Voice could be called one of the exciting new avenues for medicine and healthcare. US company Authenticx listens, analyzes, and activates customer voices. The AI based software analyzes millions of conversations patients have with customer support agents through phone calls or emails. By analysing these conversations, it unveils recurring trends that healthcare organizations use to make informed, proactive decisions for improved workflows and care. 

“People often think of conversational data as being operational, transactional and not very insightful to how you can grow revenue or improve the overall experience of your patients, retain customers in your network or in your healthcare organization. What we've learned is that listening to that authentic voice of the customer actually shines a light on all of those things and can help leaders at the highest level of the organization prioritize and focus on things that will drive their business for,” says Amy Brown, CEO of Authenticx. She is an executive with 20 years of public and private sector experience in health care public relations, startup management, policy development, quality improvement and insurance operations.

Listen to the full episode in iTunes or Spotify.

Authenticx works with organisation patients come across in different parts of their customer journey.

At the moment, the majority of organisations still get customer feedback through solicited surveys. The problem with these, says Amy Brown, is that customer have to talk about their experience in retrospect. Surveys usually have a rating system, a numeric scale, with little context. That challenges the understanding of a score. The data is also many times very skewed because the respondents are mostly people that are very angry or very happy with their experience. Sometimes healthcare organizations are leveraging conversational data but in a very manual way. Authenticx automates the processing while keeping samples of the conversation so analysts can listen to additional context when needed.

The upside of surveys and scoring is that organisations can use good scores for marketing materials and promotion. Authenticx addressed quantification with proprietary algorithms that measure things like customer emotion at the beginning and the end of a conversation. “We also have a model that listens for indicators that a customer is stuck in their journey. And that's very important because when customers are stuck, they are dissatisfied with their experience, which is an important indicator of customer retention or attrition. Additionally, when a customer is stuck, they're also generating work for the healthcare organization. They're making a call. Interacting with your people to try to solve their problem. And so listening for when a patient or a customer is stuck, is a critically important way to measure improvement in your customer experience,” explains Amy Brown.

Broader potential of voice tech

Voice tech is seen as a potential optimization tool if we used voice tech instead of typing data into the software. In the March episode of Faces of digital health Julia Hoxha, the CEO of Zana explained how her European startup that provides healthcare organizations with the technology to design and to deploy their own chatbot and voice assistants.

In the future, we might discover biomarkers in voice. After all, all the characteristics of voice - how loud or how quiet we speak, what tone do we use, how fast or slow we talk - all these characteristics probably have a correlation with something. But what about starting with something much simpler? Analysing voice recordings that already exist?

Looking at market trends, Amy Brown is hopeful that the desire to get rid of voice and call centers will change. “Call centers are old and antiquated and there’s an impression that eventually there won't be any call centers anymore. I think that's not the best way to think about it. Given healthcare, there will always be a need to interface human to human at some level, maybe not for the low level transactional types of things, but at some point in a customer's journey that human interaction is important. There's an undervalue about the impact that a voice can make in an organization. My prediction is that industries are going to value voice much more once they realize the value of context that comes from conversational data.”

Listen to the full discussion with Amy Brown in iTunes or Spotify.

Questions addressed:

• Authenticx analyzes millions of conversations to surface recurring trends that healthcare organizations use to make informed, proactive decisions. What kind of conversations and data are you analysing? How is that data gathered? 

• How do you approach sampling? 

• The hope is that voice technology could improve healthcare on numerous levels: from transcribing and data capture optimization, to workflow optimizations and more. Authentix is analysing customer feedback to help organizations better assess customer satisfaction. How exactly are does analysis with Authentix work? 

• How developed is the solution today? How many and what kind of customers use it? 

• How much customization is needed based on the hospital and its different population? 

• How do you gather consent for recording and analysis? 

• What have you learned about customer satisfaction of the US healthcare so far? 

• What are some of the main changes you’ve observed providers made after using your solution? 

• How do you see Authentix going forward? Do you plan on diving beyond customer 

satisfaction? 

• How to set a number on the voice analysed data?