Incorporating voice-driven call routing into your health system phone network makes it easier for patients to navigate to the resources they need.
People can use their own words to get to what they need right away, when they call a hospital or clinic on the phone. Parlance quickly routes callers, without the need for maze-like phone trees and long hold queues. Parlance delivers speech recognition as a managed service for leading health systems nationwide. That means we blend intelligent speech technologies, including Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding to transform old fashioned IVRs and automated attendants into easy-to-navigate speech-driven tools. Speech-enabled call routing saves time and frustration for callers (and operators too).
- No one wants to wait on hold!
- No one wants to “listen closely because options have changed”
- No one want to get lost in a phone tree to access the care they need.
Optimize call center performance without increasing budget
Patients and family members want quick, easy, friction-free access on the phone. Old fashioned touch-tone IVRs are hard to navigate. Our voices are the most intuitive user interface. Natural language understanding and speech recognition technologies enable more modern calling experiences for health care consumers, and budget-friendly solutions for call centers. Health systems subscribe to Parlance to enable their patients to speak naturally and connect directly when they call on the phone. 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.
Recent examples of how Parlance partners with healthcare clients to deliver better experiences for callers, operators, and agents:
- Many of the hospitals and clinics we serve have been challenged to maintain effective staffing levels during the COVID pandemic. Many operators were unable to consistently report to work due to illness or public transportation travel restrictions. We partnered with our health system clients to improve and maintain service levels to callers in the midst of varying staffing levels. 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 healthcare organizations 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 allows 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.
- 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. Our solution enables families and friends to say the name of their loved one and connect directly, without waiting on hold. 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 will still be 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.
Parlance Benefits:
Improve caller experiences
Callers can say goodbye to frustrating phone experiences and instead connect directly with the health care provider, patient, or department they need – easily and in less time.
Reduce operational costs
Voice-enabled call routing reduces call handling and contact center costs by minimizing misrouted calls, alleviating long hold times, and eliminating the need for live operators to act like human transfer switches.
By Dan Heer
