When time is tight and resource is thin, technology so often steps up to the plate.
Automation is a fine example.
Communicating a message; sharing information; answering a question: in today’s always-on world, these are 24/7 activities.
Consumer demand far outstrips organizations’ abilities to assign a human agent to all of those interactions.
In many vertical sectors, the sheer volume of day-to-day operational communications required is simply too great.
In others, the mundane (albeit essential) nature of the communication fails to justify the resultant drain on what is often an already-stretched human workforce.
Healthcare is a potent example.
Doctors, nurses, and clinicians of every kind are the most valuable human resource there is.
And yet, in many cases, their time is taken up communicating with patients rather than treating them.
Setting appointments, sending reminders, reporting test results, issuing prescriptions, chasing ‘no shows’.
Mundane-yet-essential – perfect for an automated approach.
“To have someone manually call a patient costs as much as $3 a call; an automated call can cost as little as $0.16 – that’s pretty simple math,” says Byron Yu, Vice President of Healthcare Solutions at global enterprise-class contact center and IVR provider ComputerTalk, whose ‘ice’ communications platform is transforming the sector.
“However, the financials are just one compelling benefit. The time automation gives back to clinicians to focus fully on caring for patients is also hugely significant.
“There are many reasons why hospitals need to proactively communicate with patients and we know that many of those communications can be delivered automatically without compromising standards of care.
“The efficiencies that then flow from that approach are truly transformative; saving money, better-leveraging human resources, and, ultimately, improving patient outcomes.”
In Computer Talk’s case, its ‘ice’ contact center solution can be configured in myriad ways to address multiple use cases.
It can call patients simply to impart information and it can ask patients questions which then inform and support next-step pathways and actions.
“The obvious and main use case is communicating appointment reminders, but it extends far beyond that to things like processing cancellations or issuing vital public health messages about seasonal disease outbreaks and vaccinations,” says Yu.
“Before automation, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic for example, a certified nurse had to reach out and call patients to confirm they didn’t have symptoms or that they hadn’t travelled in the last 14 days.
“Now, for a specific campaign, we can call patients automatically, ask them a series of questions, automatically capture and process their responses and, depending on the answers, play them a message which provides information on what they should do next.
“A report is then automatically generated to let clinicians know which of the 2,000 people the hospital may have called that day require some kind of further, more focused intervention.”
The standardised, consistent nature of such automated messaging is beneficial in and of itself.
