County of Santa Clara

Vision

Easing pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic and planning for the future

In 2020, COVID-19 put pressure on healthcare providers around the world to triage and treat patients. For Valley Medical Center, it also put pressure on their contact center. They experienced an influx of interactions which caused delays, overwhelmed contact center agents and it affected the contact center’s ability to manage member needs such as booking appointments or communicating with their provider.

The County of Santa Clara’s Valley Connection Contact Center serves as the “front door” of the medical hospital system, as it’s used to manage appointments and member experience touchpoints.

Their self-service system at the time required members to go through multiple steps; it was not particularly user-friendly. This meant that the uptake of the self-service options was low. Another factor that contributed to low adoption was that self-service options were available only in English.

Valley Medical Center wanted to improve their members’ and the contact center agents’ experience. They also wanted to make it easy for members to take greater control over routine tasks such as making, canceling or rescheduling appointments without having to speak to an agent.

Transformation

Using artificial intelligence and machine learning for effective CX

The County of Santa Clara and NTT have been working together for 10 years. They’ve partnered with us to manage their platforms, implement upgrades and build solutions. They asked us to do a complete contact center assessment, including a comprehensive evaluation of their self-service environment to identify areas where advanced technologies could enhance the overall customer experience (CX).

During the two-month consultancy, we evaluated their existing business process, their technology platforms, and their strategy for supporting omnichannel communication and becoming more integrated in the future. Together, we developed an intelligent and nimble solution that focused on delivering a streamlined experience by way of enhanced routing and expanded, speech-enabled, self-service capabilities, supporting six languages.

We proposed a hybrid design that would combine elements of their on-premises Cisco system with Google DialogFlow CX.

The application design focused on collecting caller intent at the start of the call. This approach reduced the level of cognitive load on the caller and enabled them to move to their desired destination with minimal effort. Where opportunities existed for self-service, the application streamlined the identification process by leveraging a combination of known member data and member provided credentials. Multiple safeguards were put in place to ensure member privacy was preserved throughout the entire process.

Results

Managing complexity with a smarter contact center

The Valley Connection Contact Center now enables greater operational efficiency and cost savings, as improved reporting and analytics give a better insight into how members are using the contact center and where improvements can be made.

Improved CX and EX

Determining the member’s intent upfront allows the member to quickly move to their desired destination with minimal effort on their part. Under the new solution, members only identify themselves to make or change appointments or order new medical ID cards. Any information provided by the member is passed to the agent if the caller wishes to speak to a live agent about their call reason. Agents also have a better experience, since they can assist members personally, rather than answering a call only to redirect it.

Scalable and responsive

The system’s modular design means that features and capacity can be added as the number of clinics grows. The platform also enables Valley Medical Center to respond to crises faster, as they can easily add new messages and routing capabilities in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.

More self-sufficient members

The new design is user-friendly and serves members on their own terms, when and where it is most convenient for them. This increases platform uptake and reduces the number of queries routed to agents.