Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agents Help Optimise Vaccine Communication

The arrival of vaccines has been a blessing, but it has also caused massive surges in workload for healthcare providers.

Linoy Doron

Five9 virtual agents for vaccine communication

The arrival of vaccines has been a blessing, but it has also caused massive surges in workload for healthcare providers. In addition to having to deal with outbound vaccination communication and appointment scheduling, they also have to answer numerous incoming questions from patients across different channels – some speaking different languages. And, let’s not forget the paperwork, database updates, and other monotonous tasks.

All this means that healthcare providers must rapidly scale their outbound and inbound communication channels to keep up with the increased demand—without collapsing from exhaustion first. That's where the Five9 HIPAA-compliant vaccination communication solution comes in.

The solution makes use of the company's intelligent cloud contact center capabilities, which are a natural fit for the needs of healthcare providers. One of the most interesting aspects of this solution is the Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA), which helps streamline agents’ workload and provide self-service customer support in a cost-effective manner—without having to hire more staff members.

The IVA Factor

[caption id="attachment_37557" align="alignleft" width="200"] Jeff Woodland[/caption]

IVAs ease the workload of human agents in many ways. They have the AI and data to automate more service-related tasks than IVRs, which significantly increases call containment.

"Five9 IVAs can automate many incoming questions, schedule appointments, and send outbound alerts," says Jeff Woodland, Healthcare Marketing Director at Five9. “They can scale to demand and can often be deployed within just a few weeks."

Many healthcare providers recognize the need for IVA features such as AI-powered outbound notifications and interactions, which exceed basic SMS messaging. This is where the IVA automatically calls vaccine candidates about availability and the IVA’s conversational AI permits natural back-and-forth conversation with the bot.

The value of the AI solution deepens with its ability to access an organization's calendar to book, cancel, or reschedule appointments. In addition, Five9 IVA can connect to mapping data and guide patients to the closest vaccination center, answer FAQs, and give status updates regarding test results and eligibility. Finally, in cases where AI is not sufficient, IVAs can smoothly transition work to human agents to solve more complex problems.

"Thanks to their ability to leverage natural language processing, IVAs can ask callers open-ended questions, which eliminates the need for lengthy IVR menus,” Woodland says. “This results in more accurate routing to the agent who can best assist the caller."

Numerous Integrations and Expansive Language Support

The ability of an IVA to facilitate a self-service interaction becomes exponentially more powerful when integrated with an organization's back-end systems. This is why Five9 IVAs are designed to allow easy and flexible integrations with the most popular CRM and CPaaS platforms.

"Integrations that once may have been complex and convoluted are made much easier using our platform," says Woodland. "Our IVA Task Library includes pre-built connectors to popular CRM and CPaaS platforms. We also take pride in quickly integrating with customer-specific APIs, which previously may have taken months to complete."

The Five9 vaccine communication solution provides multilingual support, which means healthcare providers catering to a multilingual patient base or providers located in non-English-speaking countries can use it without hesitation.

"Our solution is global first, and one of the major benefits of our IVA is that it’s multilingual," Woodland says.

"Five9 IVAs provide support for more than 125 languages for speech recognition and 30 text-to-speech languages"

While no business can afford to overlook IVAs today, the pandemic has especially accelerated the acceptance of AI in healthcare practices. The ideal formula required to gain the desired patient experience and provider efficiency seems to be a mix self-service chatbots, conversational AI, omnichannel communication, database integration, and the careful hand-off to staff from the IVA.