NativeChat Enables Deeper Patient Engagement at Dr. Shterev Hospital
Challenge
Dr. Shterev Hospital is a state of the art medical facility, where the foundation of modern reproductive medicine in Bulgaria was laid by the introduction of the most innovative medical technologies and methods. With its 30-year successful history in the field of assisted reproduction, the team at the clinic has helped thousands of Bulgarian women and families complete their dream for a child.
The facility’s contact center serves between 300 and 500 customer calls daily, along with numerous emails and questions on social media. About 50-60% of the calls are related to booking appointments or checking schedules. This volume results in 150-250 daily phone calls that are taking a significant amount of the contact center’s capacity with repetitive tasks that could benefit from chatbot automation.
Solution
Dr. Shterev’s Hospital’s goal for the chatbot was to make three major improvements on top of its existing process. First, the clinic expected that the capacity of the chatbot would offload calls to live operators by 49%, which is the time currently used to answer phone calls and inquiries about a doctor’s schedule and appointments. This will empower the contact center team to answer more patient calls that require deeper engagement and have a bigger impact on customer quality scores. Also, patients that want to book an appointment during peak hours of operations won’t have to wait on hold until the contact center is able to respond. The third goal is to increase reach to patients. Based on experience in the reproductive medicine sector, and the specific type of health services the facility provides, many patients prefer online communication, rather than direct voice calls.
Results
With a chatbot developed with Progress® NativeChat, an artificial intelligence platform to create and deploy conversational chatbots, Dr. Shterev Hospital achieved its goal of reducing the workload of contact center staff by its target of 49% by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up operator time for issues that require deeper patient engagement. In addition, because chatbots developed with NativeChat can be trained like a person with a set of goals, examples and data that follow a natural conversation flow, engagement with the bot is exceeding expectations.
As Ivan Todorov, Marketing Director for Dr. Shterev Hospital summed up, “Enabling our patients to book appointments using a chatbot developed with NativeChat on social media is an excellent addition to our strategy for improving the healthcare experience.”