HFS Highlight: Firstsource’s newest partnerships target the patient experience for healthcare clients

Under new leadership, Firstsource has been building a portfolio of technology partnerships to bolster its digitally enabled contact center and industry-focused capabilities. To that effort, the firm recently announced new partnerships with Zappix and Uniphore to target the healthcare industry in particular, with the goal to drive patient centricity.  The expectations of healthcare consumers have been changing dramatically, and payers and providers are challenged to rise to those expectations for digital service all while maintaining privacy and regulatory requirements. Thus, a large part of Firstsource’s decision to partner with these technology platform providers was due not only to their conversational automation capabilities but also due to extensive healthcare expertise.

Delivering on the promise of self-service for the healthcare vertical

The capabilities of these two vendors break down as follows:

• Zappix allows clients to provide self-service vital information to end users’ phones, hence significantly reduce the number of calls made. Members and Providers would prefer to use a user-friendly tool, where they could easily have the information they need at their fingertips and perform self-service. This ultimately reduces the volume of calls made, allowing agents to focus on more complicated queries and therefore reducing costs significantly.
• Uniphore boasts conversational AI and Automation expertise for healthcare-specific terms such as drug names, diagnostics, and patient conditions, which are frequently used as another differentiating factor. These capabilities enable the AI used by Uniphore to efficiently understand and identify the task at hand and bring the agent to the call to handle the query efficiently.

Conversational automation capabilities also allow for tracking agents’ performance which can be viewed and analyzed by team leads. The tool allows the client to track the sentiment of a call and if for whatever reason the call is going the wrong way, the team lead can intervene. During the pandemic with unusually high volumes of calls from patients, these technologies can enable clients to provide improved services to patients with a lower number of agents. The pay model for clients is based on license and implementation fees.

Digital optimization will drive business outcomes for healthcare firms

Firstsource is using these partnerships to enable critical elements of its 3P’s framework (Exhibit 1).  The first “P” stands for prevent, whereby analysis of contact drivers can identify ways the company can streamline processes or proactively provide updates to customers which negate the need to call in.  The second “P” focused on prediction, which is about anticipating when a customer will need services and steering them to self-service or automated options when appropriate.  Lastly, the 3^rd “P” is for process, which optimizes both human and automated interactions, while ensuring efficiencies in the process such as eliminating after-call work for agents.    This 3P framework is very aligned to the digitally optimized contact center as HFS has articulated it.

Exhibit 1: Firstsource’s 3P’s framework aims for transformation driven cost savings

Source: Firstsource, 2021

Using this methodology, Firstsource is delivering tangible business results for its healthcare clients.  In a recent proof of concept, Firstsource outlined how self-service and automation will streamline the claims processing cycle for a healthcare insurer.  By employing the 3P’s within the claims processing department, Firstsource expects to reduce AHT by 20%, reduce after-call work time for agents by 80% and impact the need to continue adding headcount, leading to significant cost savings for the insurer and presumably more satisfied customers and employees.

The Bottom Line: Firstsource’s partner strategy has the potential to help unlock deep customer and employee value for healthcare clients

The technologies provided by Zappix and Uniphore enable healthcare organizations to improve patient centricity. When it becomes much easier for users and patients to gather the information that they need, customer satisfaction improves, and this also enables the provider’s agents to focus on more complicated tasks requiring a human touch such as empathy or exception handling. While these partnerships are still in the early stages, the potential for impact to Firstsource clients and their members/patients is looking promising.  With time and focus, these capabilities have the potential to improve patient centricity and elevate the level of customer service in the healthcare industry.