By implementing VoiceAI Agent, Affordable Care was able to reduce transfers, improve customer satisfaction, and elevate agent impact.
Affordable Care recognizes that automation is crucial to delivering exceptional service to over 400 nationwide dental practices and their patients. The patient experience team frequently evaluates its automation initiatives to ensure their effectiveness, and after reviewing its current interactive voice response (IVR) system, it decided there was an opportunity to do more with voice AI. “Our customer base is very diverse. We support people who are more seasoned in life but also want to cater to a younger generation that doesn’t necessarily want to talk to somebody to quickly handle a question or two,” said Manny Noyola, Affordable Care patient service director.
Finding the right voice AI solution provider proved more challenging than expected. Some vendors required significant upfront costs for professional services and maintenance hours to build and manage a solution. Others wanted to replace its current IVR solution from day one, which was too risky. The Affordable Care leadership team was also not fully convinced that the rigid systems some vendors offered could fully automate the more advanced use cases they were looking to streamline.
When Observe.AI demonstrated its newest VoiceAI Agents solution during one of its quarterly business reviews with Affordable Care, the team was impressed with the range and flexibility of the AI agents. “Our leadership saw how friendly and how quick the VoiceAI Agents were responding in the live demo,” recalls Noyola. “There were no long pauses or robotic responses in the interactions compared to other solutions we’ve seen. So, we knew it was the best option for us.”
For many years, Affordable Care has been leveraging the Observe.AI platform to support its post-interaction analysis. Those insights and capabilities proved helpful in helping the team determine which use cases to automate.
“When it came to implementation, the management and quality teams leveraged the insights from post-interaction AI to identify an initial set of use cases,” said Noyola. “We then worked closely with our workforce management team and our training team to narrow down the specific calls we wanted our VoiceAI Agents to handle.
The Affordable Care team prioritized the automation of frequent but simple-to-resolve calls that the agents enjoyed the least. They identified multiple use cases, which were also validated by the Observe.AI post-call analytics, and selected calls related to directions as their pilot project for VoiceAI Agents.
After analyzing calls across disposition codes, Affordable Care realized that their agents were handling roughly 400 calls per day specific to practice directions. “Within the first couple of days of deploying VoiceAI Agents, 95% of callers didn’t ask to be escalated to a live agent,” said Noyola. “That specific use case alone is saving us about 8 hours per day across all agents, helping them focus on other parts of the business and working on more complex use cases.”
According to Noyola, the company has already started to notice how its team is shifting more into an inbound sales team and is becoming more customer-centric. Because VoiceAI Agents is handling more high-volume calls, the human agents can then focus more on the patient by building more rapport and reassuring them about their choice in dental care, ultimately establishing trust and business success for their 500+ affiliated dentists.
“VoiceAI Agents is going to be transformational to our business,” said Noyola.
On the heels of its initial and fast success with VoiceAI Agents, Affordable Care is not only looking to automate more within its contact center operations but is also exploring some outside-the-box ideas to derive even more value from this technology.
One such idea is to leverage VoiceAI Agents to support their 400+ nationwide practices with outbound outreach. Many of their clinics are extremely busy, making follow-up activities like checking in with no-show patients or reconnecting with them on a previously proposed treatment is very challenging. In the future, they are considering deploying AI agents as virtual assistants that could conduct the outreach to check and reschedule no-shows or remind the patient about the proposed treatment and offer to connect them to a live agent to further discuss if they have questions.
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