Affordable Care began its journey when two doctors in North Carolina saw how difficult it was for people to get tooth replacement services. Driven by the belief that everyone deserves to love their smile, they founded Affordable Care, an organization that supports dental practices and specializes in tooth replacement solutions. The company’s commitment to customer-centered care led to a partnership with Observe.AI to transform its patient service.
The patient service department handles customer interactions, appointment scheduling, and follow-through for more than 500 affiliated dentists. Customers reaching out are often in pain or feel uneasy and even embarrassed, particularly those needing tooth replacement implants or dentures due to accidents, neglect, or other reasons.
“Having the best interactions with our customers is extremely important,” says Emmanuel Noyola, Director of Patient Services at Affordable Care. “But with our process of doing 10 to 15 QA sessions per month per agent across a team of over 100 employees, we couldn’t effectively track interactions and identify areas for improvement.”
To improve support quality and increase efficiency in appointment scheduling, Noyola’s team sought to integrate AI technology into their operations.
Improving Patient Interactions with AI
By implementing Observe.AI, they built Moments around patient call flows to analyze interactions comprehensively, aiming to gain valuable insights and boost operational efficiency.
Moments are key instances in an agent’s interaction with a customer that, when measured across all agents, can reveal insights and trends at scale. By integrating their QA form into the Observe.AI platform, Noyola’s team identified Moments that correlated with higher patient scheduling and show-up rates, including appointment offers, paraphrasing, and probing questions.
Paraphrasing during calls turned out to be particularly effective, especially when discussing dental care schedules. Summarizing a customer’s concerns with phrases like, “I understand you’re worried about the timeline for your procedure” or “Just to confirm, are you hoping to book an appointment for next week?” helped clarify and ease uncertainties.
These insights prompted the team to reassess their quality standards. “Observe.AI helped guide us to make significant changes, including automating our QA process using Auto QA and leveraging the Coaching feature,” Noyola shares.
Increased Scheduling and Attendance Rates
To further explore the impact of paraphrasing, Noyola’s team integrated scheduling and feedback mechanisms using Observe.AI, tracking Moments utilization and conversion rates across teams and individual agents. They demonstrated to agents that Moments used more frequently contributed to their overall success. This enabled the team to recognize top performers and provide targeted coaching to those needing improvement.
“For example, an agent might typically have used paraphrasing in 50–60% of monitored calls. By demonstrating the impact of increasing this by even just 10%, we can show the agent how it correlates with improved outcomes,” says Noyola.
This coaching approach was instrumental in enhancing agents’ performance. Comparing a five month period in 2023 to 2024, their average appointment scheduling rate rose from 48.4% to 54%, an average percentage improvement of 11.7%.
“Given that we handle 1.5 million calls annually, this increase significantly contributes to revenue,” notes Noyola. Higher scheduling rates were estimated to have generated $8 million in incremental revenue from October 2023 to April 2024.
Beyond scheduling more appointments for dental practices, patient attendance also increased by 17% from the first three months of 2023 to the same period in 2024, indicating greater patient commitment.
Better Outcomes with Insurance Insights
Likewise, Affordable Care uncovered the impact of insurance availability on appointment scheduling rates using Observe.AI. It found that the absence of certain insurance options was hindering patient conversions and scheduling. By identifying the top insurances in specific markets through AI analysis, the company made data-driven decisions to address this issue.
“For example, a dentist in Florida wasn’t credentialed with a health insurer that was requested by 30 calls a month. We helped that doctor get credentialed and started seeing an increase in her scheduling rate,” shares Noyola.
His team also noted a high demand for Medicaid coverage among callers. In response, they are now exploring partnerships with insurance providers to expand network coverage across all regions and practices.
Excellence Through Enhanced Coaching and Behavioral Focus
Building on their Observe.AI success, Noyola’s team has implemented a refined coaching strategy focused on behaviors rather than traditional metrics. Sessions are tailored to address each agent’s specific improvement areas, better equipping them to handle calls effectively. The team uses Observe.AI to track coaching implementation, record feedback, and monitor live performance results.
Under the new coaching strategy, agents who received refresher training saw an 80% improvement in critical performance areas such as scheduling and customer satisfaction.
Noyola’s team has also revamped their onboarding process, incorporating behaviors observed in top performers. This change has resulted in new hires achieving proficiency faster. Since deployment, newly onboarded agents have consistently outperformed their tenured counterparts, achieving a 3–8% higher scheduling rate from November of that year.
“We’ve shifted our focus from chasing percentages to targeting poor agent habits,” says Noyola. “This change has improved the patient experience and made it more personalized and effective.”
Higher Customer Satisfaction and Recommendations
Enhanced patient experience has led to more satisfied customers. With increased monitoring, data collection, and coaching, Affordable Care has seen a significant lift in both post-interaction satisfaction survey scores and customers’ willingness to recommend them.
In the first four months of the year, the company’s average post-interaction survey score was 94.2%, 8% higher than the baseline figure. Similarly, its average willingness to recommend score was 5.4% above the baseline.
“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 affiliated dental practices, it is increasing the flow of data into the Observe.AI platform by ingesting call information from clinics. This will broaden the scope of analysis and improvements beyond its contact center.
The company also aims to be more proactive in handling calls by implementing Observe.AI’s real-time coaching and agent assistance features to support agents on the spot.
“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.”
Book a demo today to see how Observe.AI can enhance your operations.
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