Efficiently handling incoming calls is often a challenge for hospitals and health systems. Long hold times and operator transfers create patient dissatisfaction and increase stress for callers by making their tasks harder.
The best way to improve calling experiences for patients contacting a health system on the phone is voice-first technology. When phone systems enable speech recognition, it can increase caller self-service, improve overall patient experience, and remove frustrating and time-consuming barriers while promoting easier access to healthcare. But it has to be set up properly, managed well and tuned consistently — otherwise it doesn’t work well and it’s not worth the investment.
Voice-first technologies are intelligent speech technologies, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding. These are not new, but they’re really starting to gain mainstream acceptance. Many of us now, frequently ask Siri questions. We ask Alexa to play music or tell us the weather. Voice-based searches are just easier for people, young and old.
Old-fashioned IVRs (sometimes called phone trees) are a big source of frustration for healthcare consumers. No one wants to “listen closely because options have changed” and then press numbers on a dial-pad…especially when their needs don’t match up with the options provided. Callers should be able to speak naturally and connect quickly to the resources they need, when they call on the phone. No long hold times, no confusing menus, no numbers to press. Outdated methods don’t make sense when better innovations are available and reliable.
Think about it… We don’t use pay phones anymore, or paper maps in the car. We don’t go to a Blockbuster to rent VHS tapes, or drive to a bank to transfer money. Modern technologies solve these problems.
Parlance is a SAAS (Software as a Service) leveraging speech recognition technology to improve the caller experience. Hundreds of health systems, higher education institutions, and enterprises rely on Parlance every day to modernize call handling and call routing, ease caller effort and reduce operational costs. Callers with routine needs can say what they want and get to the right resource without waiting on hold or using a confusing IVR menu. While callers who need live support can get to an operator/agent much sooner, because call volume is reduced when more people self-serve so operators are more available to assist people who really need help. Speech-enabled call routing not only saves time and frustration for callers, but operators and contact center agents too.
Health systems specifically subscribe to Parlance to enable their patients to speak naturally and connect directly when they call on the phone because Parlance is the only company to deliver speech recognition as a fully managed service.
What does that mean? It means, we:
- Learn about our customer’s unique needs
- Design and produce automated yet natural interactions (all recorded with a live person’s voice)
- Build all the necessary applications to make your system work well in your unique environment
- Lead the rollout when the system goes live (so your IT team doesn’t have to)
- 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.
Since 1996 Parlance has been transforming the caller experience. We provide not only industry-leading technology, but a team of tenured experts who make your system work, take ownership of day-to-day performance, and guarantee ROI. No complicated fees, no extra charges, and no long contracts required. At Parlance you don’t buy software, you subscribe to results.
The power of voice. The future is now.
by Dan Heer
