The future of healthcare contact centers

Member care and comfort lie at the very heart of the ever-changing healthcare ecosystem. In an industry that values exceptional experiences above all else, healthcare contact centers play a pivotal role in ensuring seamless communication, efficient services, and personalized engagements. 

However, to effectively fulfill their duties and to ensure members always receive the best experiences, healthcare centers must now evolve, embracing the latest innovative technologies the industry has to offer. In this article, we’ll delve into the latest trends in the healthcare contact center landscape, the power of next-gen contact centers in driving seamless experiences, the role of AI in ensuring personalized engagement, and what the future has in store for this growing industry.

The role of modern healthcare contact centers

In essence, modern healthcare contact centers serve as the bridge between patients and integral medical support and assistance. Unlike normal call centers that just handle incoming and outgoing calls, these contact centers generally provide seamless omnichannel experiences encompassing social media channels, SMS, emails, and more.

As patients increasingly demand tailored services and streamlined processes, the role of these contact centers has evolved into a linchpin of the healthcare ecosystem. Modern healthcare contact centers provide a plethora of services, ranging from scheduling appointments to providing medical advice, refilling prescriptions, enhancing customer engagement, driving efficient communications, and providing telehealth support.

Embracing the tech of tomorrow

As the wave of digitization sweeps across the healthcare industry, contact centers must become member-centric, prioritizing personalized experiences through touchless customer service and a resilient digital-first approach.

With transformational modern innovations such as AI, cloud technologies, and data-driven analytics entering the healthcare sector, contact centers are undergoing massive transitions.

Some of the most prominent recent industry trends include leveraging AI-powered conversational chatbots to efficiently handle patient queries, telehealth integration to enable remote consultations and triage patients, speech analytics and voice AI to provide customized responses, generative AI for self-service features, and omnichannel experiences to retain customers and boost satisfaction.

Next-gen contact centers that upgrade themselves to deliver AI-driven experiences can ease the lives of members, providers, employer groups, agents, care managers, and stakeholders alike. We, at Virtusa have been a part of this transformation journey for various contact centers and have registered improvement of CSAT by 30%, NPS by 28%, AHT by 56%, and TAT by 20%. Similarly, organizations can achieve 80% first call resolutions (FCR) and potential 30% reductions in infrastructure costs.

Unlocking seamless experiences with next-gen contact centers

Next-gen contact centers embracing the latest technology can usher in a new age of customer engagement and experiences. Powered by actionable insights, real-time decision-making, and contextual knowledge, customers can transition from siloed interactions to coherent journeys where they are treated as a person and not just a customer. Similarly, contact center agents can move from using multiple desktop apps to converged workspaces and from asking for help to possessing contextual knowledge.

Let us take a closer look at how Virtusa helps create next-gen contact centers to deliver seamless omnichannel experiences:

• Receive: By transitioning to AI-driven next-gen contact centers, all stakeholders can receive a 360-degree omnichannel solution that combines a plethora of channels such as social media apps, telephony, email, SMS, and IVRs. This includes integrating seamlessly with the client’s CRM and cloud-hosted solutions that allow remote and hybrid models. 
• Engage: Customer service providers can leverage AI and natural language processing to identify, segment, match, and deliver exceptional user engagements. Some of the capabilities that can be realized include intent-based service categorization, caller verification using unique identities, personalized chatbots, self-service assistance, virtual queuing management, and much more.
  
• Interact: Next-gen contact centers can leverage modern trends and solutions to boost their interactions massively. The capabilities to drive meaningful interactions range from customer 360 views to one-click operations, voice-enabled AI and sentiment analysis, the next-best action advisor, integrated systems and API adoption, and smart closure using GenAI.
  
• Evaluate: With the power of AI, automation, and analytics, next-gen contact centers can gather analytics to refine workflows, analyze contact center performance metrics to identify areas for improvement, and leverage dashboards and reporting tools to present metrics and KPIs effectively. 

The transformational power of AI technologies

Across the entire journey, from customer communication to providing results and solutions, AI has a critical role to play. As soon as customers provide information through an intake channel, AI can be used in the form of conversational AI, chatbots, email bots, and digital mailrooms to resolve issues, reduce call times, reduce the need for follow-ups, increase customer satisfaction, and even smartly redirect calls to live agents.

Moreover, with the power of Virtusa’s powerful AI solution, healthcare centers can eradicate long wait times and usher in an age of highly personalized customer service. Virtusa’s Voice AI solution can be leveraged to identify and present next-best actions, ensure compliances are followed, find and present best knowledge articles, and capture and fill in form details. Similarly, AI can be utilized to generate personalized 1:1 experiences through predictive analytics. This can yield immense benefits such as increased revenue, lower churn, improved customer experiences, and higher customer value.

The future of healthcare contact centers powered by Virtusa

As a leading solution provider, Virtusa helped a major enterprise digitally transform its contact center business, resulting in an astonishing 95% improvement in customer satisfaction. We helped the client by setting up a CoE, re-strategizing their applications, reducing technical debt, re-platforming strategic contact center apps, and providing thought leadership in AI. Some of the key benefits achieved were a 192-hour reduction in system downtime, 22 system outages prevented, $1.7 million in savings, and 74% average time savings through API optimization.

It is evident that the future of healthcare contact centers is undeniably shaped by innovation and technology. As patient expectations continue to evolve, these contact centers must adapt to provide seamless, personalized experiences across various channels. By embracing next-gen technologies such as AI, cloud computing, and data analytics, healthcare contact centers are poised to revolutionize the healthcare industry, ensuring that patient care remains at the forefront of every interaction.