Ep.229 – Inside the Win: Automating Healthcare Patient Onboarding with Kore.ai

Welcome to Inside the Win. We’ll break down real world wins, showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious opportunities with confidence. Let’s jump in.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us today here on this edition of the CX edition of Inside the Win, and boy do we have an interesting win for you today. My name is Brent Wilford, CX architect here in the West based in Denver, Colorado, and with me is a fantastic partner from one of our AI vendors, Kore.ai. Israel Lemprakes, Israel say hi to everybody.

Hello everyone.

All right, now that we got that out of the way, Israel, conversations with customers are being dominated with AI.

I’m actually not even having that many CX conversations these days, it’s all AI from our customers, and they have well articulated use cases, they have specific outcomes they’re looking to achieve, and they’re looking to both tech advisors, Telarus SEs like myself, and the AI vendors like yours to help solve these problems. So today, we’re gonna talk about a recent Telarus Tech Advisor win having to do with a health care customer and some fantastic AI provided by Kore. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about the challenge this customer was having, and we’ll get into some more details after that.

Yeah. Of course. Thanks for the introduction. Nice to be here. So, essentially, the customer that we happen to be working with was dealing with growth problem that was really showing up as I like to think of it as an operational problem.

So they have a sleep business that was expanding quickly. But onboarding a new CPAP patient, which was the focus, still required a series of manual calls and handoffs across a plethora of use cases, verification, payment, mask fitting, appointment scheduling, you name it. So their team was experiencing a lot of issues, a lot of pain points. Phone tag with patients, inconsistent employee productivity, information overload for patients.

And, really, the pain was not that the customer needed to answer more calls. The pain was that, you know, every new patient required a multistep process involving several systems and really human labor that was the glue to hold everything in that process together.

Okay. So we have a growing number of patients, and we have a long onboarding process, it’s probably hard to onboard agents to handle the long onboarding process for the patient. So we have a lot of things that we’re trying to either automate or shorten down there, or at least just make simpler for everybody involved because we don’t want those customers going elsewhere, right, if our business is growing. So I’m sure you did a good job of discovery and presentation this customer, and we won the deal. What which one of the fantastic Kore AI products did this customer choose?

Yeah. So we actually it was an AI for service outbound agent that required a number of of of steps. I’d like to say a pretty lengthy workflow. So I won’t go through every list, but, you know, we started off with receiving a daily patient list and patient context from a bona fide system. We initiated the outbound call. We authenticated the patient. We explained, like, the rental, the process model, all the way down to once that all that was completed, confirming shipping address, updating their CRM with completed steps, payment references.

It’s also important to note that human escalation remained available for exceptions, and the CRM will be updated before, like, the transfer so the representative could see what what had already occurred.

And, essentially, you know, voice was the front door, but the orchestration was the actual product. You know, the agent had to act across the systems the customer already used and then leave the CRM in a state where either automation or or a human could continue those journeys. So we weren’t selling a bot that could just answer questions. We’re selling an agent that can move the patient from referral towards setup.

So we got AI making outbound calls to patients to streamline and automate this onboarding process and still have the ability to get to a human being if we need to, because we know that’s really important in the day of especially outbound AI.

I’m sure the customer had a long list of vendors that they were looking at when it comes to trying to solve this problem for. So who did you compete with and how did you overcome the strengths of those competitors?

Yeah. That’s a that’s a great question. This one was actually interesting. Right? You know, there are a lot of vendors out there that can demonstrate, like, a natural voice experience, but this customer needed a vendor that was capable of securely comp you know, completing transactions and then coordinating the systems behind the interaction.

So we demonstrated connectivity across, bona fides, diff, Zoho sign, some things that, a lot of, vendors aren’t familiar with. Maskfit AR, which was custom, Microsoft Bookings, Five nine, etcetera. So the differentiation was not that our agent could have a good conversation. It was that the agent could authenticate, explain, transact, trigger documents, you know, schedule next steps, you know, a plethora of things.

