Why an Answering Service is Critical to the Medical Field During COVID-19

Outsourcing medical answering services for the medical industry is not a new trend; it has been a widely used option now for decades. However, as COVID-19 spreads globally, health care workers on the frontlines are at risk of acquiring this dangerous disease. The medical industry has been overwhelmed with this pandemic and it is an “all-hands-on-deck” time right now.

Let’s take a look at why and how outsourcing an answering service is beneficial for you and your staff in the medical industry.

What Does Outsourcing an Answering Service Entail?

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the medical field has been taxed nearly to the breaking point. Given that we haven’t seen the end of this worldwide pandemic, frontline personnel is poised to continue offering around-the-clock medical services in an already-strained environment with no end. With the scenario that medical professionals are immersed in, many staff members are unable to deal with the high volume of calls that come into doctor’s offices, hospitals, and other medical facilities. on top of that, staff are out-of-office due to self-quarantine, illness, or vacation with a backup of messages and calls creates a nightmare scenario.

When you outsource your answering service, a well-trained experienced agent is available to answer calls, much like your front desk reception would. They can also answer common questions and forward necessary calls to medical staff. Depending on your practice and customer needs, with current conditions, you could save hundreds of hours each week by using an answering service. Answering service professionals will work with your desired call overflow and ensure all necessary calls make it through to your desk.

Benefits of Outsourcing Answering Services

Enhanced Customer Support

We are living in an unprecedented time and each one of your patients is facing the extremes of lockdown, social distancing and stay-at-home orders. It is crucial to offer alternative methods for communication between patients and medical offices beyond physically visiting. Ensuring availability for patients to call in and receive answers to their concerns and questions is more critical now than ever.

When a pandemic or national crisis hits, there are no regular “office hours” for most medical personnel. Patients need to call in at all hours of the day and night. With emergency rooms already filled and urgent care greatly strained, calling your office might be the only recourse available when a medical question arises. Due to this, patients need the ability to connect with a live person 24/7 to address concerns. 

While outsourcing to an answering service will save you time in answering phone calls throughout the day, answering services go far beyond taking phone calls. The professionals you hire can also schedule appointments for your patients and set reminders on shared calendars. An answering service can set appointments and send reminders to your patients via text messages, email, telephone and smartphone app.

Cost-Effective 

An answering service can save your medical office thousands of dollars. When you hire an answering service, you save expenses related to:

• Training
• Salaries
• Benefits Packages
• Paid Time Off
• Overtime
• Equipment
• Additional Office Space

Higher Productivity and Efficiency

Time management for medical professionals is crucial. If you’re not on break, then you are either helping patients or attending to stacks of paperwork at the end of each day. Taking extra phone calls, which can be efficiently answered by someone else, uses up your valuable time instead of maximizing the hours in your day.

By hiring an answering service, you’ll be able to devote time to the most important tasks in your day. Your staff can focus on their patients, paperwork, and answering calls that need individual attention. Rather than taking every call that comes in, you’ll be able to prioritize calls according to the level of importance and urgency. You’ll never miss a vital call that needs your attention. You can assure your patients are receiving excellent customer service and professional care when you’re not able to answer the phone.

Prepared for Emergency Situations

During a crisis, such as the pandemic we face, or a national disaster, outsourcing your answering service enables you to keep phone lines open 24/7 for patients and employees. When medical crises hit, medical offices are the first to become overwhelmed by the influx of visits, calls, and requests. By hiring an answering service, you do not only maximize your efficiency during normal conditions, but you also prepare your office and your employees to handle the crisis more effectively. Ensure your office stays available for patient and employee call-ins and make sure your phone lines never get jammed, no matter the situation you face.

Better Relationship with Patients and a Professional Reputation

When you combine instant 24/7 availability, more time to dedicate to your patients, and high-quality care and customer service, you provide a much more enjoyable and satisfying patient experience. The more efficiently you run your medical offices, the more efficiently you’ll be able to see your patients. You’ll also be able to spend more time with them since you won’t need to dedicate any more time than necessary to answering the phones. 

