Case Study: Healthcare Network’s Appointments Surge with AI-Powered Training & Performance Boost from 
HIGHLIGHTS
20%
Increase in appointments per hour
9→12
Increase in calls per billable hour
2-3
Hours saved per coaching session using iCoach
Client
A U.S.-based network of medical/surgical practices
The Goal
An executive overseeing patient scheduling wanted a way to smooth the often-rocky transition period for new contact center agents learning to navigate inbound and outbound patient scheduling calls and improve the number of appointments per hour.
The Challenge
Scheduling specialty medical and surgical appointments is a delicate task that combines effectively managing patient health concerns while accurately and compliantly capturing medical and insurance details. In support of a business model dependent on flawlessly congenial patient relations and a steady flow of new appointments, healthcare organization contact center agents must balance empathy, efficiency and regulatory compliance.
It is a lot to learn, and proficiency often comes slowly as agents gain experience in complex interactions and develop their knowledge call by call. It can be a struggle for businesses to scale up when growth requires increasing the number of appointments scheduled and decreasing the amount of time spent handling each call.
For contact center managers, dependence on performance and troubleshooting data that took hours to gather manually left little time for actual coaching and process improvement.
Our Approach
The implementation of iCoach, Iterum’s AI-powered training and performance enablement platform, enabled the client’s call center agents to reach proficiency faster and improve continuously with AI-powered role play, at-a-glance training and assessment tools, and easily accessible documents and information.
With iCoach, ongoing coaching sessions deliver rapid analysis and recommendations for intervention and contact center managers who previously had to manually collect and compare performance metrics can now quickly focus on problem areas. Hours once spent pulling data in preparation for a coaching session can be used for actual coaching instead, precisely targeted to areas in need of improvement.
It’s an approach built around two key goals: removing friction from the operation without adding any additional client costs and ensuring that contact center processes reflect a thorough understanding of the client’s business.
The Journey
The difference between innovative software and innovative software that can legitimately be described as a “solution” is often a function of how well the organization implementing it understands your business operations.
At Iterum, our journey began there.
- Data gathering and due diligence to understand the business
- Defining of key performance indicators productivity metrics that align with business goals
- Refining processes and ensuring that protected health information was properly filtered
- Creating the process that would produce the needed data
- Training and implementing of iCoach
- Studying and replicating call flow for implementation and customization of role-playing application
- Training and implementation
- Ongoing support
Results
Within a week of iCoach implementation, contact center managers saw an improvement in the quality of the agents’ work. Within two weeks, the number of appointments scheduled per hour rose by 20% and the number of calls per billable hour went from nine to 12.
Supervisors no longer had to spend hours pulling KPI data in preparation for a coaching session. With iCoach, the data was immediately in-hand, including KPIs showing how individual agents were performing overall, and in comparison to their peers.
The client’s scheduling executive was especially impressed with iCoach’s role-playing application, which let agents practice with a highly realistic simulation of customer calls. The executive could not believe how authentic the simulations sounded. “This is what our patients really sound like,” he said. “I am in awe.”