And what we learned was the customer tried to find vendors out there that were similar to compare an apple to an apple, and they weren’t successful. And, really, you know, what it came down to is that they found a lot of vendors out there that had a natural sounding voice, which is important, but did not create that business case on its own. You know, the value came from what the agent could actually complete, and that’s what separated us. And what we were told, like I mentioned, there wasn’t really a vendor out there that was competing with the platform.

So the customer found a lot of oranges, but not another apple to compare you to.

I think that’s a fair way to put it.

It’s a testament to not only your product, but your sales process and the agentic nature of what you’re providing for the customer in terms of multi step automation.

Okay, well, the customer found a great solution. It seems like we have a well mapped out process. Now we know that AI doesn’t get bought because of a cool demo, or because we say we can automate things. We need to tie this back to ROI, to business outcomes, and to tangible benefits. So what were the outcomes and benefits this customer realized in implementing Kore.ai?

Yeah. So there were I would say there were a number, as far as benefits are concerned.

So automation obviously became a huge portion of of the of of the benefit through all throughout all the multiple systems, all the current integrations. We’re really able to act as, like I mentioned, that orchestrator to bring all those things together. You know, the customer specifically there aren’t any hard metrics associated with the win, but the customer specifically valued that Kore was not, you know, pigeonholed into one narrow use case. You know?

Their planned initiatives included verification, authorization, pills, prescription renewal, etcetera. And the first use case was patient onboarding, but the platform decision was broader. You know, the customer wanted a partner that could support multiple AI initiatives as his transformation matured. So we helped shift the evaluation from, you know, who can build this one agent, what’s gonna be our containment rate, to who can become the platform for the next several workflows over the next several years. And that’s really why the customer selected Kore.ai to automate this outbound CPAP patient journey.

So like I mentioned, that’s the bigger picture of the outcome. It was more so of a not you know, we’re looking to we’re looking for a point solution. They were looking more for more more so for a partner that can help them along this current initiative and many more moving forward.

So it sounds like you’re able to do a lot of different things for this customer, but more than likely, we were able to save our human agents for more empathetic, more complicated type sales while still giving our customers or our new patients the process that they need.

We’re probably able to scale with the growth they need, so they weren’t losing patients to another provider or another competitor. And we were able to scale so that we can keep our human agents doing important things, get new patients in the door, that speed to lead kind of situation where if you don’t call them right away, they’re probably getting that CPAP from somewhere else. So helping the customer achieve those growth and scalability issues and providing higher value interactions for the human agents. All great benefits that any CX leader would want to maintain. So awesome win, Israel, I appreciate it. Before we go, let’s end with three takeaways for our tech advisors that should understand about this sale and how they can try and replicate it or use this information to find another customer so we can put some more Kore.ai automation out there in the field.

Yeah. Of course. So, you know, I’ll I’ll I’ll leave with this.

You know, the repeatable lesson here is that the goal is to look beyond, you know, for example, just contact center replacement. You know, this opportunity came from identifying a high value workflow where, you know, manual labor, fragmented systems, and rapid, you know, business growth for creating constraint.

So for partners, you know, the opening is often not, do you need AI? It’s it’s where is growth creating operational strain that your current team and systems can absorb. So I think that’s the bigger message. And then, you know, two additional ones I’d say is orchestration sale.

You know, voice was essentially here at the interface, but workflow or or execution was the value. So always think of orchestration at scale. And then the last thing is, really just the land and expand sale. You know, patient onboarding was was was the funded starting point, but the broader decision was about the customer’s future AI platform.

So we are always thinking with the future in mind, and we always should be because in this industry, today’s, I guess, buzzword is not the same as tomorrow’s buzzword. So always be thinking in the future.

Fantastic. So again, tech advisors, don’t be afraid of this AI conversation. Your customer has workflows that are manual, that are tedious, that are monotonous, that they need help automating. They’re looking to scale and make sure they grab as much business as they can. You think of using AI as a tool to help solve business problems, even if there’s not an opportunity to replace the contact center, there’s ways to help add automation and speed to what a customer is doing. So thank you Israel for such a fantastic overview of this win.

We’ll see you here on the next time. I look forward to seeing you guys on the next Inside the Win.

For Israel and everyone else here at Telarus, my name is Brent Wilford, and we will talk to you later.