Create a Frictionless Customer Experience
Customers are busy people, so when they have to wait a long time to get answers to basic questions, make a payment, or handle another type of transaction, they’re not happy. That’s because, for many organizations, handling customer enquiries involves too many people and too many manual processes, creating friction in the customer journey. Manual processes also lead to mistakes such as providing the incorrect information or information outside the scope of the organization’s policies.
By automating common customer touch points with modern, affordable technology, organizations can streamline the customer journey to handle a growing volume of enquiries with less people, fewer errors, and improved customer satisfaction.
Common Friction Points in the Customer Journey
Friction in the customer journey comes in several forms, including friction around financial matters, such as paying a bill; friction behind the scenes in processes and operations; friction in getting the right information to the right people at the right time; and friction in getting feedback from customers.
Hospitals, hotels, resorts, municipalities, and universities have similar types of customer interactions, and their customers experience the same types of friction. So, while the examples below illustrate friction in healthcare, the same issues apply to many other industries.
Financial Friction
Hospitals and other healthcare organizations field a continuous stream of enquiries from patients about paying a bill, why they received a certain bill, understanding the charges, understanding the cost of upcoming care, updating insurance information, or booking a private or semi-private room for an upcoming surgery or procedure. These are simple questions with simple answers, but for many organizations, getting the answers isn’t simple. It can involve several people hunting down information, making the patient wait for a half hour or more for an answer, which may or may not be correct.
Operational Friction
Behind the scenes, multiple employees come together to answer questions using inefficient processes that may include multiple bottlenecks, which inhibit an organization’s ability to deliver timely information.
People Friction
Nurses and other staff members need continuous training and access to information, including volunteers, who come into the hospital environment without much knowledge about their role. The information exists, but it’s not easily accessible.
Friction in Measuring Outcomes
In many cases, organizations don’t have reliable or accurate methods to measure success. Organizations need easy ways for customers to provide feedback, which can help improve processes and operations.
The Power of the Digital Workforce
Streamlining the customer journey often boils down to improving processes, integrating multiple systems to bring disparate information sources together, and having a way to quickly and easily access that information.
By identifying friction points and resolving bottlenecks, organizations can create more efficient processes that will help them get more done with fewer people. By using technology to eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks, organizations can free up employees to be productive in areas that deliver more benefit to the organization. This is the power of the digital workforce, which works behind the scenes to support employees, customers, and outcomes.
By using technology to streamline processes, patients can get answers to their billing and insurance questions in minutes, nurses and volunteers can have quick access to information they need to do their jobs, operations can become more efficient because fewer people are involved in the process, and organizations can develop a feedback loop to gauge their effectiveness. Patients can also get access to information on their own, for example, learning about how to manage a condition such as Type 2 diabetes through the hospital website.
Technology can be used to bypass many touchpoints to improve customer service, make better use of employees’ time, and reduce errors. Instead of using four people to answer a question, you can take most of the people out of the loop for handling customer enquiries. Not everything can be automated, for example, if the customer requires that something be mailed. People still need to be involved, but the digital workforce is doing nearly all the work for you.
The Peach iQ Approach to Streamlining Customer Touch Points
Peach iQ works with IBM to help organizations improve the customer journey using the IBM watsonx AI ecosystem of solutions. The platform ties into existing databases, knowledge bases, and other sources of information, and provides a natural-language conversational assistant that can quickly answer questions using conversational AI.
Automate Transactions
The IBM watsonx platform can automate processes and transactions. If a patient calls about a bill, watsonx can ask basic questions and steer the conversation to a quick resolution, whether the patient wants to pay a bill, dispute it, or have specific charges explained. The solution can validate that the person is who they say they are and orchestrate the gathering of information to deliver an answer or take a payment, book a room, and follow up with an email to confirm. If the enquiry is complex, watsonx can turn the conversation over to a real person. What took a half hour or more can be done in five minutes or less with fewer people and reduced errors.
Streamline Internal Touch Points
Watsonx can also streamline internal processes beyond customer service. If a physician, nurse, or volunteer needs information, they can get it quickly and easily. If there’s a chemical spill, watsonx can access the workplace hazardous materials information system (WHMIS) to get a quick answer on how to remediate it. Employees can use it to access HR information such as how many vacation days they have available or when a maternity leave benefit expires.
Discovering the Art of the Possible
Peach iQ takes a consultative approach to help organizations eliminate friction from the customer journey. By identifying bottlenecks and other friction points, we leverage technology to resolve issues and develop a feedback loop to measure outcomes. We work with our clients to understand what they need and what they want. Needs are mission-critical problems that require a solution. Wants are a springboard to innovation that extends the value of the solution beyond solving mission-critical challenges. Based on our understanding of your needs and wants, Peach iQ can provide demonstrations and proofs of concept to confirm the value of a solution before you commit.
By providing the right information to the right people at the right time, technology can enable organizations to transform customer touchpoints into efficient processes that customers will appreciate. While this level of automation has been out of reach except to large organizations with the scale to implement advanced technologies, Peach iQ is able to bring the benefits of advanced technology to smaller organizations with a proven platform that’s been in development for decades.
