Contact Centers of Top Healthcare Player Medscan Group Boost Productivity and Improve Patient Satisfaction by Using edna’s Chat Center Solution
Medscan Group of Companies, a leading healthcare player, sought to find a digital solution that would help it attend to patients’ needs in near real-time.
The Client
The Medscan Group has 28 centers spread across the CIS region, with each specializing in different services. The group also includes an official branch of the Israeli Hadassah Hospital.
Challenges
Prompt Query Resolution: The group’s existing contact centers were facing many difficulties in managing patient communication efficiently. When patients reached out, many were put on hold for long before an agent could respond to them. Also, as the contact centers were siloed – lacking a unified database that contained a patient’s entire care history, in-person visits, and online interactions – support agents struggled to identify their patients when they reached out and address their concerns. Agents would typically have to switch between systems or ring up other centers to get necessary information, increasing wait times and patient frustration significantly.
Lack of Patient-Friendly Communication Options: These days, patients, like other consumers, prefer to reach out to providers over messaging rather than phone calls or emails. They also want to be able to book appointments virtually with minimum fuss. The group lacked chat and messaging-based channels where patients could book, re-schedule, or cancel their appointments in a quick and pain free way. Booking appointments over phone was a hassle both for patients as well as agents, who were already bogged down by huge call volumes. Also, the whole process was more prone to errors.
Agent Productivity and Operational Efficiency: As teams at different centers were not connected, there was no streamlined collaboration and communication between them. Also, agent workload was not equally distributed, which hampered operations. Moreover, the group did not have any mechanism that would measure agent productivity, customer satisfaction, and so on. This lack of visibility affected its ability to make data-backed improvements to its operations and prevented it from understanding and addressing patient pain points effectively.
To set things right, the group set out to digitally transform its contact centers. What it wanted to accomplish was to offer patients text-based communication channels where they could reach out and be heard instantly. It wanted to facilitate pain-free patient registration and query resolution over chat.
Solution
The Medscan group realized the need to introduce new digital channels for communication as well as to manage all its communication across channels from a single, unified interface. As a first step, it introduced live chat, instant messengers, and social networks as channels where patients could connect with them. This increased patient convenience significantly.
To unify its multi-center communication, the group selected edna’s chat center solution. To start with, the chat center unified the chat platforms of its three leading clinics. It collected and stored the patients’ entire care history and conversations from different channels – whether it was chat rooms on websites, a corporate account on WhatsApp – in a single window. This enabled support agents to gain a holistic view of the customer and process their requests more swiftly.
The chat center served another vital function – it intelligently routed queries from multiple channels to the most suitable agent in real time depending on the nature of the patient’s request and agent availability. This ensured optimal utilization of an agent’s time, increasing the overall productivity of the team. Also, queries were routed to the most qualified agent, which ensured faster resolution.
The chat center also generated comprehensive agent activity reports, customer rating reports, and messaging channel reports, which helped managers take data-backed decisions to improve processes.
Results
With the introduction of chat platforms, the group was benefitted in several ways.
- 33 percent of patients chose chat as the primary channel for communicating with the group’s clinics
- Average patient service time was reduced to only 5 minutes as agents had full visibility into a patient’s past history whenever they reached out on chat and could help them out quickly
- First response time was reduced to only 60 seconds due to automated query segmentation and routing across different contact centers
- Online appointment booking over chat was introduced
- 24/7 support was made available via bots that could greet customers, answer simple FAQs even when agents were unavailable
- Patient satisfaction improved as they could be served on a channel of their choice. Managers could monitor operator KPIs, CSI, and contact center load easily and make data-driven improvements
Results at a Glance
33% client
interactions on chat
60 seconds
First response time
5 minutes
Average handling time
The group was able to become more patient-centric and provide them a whole new level of convenience while boosting its own operational efficiency.