With increased efficiency and less wait time, your staff will be able to focus on the patients who need your services. They will also feel less pressed for time and can provide a more peaceful and calm patient experience. The more time and efficiency you can introduce to your offices, the more you can focus on current patients, engage with staff, and take on new patients as you free up extra time. No matter what a day may bring, you can rest easy knowing every patient under your care has 24/7 access to a professional who can answer their question, calm their fears, schedule an appointment, or connect them with appropriate staff.

Answering Services: A Medical Professional’s Lifeline

Outsourcing answering services can help your offices avoid the influx of calls and taking hours away from staff that has more pressing matters at hand. During a pandemic or other crisis, outsourcing can provide numerous benefits for your office and your employees.

2021 Buyers Guide

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Artificial Intelligence

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1.)

Acqueon Technologies Inc. Acqueon's AI-driven conversational engagement software enables sales, marketing and service organizations to engage in emotionally connected dialogs with customers via their channel of choice for significantly improved results. The Acqueon suite adds multichannel campaign management, contact center analytics, desktop, and CRM connectors for your contact center software of choice, including Amazon Connect, Cisco, Nice inContact, and Twilio. Acqueon conversational engagement software leverages the Acqueon IQ platform to aggregate data from the various applications, assemble rich customer contexts, and drive next-best-action using powerful statistical and predictive models.

2.)

Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation.

3.)

Aktify Aktify Aktify is personalizing interactions between brands and consumers at scale with machine learning. It allows contact centers to offload their leads that are not responding to agents to Aktify where AI will be used to follow up through SMS until the customer is ready to talk to an agent. Aktify produces something out of nothing, as typically unresponsive leads are not focused on. https://aktify.com

4.)

Balto Software Inc Real-time call guidance and post call data analytics Balto Software is a provider of real-time intelligent call support and coaching. Our software solution leverages artificial intelligence to listen to both sides of a call and deliver mission-critical information and feedback to sales representatives immediately. Our solution is fully customizable and our current customers include sales teams and customer service groups in sectors ranging from debt collections to healthcare and home improvement.

5.)	Cognigy Cognigy.AI Cognigy.AI is a Conversational AI Automation platform that enables enterprises to easily create and operate AI-powered virtual agents to automatically handle calls and chats from customers and employees. https://www.cognigy.com/

6.)

Consilium Software Consilium UniChAI™ Contacting customer service can often be a challenging experience with waiting on hold forever being one of the top reasons for client dissatisfaction. Furthermore, repeating information that was already provided to a chat agent, and generally spending too much time getting answers to questions can all lead to a lengthy, and often frustrating, customer journey. With unlimited scalability, enterprise-level security, and best-in-class data privacy features, UniChAI™ is a conversational AI platform which is playing an important role in improving some of these aspects of customer experience (CX) through chatbots – which are intelligent and natural-language virtual assistants meant to augment a c... (read more)Contacting customer service can often be a challenging experience with waiting on hold forever being one of the top reasons for client dissatisfaction. Furthermore, repeating information that was already provided to a chat agent, and generally spending too much time getting answers to questions can all lead to a lengthy, and often frustrating, customer journey. With unlimited scalability, enterprise-level security, and best-in-class data privacy features, UniChAI™ is a conversational AI platform which is playing an important role in improving some of these aspects of customer experience (CX) through chatbots – which are intelligent and natural-language virtual assistants meant to augment a contact center’s agent-assisted service. These chatbots are able to recognize human text chat and speech and understand the caller’s intent without requiring the caller to converse in specific phrases. Callers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment, without the need to speak to an agent. UniChAI™ is designed to deliver a personalized customer experience across any application, device, or channel, with an advanced bot and virtual agent to recognize customer intentions. While most chatbots try to mimic human interactions, UniChAI™ is more than a chatbot – it keeps interactions intuitive and repeatable, using consistent features and helping enterprises to answer and resolve a high percentage of their routine customer inquiries without any human intervention, resulting in increased productivity and efficiency, and certainly a shorter waiting time in queue. UniChAI™ allows contact centers to create intelligent conversational chatbots, and turn their contact flows into natural conversations that provide personalized experiences for callers. Using the most advanced AI technology, a chatbot powered by UniChAI™ can be attached to a non-voice contact flow to recognize the intent of the caller, ask follow-up questions, and provide answers. UniChAI™ maintains context and manages the dialogue, dynamically adjusting the responses based on the conversation, so that contact centers can perform common tasks and address many customer inquiries through self-service interaction with the bot. Benefits at a glance • Personalizing the customer experience: UniChAI™ serves as a virtual assistant, providing real-time context and advice to the agent, making customer and agent interactions more effective as the most relevant customer interaction history is presented to the agent. • 24x7 availability: Customer service is all about convenience, that is services being available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. UniChAI™ chatbot can deliver self-service to clients round the clock, by filling in those hours when your contact center is not staffed. • Improving Customer Satisfaction: Using the advanced capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), UniChAI™ understands the context and sentiment of the customer query to respond back quickly, thus, reducing operational costs and resulting in greater levels of customer satisfaction. • Easy to Use: UniChAI™ provides an easy-to-use console to create chatbot or conversational interfaces in minutes. • Seamless 3rd-Party Integrations: UniChAI™ provides built-in integrations with 3rd party CRM’s or applications using REST APIs. • Cost-effective: With UniChAI™ there are no upfront costs or minimum fees. Contact centers and technology partners can avail Consilium’s pay-as-you-go pricing, which makes it a cost-effective way to step into conversational AI capability.

