Automating medical center reception services with voice AI

Automating medical center reception services with voice AI can help you deliver better patient experiences. With the demand for health care services on the rise and increased pressure on staffing costs, many businesses are looking for ways to enhance their medical services with automation that improve customer satisfaction by offering callers near instant call answering and convenient self services.

Voice automation uses conversational AI to enable your medical center to offer callers and patients self-service transactions over the phone that are convenient and intelligent enough to handle your most frequent calls without the need for the intervention of a human agent, freeing up your staff to focus on delivering specialist patient care.

Challenges for medical service centers

A medical contact center can spend countless hours taking and managing appointments, calling patients and handling frequent queries over the phone. When phone lines are busy, staff aren’t able to focus on serving onsite patients or take the time to deal with more complex patient issues over the phone. And callers may still be facing long call waiting queues.

Here are some examples of real-world caller complaints taken from Google reviews for contact centers for busy medical centers and clinics:

No matter how proficient your staff are, there will be times that the volume of calls coming into your medical center will potentially overwhelm them. Long call waiting queues and overstretched reception services lead to irate customers who can damage your hard-earned reputation. So, is there a better way of handling medical reception services than just hiring and training more staff?

How voice AI automation enhances your reception services

Voice AI offers a way to answer every call instantly with human-like interactive self services that virtually eliminate call waiting queues. Voice assistants  – automated voicebots powered with sophisticated voice AI – can not only answer calls but also enable callers to complete many common phone-based transactions without the need for human intervention. And because voice assistants are a scalable service, every call can be answered almost instantaneously

Automate your most frequent call transactions

Here are some of the most common phone-based transactions we automate for our clients at Talkie.ai:

• Taking, managing and canceling medical appointment bookings
• Enabling callers to order repeat prescriptions or get referrals
• Proactively calling patients to confirm bookings
• Providing essential information, e.g. clinic business hours, the latest vaccine advice

In fact, a voice assistant can handle a wide range of tasks using intelligent automation that will free up your human staff to deal with onsite visitors and patients, as well as more complex caller issues. Natural language understanding (NLU) technology helps the AI understand what callers are trying to do no matter how they choose the express themselves and facilitates natural conversation. Integration with your health system records can also help automate many common administrative tasks that will save your staff time.

The Talkie.ai voicebot platform integrates with your existing telephony service for seamless switching between voice assistants and human agents. Our voice assistants can also arrange call back appointments interactively with callers when all your lines are busy. The voice technology gives the voice assistant a human voice that uses a seamless blend of recorded and synthetic speech.

Read more about integrating voice AI with the Talkie.ai platform.

Relieve the pressure on your administrative staff

For a small clinic, implementing Talkie’s voice assistants at reception allowed them to reduce the time spent by human agents answering calls from 5 hours per week to just 40 minutes. Not only did this relieve administrative pressure on clinic staff but also allowed the center to increase the number of vital vaccination appointments booked by 800% just two weeks after implementing the voice assistants. Automating your booking system also means more efficient booking from customer calls, further reducing patient frustration with wait times once they arrive for their appointment.

How Medidesk enhanced their medical reception services with voice AI

Medidesk is a comprehensive platform for smart and effective management of healthcare facilities. It provides tools that support the front desk staff, marketing specialists, and management.

In order to help their clients offer improved customer service, Medidesk implemented voice assistants to help their clients relieve the administrative and time burden of high frequency call-based transactions, including:

• Appointment scheduling according to a calendar
• Appointment verification (confirmation / cancellation / rescheduling)
• Prescription and medical referrals ordering
• Providing information (e.g, how to prepare for a procedure)

As a result of implementing the voicebots, the automation was able to handle around 84% of all incoming calls with the voicebots handling an additional 27% of calls compared to just using live agents.

Read more about Medidesk’s use of voice automation.

Implementing voice AI automation at your medical service center

Implementing voice AI sounds daunting but actually you can be up and running in just a couple of weeks. Talkie’s voicebots are pre trained to deal with the most common and frequent transactions so only a short setup time is required before the voice assistants are answering calls proficiently. Once set up, the voicebots are easy to manage and configure, even without coding skills, through the all-in-one voicebot platform.

To learn more about how conversational AI can improve the performance of your contact center, download our free ebook.

Get started with your AI-assisted reception center

Our experts are here to help you get started with voice AI. We help you to choose processes for automation, deploy, train and configure your voicebots and customize them to suit your business needs. Our pre-trained business-ready voice assistants can be ready to use in just one week.