Technological innovations have reshaped the healthcare industry countless times. The first stethoscope allowed doctors to listen to their patients’ heartbeats and diagnose them with that information. The invention of antibiotics led to better illness treatment and patient care. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking centre stage, particularly when it comes to improving customer service for patients. Below, we’ll break down the top AI use cases and benefits shifting how healthcare organisations handle customer experience (CX).
What is artificial intelligence in healthcare?
Artificial intelligence in healthcare refers to using advanced algorithms and machine learning models to analyse complex data, support decision-making, and improve patient outcomes. All areas of healthcare can and do apply AI tools, enhancing the overall quality of care. It can help businesses deliver better customer service by resolving patient questions faster, ensuring high-quality support around the clock, streamlining workflows, and completing tasks like appointment booking or rescheduling.
More in this guide:
- How AI improves CX in healthcare
- Top CX benefits of AI in healthcare
- What will the future of AI in healthcare bring?
- Frequently asked questions
- Use AI in healthcare for more efficient service
How AI improves CX in healthcare
AI makes it easier to provide efficient service to healthcare patients. Customer experiences are crucial in the healthcare sector to ensure patients receive the timely and effective service they need. Good CX reduces pain points that could otherwise lead to frustration and churn. Efficiency is key to increasing satisfaction, keeping customers around, and creating high-value support interactions.
Here are some of the top AI customer service use cases in the healthcare field.
- Providing 24/7 service with AI agents: Intelligent bots like AI agents are more than just chatbots—they give patients options to access immediate customer support around the clock. Among the top benefits of using AI bots for customer service is that they can execute support tasks from start to finish, like cancelling or rescheduling an upcoming appointment. They can also escalate issues to a real human agent whenever it’s needed.
- Booking appointments and sending appointment reminders: To help deflect simple support queries from your busy team, AI can automate the appointment scheduling process so patients can book and manage visits online. It can also send automated reminders to limit missed appointments.
- Assisting with billing inquiries: Patients might have questions about their bills or insurance coverage. For quick and easy help, AI can help patients understand their statements, answer billing enquiries, and resolve payment issues.
- Streamlining workflows: To improve response times and provide better care, healthcare businesses can use AI to streamline various workflows, like routing patients to the appropriate department. AI can even analyse customer intent to understand the “why” behind an enquiry and better triage support accordingly.
- Enhancing self-service resources: Comprehensive online resources that allow patients to access information and self-serve, like a knowledge base, are even more powerful with AI. AI helps keep these resources fresh by flagging gaps or outdated information, so patients are always looking at the most current resources when self-serving.
- Ensuring high-quality service: AI-powered tools such as quality assurance (QA) software drive improvement over time by analysing patient support interactions. It then helps managers flag opportunities for coaching or improvement so high-quality service is always top-of-mind.
With use cases like these, AI improves the patient experience and transforms CX agent roles to help them drive more efficient, effective support in healthcare across the board. Just look at TeleClinic—the online doctor visit platform meets the challenge of catering to large spikes in demand with AI agents that prioritise requests and respond accurately to sensitive questions. In turn, the company reduced the workload per ticket by almost 19 hours.
Top CX benefits of AI in healthcare
By leveraging an AI-powered service solution, healthcare companies are improving CX and delivering fast and reliable support. Meanwhile, they are also reducing operational costs and the support strain on their own people. Here are the top ways healthcare support teams can enhance patient care with AI.
Shorten wait times and deliver faster support
AI helps deliver immediate assistance thanks to features like AI agents that offer support on their own or route patients to the appropriate departments right away. This way, patients aren’t stuck waiting for a response. To deflect tickets from busy support team members, AI also enhances self-service offerings with features like intelligent search that helps patients find relevant information in a knowledge base. This gives patients access to 24/7 support to find answers on their own, without having to reach out to your actual support team.
Enhance patient experiences at all touchpoints
AI agents can assist customers over channels most convenient for them—such as messaging, chat, and email. These bots can take on lower-stakes questions like appointment booking or billing issues, so human agents can divert their attention to higher-stakes enquiries and patient care. To keep support quality high, AI-powered QA tools give patient service managers feedback and insights for coaching and improvement.
Handle rising ticket volumes more effectively
As the volume of patient inquiries grows, AI can help manage the increasing workload. By automating routine enquiries or directing customers to self-service resources, AI lightens the burden on human agents so they can focus on more critical issues. This improves efficiency and provides patients with timely, personalised support with every interaction.
Reduce operational costs
Time is money, and AI helps healthcare organisations save time with value-driving automation that gives human agents more time to devote to patient care. This time-saving directly translates into cost savings since businesses can allocate support more effectively and reduce expenses associated with clerical errors and anomalies. Better overall patient care reduces the need for costly interventions and improves patient outcomes, leading to lower support costs across the board.
Additionally, tools like AI-powered workforce management help managers forecast staffing needs to avoid overstaffing costs.
Learn how AI is changing CX
Our AI-powered CX report shows how leaders feel about the ongoing AI evolution.
What will the future of AI in healthcare bring?
According to the Zendesk AI-powered CX Report 2024, AI will soon be involved in 100 percent of support interactions, with 80 percent of those being resolved autonomously. In healthcare, this transformation promises enhanced efficiency, faster patient support, and deeper insights for optimising operations. AI’s growing capabilities will streamline both patient-facing and backend processes, leading to reduced wait times, more accurate responses, and a more seamless experience for patients.
As AI tools become increasingly sophisticated, healthcare support teams will be freed from the burden of routine administrative tasks and repetitive inquiries. This shift allows them to focus more on high-quality patient care, while AI handles the heavy lifting of data analysis, appointment scheduling, and other key processes. With AI, healthcare providers can deliver more personalised, timely, and effective care, driving better outcomes and elevating the overall patient experience. The future of AI-powered CX in healthcare is one where efficiency and human-centred care go hand-in-hand.
Frequently asked questions
Use AI in healthcare for more efficient service
AI’s impact on healthcare is creating better experiences for patients every day. Just like the stethoscope and antibiotics changed patient care forever, AI in CX is reshaping the healthcare industry with its ability to help enhance operational efficiency and drive innovation. Patients get faster, higher-quality support across channels, and healthcare service representatives become more efficient.
See how Zendesk AI can take your patient support to new heights.