AI in Healthcare: The Future of Consumer Experience and Engagement

In an era where customer service standards are continuously evolving, we are witnessing a significant change in the way companies engage with their customers. This change is being fueled by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly conversational AI.

Customer service optimization has become one of the most popular use cases for conversational AI across industries. These capabilities have the potential of bringing us closer to the long-awaited goal of personalized and seamless consumer experience and engagement within the healthcare industry.

For far too long, customer service has shouldered the responsibility of consumer engagement by being the primary point of contact in healthcare. Customer service reps often need to manage a patchwork of disjointed technologies, processes, and disparate knowledge bases while speaking to consumers which hinders their ability to deliver seamless support. To address these challenges, the healthcare industry needs to leverage innovative solutions like conversational AI to meet the evolving demands of consumers. The goal is to empower customer service resources with AI capabilities that allow them to perform tasks and activities that don’t need human interaction/intervention.

Our clients want to know how and where to start on this journey. Here are some highlights from my years of experience in implementing customer service optimization initiatives in the healthcare industry. These insights are not just about leveraging technology, but about reshaping the way we approach consumer interactions in healthcare.

Compliance & Regulatory Needs

Establish a compliance and regulations task force. Understanding the implications of bringing in AI systems and technologies at the beginning of this endeavor will save time in the long term and ensure that you are building secure and compliant systems.

Training & Knowledge

AI-powered knowledge base optimizations can reduce training and onboarding time significantly. In one of our implementations, we saw a reduction of 50% in onboarding time. The key here was starting with a set of use cases that addressed critical customer pain points and supported the customer services resources with information in one place as opposed to scattered throughout various SharePoint sites and sticky notes.

Personalization

Integrate conversational AI tools with your CRM systems. This will fast track the personalization of responses in real-time based on a member’s profile, health history and past interactions. In one of our implementations, the action completion rate improved between 5-10% for an inbound Next Best Action (NBA) solution for annual wellness visits for a population with health-related social needs.

Self-Service Tools

Develop conversation AI-based chatbots for routine questions that have capabilities to escalate to customer service professionals for complex conversations. Enrollment and onboarding-specific chatbot technologies are showing early promising results in improving retention and customer satisfaction within the healthcare industry.

Service Recovery

AI can be used to alert customer service and/or other departments by analyzing potential issues in near real-time ranging from payment processing to supplemental benefits usage.

Final Thoughts

Integrating AI into your customer service ecosystem goes beyond adopting new technology. It requires a holistic understanding of consumer needs and the challenges your team faces while trying to meet these needs. By identifying and resolving these core issues, you can improve customer interactions and engagement while simultaneously increasing the efficiency and productivity of your call center resources.

Contact us today to get started on your AI-powered initiatives.

Special thanks to co-author Bradyn Radford