At the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, one healthcare organization wanted to rapidly understand the social and economic factors impacting their customers’ ability to get the care they needed – without conducting another survey. They sought insight into how effectively their team was demonstrating their brand promises. Were agents responding to customers with empathy and humanity during this time? Were they delivering on the brand values being expressed in marketing? Were they building a human-centered brand?
Authenticx in Action
With Authenticx, the organization was able to lean in and listen for the brand values and detractors customers were expressing organically, without being asked. This provided the organization with insight into what was and wasn’t working, relative to their customer journey.
Social Determinants of Health
By April 2020, the organization knew that coronavirus was being mentioned in over 25% of calls. Customers were proactively talking about COVID-19’s impact on their lives and their relationship to the organization without being prompted.
Customers were expressing significant financial hardship and an inability to pay their bills. They also shared concerns around how they could continue to follow doctor’s orders if they didn’t have access to healthcare.
The organization was experiencing:
- Cancellation of future healthcare appointments
- Abandonment of care plans
- High readmission rates
Agent Preparedness
Through Authenticx’s qualitative analytics and audio montages, our client understood the customer’s side of the conversation, but they also gained insight into the agent’s side, too.
What they found was that their agents were scoring lowest in the area they cared about most – relating to the customer. Why? Because no one could have prepared them for the pain being expressed by the customers on the other end of the phone. Customers were expressing really traumatic stories and agents weren’t prepared for the weight and heaviness of what they were hearing.
Agents needed more support, training, and guidance on how to respond when someone says they lost a parent to COVID-19 or that they’ve been waiting for over a month for their unemployment check.
The entire world was reeling and responding in real-time to the coronavirus. These agents were no different than the rest of us and needed support too.
Results
After listening at scale with Authenticx, the organization knew what changes they needed to make to best serve their customers during this global pandemic and refocus on a human-centered brand. Smart Sample was leveraged to perform a deep dive into these calls.
The organization saw the following results & outcomes:
- Revised their collections and payment policies to proactively introduce payment plan options, resulting in improved speed-to-payment metrics
- Retrained their agents to better address the current climate, resulting in increased first call resolution and decreased total call volume across billing lines
- Started providing tips about disease prevention and mitigation on outbound calls, as a way to be part of the solution
- Expanded medical transportation program
Based on those changes, the organization was able to increase agent empathy scores by an average of 5 points within 60 days.
See Authenticx in Action
Learn more about how Authenticx analyzes customer conversations to surface recurring trends in this two-minute video.
About Authenticx
Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes.
Want to learn more? Contact us!
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