As it grew, Affordable Care was keen to improve patient interactions and streamline appointment scheduling for more than 500 affiliated dentists across the United States. But the company hit obstacles as it scaled up.
“With our process of doing 10 to 15 QA [quality assurance] sessions, per month per agent across a team of over 100 employees, we couldn’t effectively track interactions and identify areas for improvement,” says Emmanuel Noyola, Director of Patient Services at Affordable Care, whose department handles customer interactions, appointment scheduling, and follow-ups for affiliated dentists.
Unlocking Insights for Better Interactions
To improve call-handling and increase efficiency, Noyola’s team integrated Observe.AI into their operations. Using the platform, they built ‘Moments’ around patient call flows, letting them better analyze interactions and gain insights for boosting operational efficiency.
Moments are key instances in an agent’s interaction with a customer that reveal insights and trends. By integrating their QA form into the Observe.AI Conversation Intelligence platform, the team identified interactions that correlated with higher patient scheduling and show-up rates, including appointment offers, paraphrasing, and probing questions.
To explore the impact of paraphrasing, Noyola’s team tracked Moments usage and conversion rates across teams and individual agents. They showed agents that using Moments frequently contributed to their success by recognizing top performers and providing targeted coaching to those needing to refine their skills.
“For example, an agent might typically have used paraphrasing in 50–60% of monitored calls,” says Noyola. “By demonstrating the impact of increasing this by even just 10%, we can show the agent how it correlates with improved outcomes.”
Boosting Performance and Revenue
This coaching approach increased agents’ performance. Comparing a five-month period in 2023 to 2024, Affordable Care’s appointment scheduling rate rose from 48.4% to 54%.
“Given that we handle 1.5 million calls annually, this increase significantly contributes to revenue,” notes Noyola. Indeed, higher scheduling rates generated $8 million in incremental revenue during the period.
Better Coaching, Greater Results
Building on this success, the team has rolled out a coaching strategy focused on behaviors rather than traditional metrics. These sessions target specific skills for each agent to enhance their call-handling skills. The team uses Observe.AI to track coaching implementation, record feedback, and monitor live performance results.
With this approach, agents who underwent refresher training saw an 80% improvement in essential performance areas, such as scheduling and customer satisfaction.
The team also overhauled their onboarding process, adopting behaviors observed in top performers. This change has helped new hires achieve proficiency quicker. Since implementing the new approach, newly onboarded agents have consistently outperformed their more experienced peers, achieving a 3-8% higher scheduling rate.
As Noyola adds, “We’ve shifted our focus from chasing percentages to targeting poor agent habits. This change has improved the patient experience, and made it more personalized and effective.”
Increased Customer Satisfaction, Referrals
Affordable Care’s focus on enhancing the patient experience has led to higher customer satisfaction. Through better monitoring, data collection, and coaching, the company has seen notable improvements in post-interaction survey scores and customer referrals.
In the first four months of 2024, Affordable Care’s average post-interaction survey score reached 94.2%, an 8% increase over previous figures. The willingness to recommend score also rose by 5.4%.
“Customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend are extremely important to us,” says Noyola. “These scores reflect how well we treat our customers over the phone before we pass the baton to the clinic.”
Proactive Patient Call Handling
As Affordable Care expands its network of affiliated dental practices, it is integrating more data with the Observe.AI platform by including call information from clinics. This will broaden its scope of analysis to cover patient interactions and other metrics across both its contact center and clinics’ environments.
Likewise, the company is deploying Observe.AI’s real-time coaching and agent assistance features to provide immediate support and guidance to agents during calls.
“Our teams are already doing a great job using the Observe.AI platform,” says Noyola. “Implementing Real-Time Agent Assist would bring even more substantial performance improvements.”
Discover how Affordable Care transformed its patient interactions with Observe.AI. Read the full customer success story.
