Behavioral Analytics



Empower Medical Contact Center Agents to Improve Patient Care

By Joshua Feast

Working in a contact center can be difficult under any circumstances. Medical contact centers in particular require a high level of emotional engagement. Patient calls can often be stressful and emotionally trying experiences. An agent’s ability to display empathy, create rapport, and successfully build an emotional connection with a patient is critical in driving resolution and ensuring long-term satisfaction for both agents and patients.

Contact center agents have a tough job. They take medical leave at a rate three times greater than that of employees in other fields (Integrated Benefits Institute). They encounter, on average, ten hostile callers per day (Dr. Guy Winch/Psychology Today). The repetition, stress, and job difficulty takes its toll; the average career span for a contact center worker is just three years.

Agents who successfully develop rapport with patients not only provide better care, they are better able to cope with the emotional labor their job requires, which results in higher job satisfaction. Positive energy is contagious. An agent who develops an emotional connection with a patient on one call feels better about his or her work and carries a sense of optimism into the next call.

Extract Actionable Insights from Subconscious Behavior: Behavioral analytics solutions provide agents with the real-time guidance they need to develop positive emotional connections with patients. These solutions provide insight into agent and patient speaking behavior. They comprehensively measure patient experience and provide deeper awareness into the emotional connection between patient and agent. According to research pioneered by Dr. Alex “Sandy” Pentland at MIT, humans communicate in large part by using “honest signals.” Honest signals are a kind of involuntary language involving vocal expressions, among other gestures, which communicate what’s on our mind more honestly and powerfully than the spoken word can.

Behavioral analytics solutions perform vocal analysis – focusing on pitch, tone, silence, and turn taking – to pick up on these honest signals. They convert speech into signal data, process that data in real time through behavioral models and present guidance to agents as well as a summary of agent performance to contact center managers. For the first time, contact center leaders have the analytics they need to measure and improve emotional connections with patients. Through these novel analytics, medical contact centers can discover whether agents are displaying the conversational skills that ultimately lead to more satisfied patients and more engaged agents.

Behavioral analytics solutions are already affecting healthcare delivery. The US Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, is leveraging behavioral analytics in an attempt to better detect when veterans are at risk for suicide. Mass General Hospital is using this technology to better identify behavioral patterns that can help patients manage depression or bipolar disorder.

Behavioral Analytics Facilitate Continuous Care for Patients: Behavioral analytics solutions empower phone agents to communicate more effectively with patients. This ensures more productive conversations and better call outcomes. The solutions can also be put directly in the hands of patients via a mobile application, making them more aware of their own condition and helping them to seek medical support proactively.

The mobile application can sense patterns in patient behavior to detect potential medical need: Are patients remaining socially connected? Are they active? Are they experiencing large variations in mood? If a patient in need calls in for support, the agent has more context regarding the patient’s medical state and can use that information to take the best actions for the patient’s health.

Behavioral analytics has the potential to help transition care from expensive, episodic, reactive support to continuous proactive care. They provide contextual information for agents and clinicians, ensuring a more comprehensive assessment of health and a better understanding of treatment success.

Emotional Connections Drive Healthy Outcomes: Working in medical contact centers presents a unique challenge. Agents must build rapport with patients who are often making complex inquiries in a fragile emotional state. Behavioral analytics solutions extract insights from voice analysis and digital trace data and convert those insights into real-time, actionable guidance.

Ultimately, behavioral analytics enable agents to build trust with patients, making the experience more positive for both parties. Agents, fueled by successful patient interactions, build confidence, reduce stress, and derive more satisfaction from their jobs. Patients become more engaged in their own care, leading them to live happier, healthier lives. The power of behavioral analytics can transform the medical contact center into an environment rich with empathy, rapport, and positive emotional connections for both agents and patients.

Joshua Feast is CEO and co-founder of Cogito Corp. His focuses are on enabling Cogito’s customers to achieve the next level of enterprise responsiveness and on expanding Cogito’s contribution to the field of human behavior understanding. He has over a decade of delivery to human services, government, and financial services organizations. Joshua holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was the Platinum-Triangle Fulbright Scholar in Entrepreneurship, and a Bachelor of Technology from Massey University in New Zealand.