Reducing consumer effort—the work they must do to get their problems solved—builds loyalty. Organizations create loyalty primarily by helping people solve their problems quickly and easily. Consumers punish organizations with poor phone-based interactions and customer support. In these settings, research shows, customer loyalty has a lot to do with how well companies deliver on basic good service. The burden must be shifted away from the consumer wherever possible.
A big problem in healthcare lies in one of the oldest technologies — the phone. People are busy. They want easy experiences at every touchpoint.
- 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 get what they need.
Make it easy for patients! Three recurring complaints about service interactions that focus specifically on customer effort:
- having to call repeatedly (or be transferred) to get an issue resolved
- having to repeat information
- having to switch from one service channel to another (for instance, needing to call after trying unsuccessfully to solve a problem / make an appointment through the website)
Implementing ‘low-customer-effort’ approaches to service and empowering staff with more time to own customer’s issues from start to finish, drives customer loyalty and prevents unnecessary revenue leakage.
Parlance is committed to transforming the caller experience for hospitals and clinics. We deliver speech-enabled IVRs as a managed service, leveraging speech recognition technology to improve the caller experience for hundreds of leading organizations nationwide. Health systems, higher education institutions, and enterprises rely on Parlance every day to modernize call handling, ease caller effort and reduce operational costs. People with routine requests can get to the person, department, or resource they need without waiting on hold or using a confusing IVR menu. People who need complex support can get it quickly, because staff are no longer acting like human transfer switches and they’re more available to help callers who need it. Hospitals and clinics specifically subscribe to Parlance to enable their patients to speak naturally and connect directly when they call on the phone.
