Top healthcare contact center trends used with Amazon Connect

Healthcare contact centers are most often the first point of patient contact and are typically tasked with handling a wide range of functions. They answer everything from call routing to scheduling appointments, triage, admissions, referrals, and billing questions.

However, many struggle to meet these needs, and additional demands of the global pandemic and transitioning to a remote or hybrid workforce have tested their limits even further. To be successful, it is critically important that healthcare providers continuously assess the evolving needs of their patients.

In this blog, we will discuss the top trends and healthcare call center best practices to consider. We’ll also see how Amazon Connect helps address your patients’ desire for additional services and more personalized engagement.

Amazon Connect eliminates business interruption

Hospital call centers and other healthcare businesses have recently learned about the benefits of a unified, cloud-based solution. One primary benefit is how imperative they are for maintaining business continuity during a crisis.

Cloud-based solutions such as Amazon Connect provide the agility and flexibility needed to quickly support a remote workforce, while continuing to manage patient service operations. In fact, many that shifted from on-premise to the cloud saw improvements in customer service, agent efficiency, and productivity.

Other benefits of medical contact centers integrated with Amazon Connect include:

• Greater scalability to quickly accommodate fluctuations in call volume
• Reduction in internal IT resources by outsourcing implementation, hosting, operations, and maintenance
• Access to a better talent pool that can work from anywhere
• Quick implementation of new workflows to adapt to changing legislative and emerging compliance requirements.

Omnichannel communication drives a practical patient journey

Patients want to reach out on the channel of their choice. On one instance, this might be email, the next, phone, and the next, social media or chat. Whatever channel they choose, they want the experience to be consistent and personal.

To ensure this, health call centers must be able to seamlessly access patient information and history – eliminating the need for patients to provide the same information over and over again.

Omnichannel communication also helps healthcare contact centers deliver an experiential journey tailored to each patient. This is a core functionality of Amazon Connect and helps discover the true value that a patient derives based on their experience.

AWS’ AI and ML services enhance patient care

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) services provide ready-made intelligence for your applications and workflows that provide the right information to both agents and patients at the right time.

AI drives better communication and resolution through chatbots. When done right with Amazon Connect, it can help improve accuracy and enable skills-based routing, and provide live guidance to agents during calls. Patients benefit from a more personalized experience and faster responses to their requests.

Amazon Connect’s advanced self service enhances efficiency

Patients don’t always need to – or want to – talk with an agent. Self-service options offered through Amazon Connect are the preferred level of engagement for some patients. They also free up agents to address cases with more complex issues.

Some examples of patient self-service applications used in healthcare call centers include appointment confirmations, account contact information changes, answers to FAQs, and educational tutorials on health concerns and lifestyle changes.

Patients are constantly seeking a broader range of services and more personalized relationships with healthcare providers. Those organizations that adopt contact center best practices will be the ones that thrive in this ever-changing healthcare landscape.

In my next blog in this series, I will review the latest Amazon Connect technologies that leverage rich data sources to attract new patients, driving frictionless patient outcomes, enhanced loyalty, and increased satisfaction.

To learn how Capgemini’s Digital Customer Operations for Healthcare solution enables you to identify and eliminate bottlenecks that impact customer satisfaction, scalability, and efficiencies, to drive frictionless patient and member experiences across the healthcare ecosystem, contact: philip.bush@capgemini.com

Philip Bush is the Amazon Connect SME & GTM Lead in North America focusing on cloud contact center modernization across all business sectors.