics: Purpose-built speech analytics help support journey mapping, alignment with top call drivers, potential cost savings, and opportunities to improve upstream or downstream processes to reduce member effort and improve value. With a unified dashboard that combines voice, text, and structured data analytics, a speech recognition toolkit, and prebuilt natural language processing (NLP) rules, this tech enablement is designed to analyze the voice of the customer. Solutions like these are boosted with concierge self-service engagement that includes a conversational AI bot to answer top member inquiries – allowing payers to deflect calls and resolve issues with web-based chatbots and visual interactive voice response (VIVR).
- Post-call survey: An optimized VoC solution requires not only user-centric (design thinking) questions, tools, and technology—what’s also needed is the right volume and rich quality of data backed by an NLP/AI interaction mining platform. Working together, the solutions and data can deliver meaningful and actionable insights to drive positive business outcomes. Increasingly, the healthcare VoC survey is embraced as an essential driver of member/patient satisfaction and retention. In fact, Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 60% of organizations with VoC programs will supplement traditional surveys by analyzing real-time or near real-time voice and text interactions at every customer touchpoint.
- Analytics Center of Excellence: An Analytics Center of Excellence can serve as the nerve center of healthcare customer experience, using the following frameworks:
- Journey mapping, measurement, and ownership (customer effort, sentiments, emotion analytics)
- Insights-driven experience and process improvements to ease customer friction points by contact types, and reduce agent effort reduction by providing tools, with an increased engagement rate
- Leveraging technology to meet stated and unstated customer needs and experiences
Working together across interaction channels, these three accelerators are delivering:
- Call handle time reductions
- Reduced provider and member abrasion
- Enhanced provider and member satisfaction with NPS®, CSAT, and Star ratings boosts
- Aggregate cost savings, including administrative costs
High-Touch
The healthcare industry has always placed a high value on personalized customer service, especially when dealing with sensitive patient needs and complex issues. While self-service tools like apps, chatbots, and interactive voice responses (IVRs) are available, many patient customers still prefer the attention and expertise that a knowledgeable professional can provide. This is particularly important for the aging population, those with multiple requirements, and urgent needs for resolution who may find that they get tailored voice or text responses that are specific to their needs, instead of spending more time on digital instructions or solutions that may not be relevant.
While it is crucial to cater to customer needs with tech enablement, it is equally important to focus on the internally manageable competencies that influence high-touch, such as:
- The right talent to deliver high-touch service: Healthcare agents are on the front lines of critical personal patient impact across health and finance, and often raw emotions at the core. Accurate screening, insightful interviews, and precise representation of job responsibilities are essential to eliminate false-positive candidate choices. By following this approach, the talent acquisition team can identify candidates with a proven track record of high performance and longevity, who are a great match for the healthcare experience—a customer service unlike any other.
- Top-notch training model with guidance to empathetic problem solving: It’s important to help new hires understand how their role fits into the bigger picture—and how to achieve wins for patients and the healthcare provider alike. This might mean breakout sessions with more focused and simplified training classes. From day one, scripting and empathetic problem-solving should be taught as the central focus of every patient call.
- Sustainable and customizable learning incorporating personalized communication: When it comes to healthcare customer service, genuine understanding is of utmost importance. Some patients are not in the mood to struggle with apps or digital exchange. In these cases, what’s called for is uniquely empathy-based engagement. This means guiding agents to actively listen to the customer, with a bespoke experience that enlists empathic words and phrases. Consistent call-listening sessions will enable agents—essentially your organization’s brand ambassadors—to remain attentive, temperate, and compassionate in their tone of voice. Authentic communication is key, with an added personal touch.
- WFM situational awareness acumen: It’s vital to equip the workforce management (WFM), data analytics, and reports team with the necessary tools and training to anticipate volumes and call-traffic influxes, effective call blending (skilling), and utilize cyclical, seasonal, and erratic trends. Don’t underestimate WFM’s impact on high-touch, as optimized experience means consistent feedback to the delivery team on where and how to improve production efficiencies, eliminate touch redundancies or bottlenecks, mitigate risks, and handle setbacks in staffing. By streamlining processes, the team can work smarter, minimize touch redundancies, and provide the best possible experience to patients.
High-touch focus incorporates these aspects and is additionally bolstered with precision alignment to tech enablements like unified desktop and analytics, with results like:
- Improved sales conversion rate
- Improvement in collection rates
- Significant reduction in AHT, with efficiencies and breakthrough cost savings
- Doubled NPS enhancement and increased patient loyalty
High Tech/Touch: Best of Both Worlds
The optimized blend of advanced technology and personalized care creates an exceptional level of service for healthcare providers and their patients. Instead of considering high-tech and high-touch approaches as incompatible, outside experts like healthcare business process managers (BPMs) know how to combine them to elevate the patient experience. With an innovation hub and strong B2C customer care expertise gained from electronic retail and retail, the right BPMs can determine how to incorporate tools in a deliberate and strategic manner. These experts are the right resource to tap for guidance in implementing the affinity-earning individualized, high IQ/EQ experience.