7.)

ContactEngine ContactEngine ContactEngine connects conversations across entire customer journeys with One Voice delivering exceptional CX and demonstrable business value for organizations around the world. ContactEngine provides proactive customer service by helping your customers through the channels they’re most comfortable with. It aims to contact your customer before your customer contacts you. https://www.contactengine.com/

8.)

Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.

9.)

eGain Corporation Automate the routine and boring and augment the interesting with eGain AI (Artificial Intelligence). eGain is a pioneer in AI for contact center customer service and customer engagement and has developed cutting-edge technology as also best practices and proven use-cases over the last two decades. eGain’s patented Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) technology, called Guided Help, is a simple but powerful AI technology used to find answers to customer issues, and for process guidance and decision making. Along with Knowledge and Analytics, Artificial Intelligence forms the core of the eGain Customer Engagement Hub platform and its omnichannel and digital-first capability.

10.)

eGain Corporation eGain Knowledge+AI eGains omnichannel customer engagement solutions power digital-first experiences for leading brands. Infused with AI, machine learning, knowledge and analytics, our award-winning platform helps clients automate and optimize customer journeys via virtual assistance, messaging, social, mobile, web, and contact centers. https://www.egain.com/

11.)

Emmersion Automated Language Testing Emmersion offers automated assessments to quickly and accurately test speaking, writing, and grammar fluency in 9 languages and counting. We help contact centers improve CSAT scores by screening for top talent and retaining top performers. https://emmersion.ai/products

12.)

Eudata Convy.AI Scale up your business using Convy AI, the artificial intelligence that acts like a human helping enterprises to better interact with their clients and agents to be focused on the value added transactions. Convy.AI is used to support, entertain and simplify the experience of million of customers every month. Convy.AI understand natural language (but supports also button based UIs), simply integrate many front end (chat, email, whatsapp, IVR, Alexa, google home, ...) and it's zero code admin interface enables everybody to manage conversations.

13.)

ExecVision ExecVision is a conversation intelligence platform built to drive human behavior change which positively impacts individual, team, and organization performance. The software ingests, transcribes, and analyzes conversations to provide actionable insights for coaching, upskilling, and more informed decision making. Sales, QA, customer success and support teams use ExecVision to create a consistent experience across the customer journey.

14.)

