Teladoc Health Leverages Agent Assist to Improve Efficiency and Call Quality

The Customer

Founded in 2002, Teladoc Health, Inc. is a global leader in virtual healthcare and believes that everyone should have access to the best healthcare anywhere in the world on their terms. Today, Teladoc is delivering on its mission by providing members with a unified and personalized interaction to drive better health outcomes. Over 50 million members can now use phones, mobile devices, and secure online video to connect within minutes to Teladoc’s network of board-certified, statelicensed physicians and behavioral health specialists. Teladoc has multiple service centers in various countries with contact center employees operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. About 50 percent of visits are inbound calls to the contact center, and they handle over 2M+ calls annually.

A Committed, Reliable Partner for Continued Success

After outsourcing its contact centers operations for several years, Teladoc had brought everything back in-house. Unfortunately, moving the contact center in-house did not come easily. They experienced various issues such as outages, inconsistency, instability, unreliability, and lack of support. This resulted in customer complaints and lower customer satisfaction scores. Teladoc recognized it needed a modern cloud contact center solution that could grow and scale with the
company. Gary Britton, vice president of operations at Teladoc, had prior experience working with Five9 and was already familiar with the ease of implementation, reliability, full administration, and functionality. Five9 soon emerged as a leading candidate.

“Agent Assist allowed agents to view call transcripts in real time, helped them validate HIPAA compliance, and assisted agents in providing better experience using AI-powered call guidance
in real time.”
Teladoc Health

In 2016, the team at Teladoc reached out to Five9 and asked if they could execute a quick implementation before Teladoc’s busy season started. “We chose Five9 because it’s reliable, it could be deployed quickly, and it had a flexible API which could integrate with our custom CRM and also integrate with other systems we used,” said Britton.

“It was a rapid, flawless implementation and performance has been impeccable. We turned the old switch off one day and turned the switch on for Five9 the next day. The support from everyone has been great, and that support has continued as we expand our services,” he said.

“Five9 understands our company and where the market is going, which helps us to be successful and provide better services for our clients and customers,” said Britton.

Initial business results upon moving to Five9:

• 97% customer satisfaction ratings
• 99% uptime
• 30% increase in call volume YoY with 20% less staff

Leveraging AI to Provide Intelligent Support to Agents

Fast forward to 2020 and COVID-19 was impacting the world, bringing economic hardship and mandatory lockdowns to consumers, businesses and communities. Teladoc was already positioned to serve its members remotely, with the infrastructure in place to support and connect patients and doctors regardless of location. The biggest challenge Teladoc faced was staffing up to meet the incredible demand for service, and moving all operations and the contact center to 100% remote.

Teladoc Director of Workforce and Program Management Andrea Brown shares, “Five9 enabled Teladoc agents to work remotely while maintaining the same level of productivity working from home. The transition was seamless, and agents were able to continue caring for our members without any type of service interruption.”
Considered a thought leader in the industry, Teladoc was keen to adopt AI in the contact center. They were evaluating a third-party AI vendor when Teladoc learned about Five9 Agent Assist during a Customer Advisory Board meeting. Five9 Agent Assist uses AI, natural language processing, and machine learning to help live agents during calls by performing several tasks in the background. Agent Assist provides real-time guidance and reminders, triggers real-time knowledge base articles, and automatically transcribes calls, summarizing them in real time to help reduce the time spent on after-call work.

Teladoc saw a tremendous opportunity to influence and augment the agents’ behavior during the call and meet the quality requirements without waiting for the post-call analysis. Teladoc engaged with Five9 to implement Agent Assist in a pilot program with a few campaigns. The objective of the program was to introduce the new technology in a gradual and systematic way and gain feedback before a complete rollout.
“We found Five9 Agent Assist attractive for three reasons: it offered us a way to leverage technology to replace manual agent processes, it had the flexibility to be integrated into our homegrown CRM which we utilize via the API, and we found the UI to be intuitive and easy for agents to use,” said Brown.
As a frontline agent for Teladoc, the customer service representatives are considered the doctors’ front desk and need make it easy for patients to “check in.” With real-time guidance during calls, coaching cards remind agents to go through the process of verifying client details, medical history, and other important prompts during the telehealth visit.

“Agent Assist allows agents to view call transcripts, helps them validate HIPAA compliance, and assists agents in providing a better experience using AIpowered call guidance, all in real time,” Brown continued. “One of the results we have seen since implementing Agent Assist is increased quality scores, because agents have that information right at their fingertips. They do not feel overwhelmed and don’t need to search through the repository to find information. Feedback we have from our older agents is they wish we had Agent Assist sooner when they see how beneficial it is to our
newer agents.”
Agent Assist also improved the new agent onboarding process. At a time when Teladoc
was hiring and expanding through acquisitions, Agent Assist helped shape new agent training. Guidance cards provide reminders of processes and procedures, such as questions required for HIPAA compliance, and can be customized for different campaigns.
Additional benefits include consistent call summaries across agents, reporting on call topics, real-time guidance and knowledge base integration, and added input for QA management. Agent Assist transcribes calls in real time; following the call, the agent confirms if the AI summary is correct and can add optional notes. With the press of a button, notes are uploaded to the CRM and saved to the member’s account.

Reporting is more robust and provides Teladoc with new insight into key metrics. Agent Assist enables reporting on a variety of call intents that include more details than typical call dispositions, which were typically binary and did not fully capture all the sub-topics discussed in a call. With Agent Assist, Teladoc can now observe, measure, and report on critical KPIs.

The Future

Teladoc is looking forward to its continued partnership with Five9. “The customer support has been outstanding. Five9’s account and technical management team members are professional, knowledgeable, responsive and fun to work with. They are always willing to listen and partner with us to find solutions to address any business needs. We look forward to our continued growth and partnership,” said Brown.