How TeleClinic revolutionized customer service in telemedicine with AI-powered automation

Highlights

• TeleClinic's customer service team grew by 150% during the first lockdown, and added 14 more agents in the subsequent 6 months.
• Ultimate provided a flexible, customizable solution to help streamline the support request process with automation 
• 2 months after going live, 30% of support conversations were automated

The Customer: TeleClinic 

TeleClinic is a German market leader in telemedicine that launched in 2016: Its platform matches patients and doctors for online consultations via a mobile app.

TeleClinic operates within a regulated and changing landscape: Until 2016, telemedicine was covered by private insurance only in Germany.

When the law extended coverage to everyone, there was a dramatic surge in demand: nearly +500% in 2020.

That same year, the pandemic induced a steep spike in customer service requests, making it even more crucial for customer service to assist patients and doctors quickly and reliably.

The collision of these two circumstances meant it was the right time for TeleClinic to adopt automation. TeleClinic already offered 24/7 customer service, but it was entirely handled by live agents.

While the team was growing rapidly, it became clear that they needed a tool to address customer queries in an empathetic and efficient way.

That’s why their operations leadership decided to partner up with Ultimate to build it.

The Situation: Addressing a mounting number of queries efficiently and flexibly

TeleClinic’s Customer Service deals with two kinds of requests. Some are purely administrative and others are medical.

They do not have the same level of urgency, but TeleClinic’s communication system wasn’t able to prioritize the more urgent queries.

They needed a tool to do that while ensuring a high-level customer service experience for everyone. This came with a series of challenges:

• Telemedicine is a complex, sensitive matter, where a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work;
• TeleClinic had little actionable data on what customers needed;
• Their customer service team was growing rapidly: the first level support needed to scale up from 5 to 10-15 agents (In early 2021, their team is composed of 40 agents).
• They needed empathetic and accurate suggested replies to support their work.
• Knowing when to escalate critical queries to a human was also vital.

The Solution: A virtual agent, made-to-measure and ready to support the customer service team

TeleClinic chose Ultimate's solution because it allowed them to build and customize their virtual agent to fit their specific needs, as well as to train it themselves.

The tool easily integrated into Zendesk, TeleClinic's CRM.

The first step was to deploy suggested replies, to help agents answer repetitive questions and train the virtual agent at the same time.

Philipp Weidenbach was also dedicated to training the virtual agent himself; he was guided by Ultimate's customer success team throughout the whole automation journey, from initial setup to conversation design.

A month after suggested replies were activated, customer-facing automation was launched; now, the virtual agent can deal with the most frequent administrative queries with no human intervention.

Some administrative requests (for instance to postpone an appointment) are transferred to an email ticket: Agents are notified and a 24-hour reply rule is created automatically in Zendesk.

This allows TeleClining to shift volumes, save escalation for urgent queries and help agents prioritize. The virtual agent is also instrumental in identifying urgent requests: For instance, is a last-minute appointment an emergency?

The Success: An automation rate of 37% thanks to AI-powered chat automation 

TeleClinic’s automation rate went from 25% in October 2020 to 37% in February 2021.

This impressive number for a naturally complex industry was achieved thanks to a mix of suggestion and automation.

This approach continuously improves the AI model's accuracy, supercharging the AI-powered Virtual Agent's readiness to understand and resolve incoming requests.

TeleClinic’s purpose was never to automate support entirely, but to find the right partner to create a great customer experience at a time when many end users face unique and urgent health challenges and need empathetic and reliable help.