Incorporating voice-driven call routing into your health system phone network makes it easier for patients and caregivers to navigate to the resources they need.
Healthcare consumers use their own words to get where they need right away with Parlance modern interactive voice response (IVRs) and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs). These technologies quickly route callers, without the need for maze-like phone trees and long hold times. See this article to learn about the differences between IVRs and IVAs.
Parlance enables health systems to expand caller self-service beyond basic speech-driven IVR. Our intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) are specifically trained to support health systems with human-like conversations, further expanding patient self-service capabilities with AI. We guide callers to the resources they need. At Parlance, we learn about a health system’s needs, then design and produce automated yet natural interactions, all recorded with a live person’s voice. Once the application is built and live, we manage the solution through continuous updates, directory import automation, manual intervention, and daily 24/7 monitoring. The Parlance application becomes a part of our customer’s infrastructure and changes, grows, and benefits the environment for which it was created.
When calling a health system, no one wants to:
- Wait on hold!
- “Listen closely because options have changed.”
- Get lost in a phone tree to access the care they need.
Parlance improves the caller journey
Patients and caregivers want quick, easy, friction-free access to care on the phone. Old-fashioned IVRs are hard to navigate. Our voices are the most intuitive user interface. Natural language understanding and speech recognition technologies streamline the caller experience for healthcare consumers. With modern interactive voice response (IVRs) and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), callers say goodbye to irritating phone experiences and instead connect directly with the healthcare provider, patient, or department they need – easily and in less time.
Parlance optimizes switchboard and contact center performance without increasing budget
Voice-enabled navigation reduces call handling by minimizing misrouted calls, alleviating long hold times, and eliminating the need for live operators to act like human transfer switches.
During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2022, Parlance helped healthcare clients deliver better experiences for callers, operators, and agents:
We partnered with health systems to improve and maintain service levels. Many of the hospitals and clinics we serve were challenged to retain effective staffing levels during the pandemic. Many operators were unable to consistently report to work due to illness or public transportation travel restrictions. By allowing callers to use their voices to self-serve, the burden of managing calls was shared with an effective solution that is always available. Most of the health systems we serve are large and complex organizations with many services and a broad array of patients. Nevertheless, with over 25 years’ experience, we are able to implement our solution quickly and effectively. This enables callers to speak naturally and easily navigate to any number of destinations within the health network. Some of our clients have over 100,000 unique destinations.
Our solution enabled families and friends to say the name of their loved one and connect directly, without waiting on hold. Many of the health systems we serve use centralized operators to handle calls across multiple hospitals and clinics within the health network. When call volumes fluctuate or unexpectedly increase, those operators become overwhelmed. Many hospitals saw a 20%+ increase in calls to patients during the COVID pandemic, due to the increased restrictions on visitation. Parlance has a proprietary database with advanced programming to interpret millions of proper names and pronunciations. That means callers using varied accents or diction/inflection are still connected to the right destination when they speak the name of a person or department. We meet the challenge of a rapidly changing set of proper names in the hospital with extremely high accuracy in speech recognition. This supports an easier caller journey and optimizes switchboard operations.
By Parlance Team