Koopid KoopidAI Most customer-facing interfaces make it the end user’s job to figure out how to navigate and find their way to where they need to be. This is true of websites and mobile apps as much as it of touch-tone IVRs. The interface is usually designed for the most generic of uses; and because making changes is expensive and time-consuming, these interfaces tend to be inflexible with regards to evolving times, use cases or user needs. AI can help create user interfaces that are adaptable and personalized. Advances in Conversational AI make it possible to interact with the user in natural language. Many IVRs are being re-configured to work this way and businesses are also introducing text-based cha... (read more)Most customer-facing interfaces make it the end user’s job to figure out how to navigate and find their way to where they need to be. This is true of websites and mobile apps as much as it of touch-tone IVRs. The interface is usually designed for the most generic of uses; and because making changes is expensive and time-consuming, these interfaces tend to be inflexible with regards to evolving times, use cases or user needs. AI can help create user interfaces that are adaptable and personalized. Advances in Conversational AI make it possible to interact with the user in natural language. Many IVRs are being re-configured to work this way and businesses are also introducing text-based chatbots. An even more powerful technique enables AI to manipulate the visual aspects of the user interface as well. Imagine interacting with what seems like a just-in-time mobile app or web-site, created just for you - the user - and optimized for exactly the problem you are trying to address at this moment. A Conversational UI, as it were. Deploying Conversational UI’s can dramatically improve rates of self-service, reduce call volumes and greatly simplify the customer experience. Further, integrating a Conversational UI into a natural language IVR and providing a seamless experience across channels can enable intuitive and personalized experiences that are truly delightful. And in an era where customer loyalty is closely co-related with the quality of experience, that is a game changer for the business as well.

15.)	LivePerson Automate up to 70% of messaging conversations on your website, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp and more. LivePerson has a complete solution to create, manage, and optimize bots for businesses of all sizes.

16.)

Mediatel Data Srl Contact Center Solution AI-Driven Mediatel Research and Development team developed Artificial Intelligence Engine, part of the Contact Center platform, suitable for vocal interactions using Natural Language Processing modules and digital interactions, used in chat sessions, for chat bots, email management for email dispatching or text messages.

17.)	MFE International Oracle Digital Assistant The next generation state-of-the-art text and voice AI Chatbot . No coding required. Reduce call volumes by 30-60%. Reduce waiting times

18.)

Navedas CSAT.AI CSAT.AI Scores Better Customer Service with Gamified Guidance! CSAT.AI lets agents know when they’re on the right track by predicting CSAT scores in real time (when they’re fixable!) - because most customers don’t leave feedback, they just leave. CSAT.AI measures if the customer’s questions were answered, how empathetic was your agent and the customer’s sentiment to predict a CSAT score without pesky surveys, all in real time. QA is modernized and the CX game is improved - no matter if your agents are at their home or your office.

19.)

OpsTel Services SPEED & PLUS The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Perfor... (read more)The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Performance Monitoring & PLUS provides a single interface, where operations teams no longer have to rely on HR, IT or any other organization to administer agent profile data across multiple technologies in the contact center. The PLUS solution allows for simplified provisioning & maintenance of agent profile data reducing processing time from days, weeks or months in LESS THAN 10 MINUTES! The PLUS features: *Agent Provisioning Cycle Time Reduced from Days/Weeks to 10 Minutes or Less *Fully Automated Agent Onboarding / Updating / Maintaining / and Offboarding of Agent Profiles (Identity, Access, Utilization) *Overlays and Enhances Existing Contact Center Solution Set *Enables Operations Staff to Maintain all Aspects of Managing an Agent’s Profile through “Single Pane of Glass” *Supports Multi-Faceted Agent Profile Attribute Configuration Requirements; e.g. Union Rules, Seniority Dates, Etc. *Detailed Agent Profile Audit Trails

20.)

Vads VADS Smart Chat Assistance VADS Smart Chat Assistant is a computer program that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. VADS Smart Chat Assistant is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that simulates interactive human conversation using key pre-calculated user phrases and auditory, visual, and text-based signals. Benefits : - Reducing operational workload - Increase customer engagement and customer experience - Save on operating costs - Provide insight into the customer

 

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