Here are five approaches that can help you improve your patient satisfaction scores by employing the services of a healthcare chatbot.

1. Make a Human Back-up Available

Chatbots routinely answer questions to add value to a business. However, when the conversation becomes complex, it is important for the chatbot to transfer the interaction to a human advisor.

This human advisor should have the required expertise and knowledge to pick up the chat conversation and even switch to a voice interaction if needed. This kind of an escalation path is very important in maintaining customer satisfaction levels. A patient might stop business with a practice if he or she feels inadequately handled.

Apart from maintaining a ready escalation path, it is crucial for a healthcare practice to employ resources that can reduce patient waiting time while ensuring quality. Also, appropriate service level agreements should be maintained at all times between the practice and the patient.

2. Feed New Information Continuously to Chatbots

Implementing and operating chatbots is a full time commitment. That said, they add to the business and can help a healthcare practice in realizing its major goals. To make them more effective, chatbots require continuous real time information to stay relevant and up to date.

Patients’ needs are constantly changing, and their expectations are growing. A chatbot could become redundant if the healthcare organization fails to nurture it with relevant data, information and other instructive knowledge. In such situation, it may not be able to answer a patient’s questions beyond a certain level.

This redundancy can be compared to a website becoming obsolete when not updated. Hence, it is important for all healthcare businesses to feed chatbots at all times with the current data and information.

3. Train Chatbots to be More Empathetic

Chatbots like many automated systems can cause a feeling of lacking empathy or emotions. Needless to say, these bots are of immense help in a variety of settings. However, without the required empathy a patient might find it difficult to express themselves during a conversation.

As per recommendation from AI researchers, it is crucial that healthcare related call centers create a more empathetic chatbot. For enhanced conversational experience, chatbots will need the:

• Ability to respond to sentiments and adapt to conversation flow
• Ability to improve sentiments captured by comparing explicit and implicit measures
• Ability to utilize implicit measures of capturing customer sentiments without explicitly asking
• Ability to employ explicit approaches to gauge a customer satisfaction level at the end of a conversation

Training is critical for this and the training set used should include various emotional settings. Additionally, the chatbot should be a part of real conversation by way of reporting process before production. This enables the tuning teams to isolate those emotional circumstances where chatbots are lacking and to train them in order to exhibit satisfactory behavior.

4. Implementation in the Early Stage of a Conversation

To improve patient satisfaction from chatbots, it is important to know how and when to implement then. A good approach to this may be to start with social media applications such as Facebook Messenger or existing live chat offerings before introducing the bots.

Bots can be then used to collect information at the start of a dialogue or to automate any other repetitive tasks. They can also be used to directing the caller to a live advisor or to any other self-service option.

5. Employ Interaction Analytics to Make Conversational Chatbots

People communicate differently over phone as compared with chat, email or text message. It is critical for a successful chatbot conversation that these differences be identified. This can ensure increased patient satisfaction from conversations and outcomes. The end goal to creating a successful automated interaction is to coach chatbots to communicate on the same lines as humans.