Healthcare Case Study in Focus: One Medical and Zendesk

Zendesk transforms service operations for One Medical

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Healthcare Case Study in Focus: One Medical and Zendesk
Contact CentreInsights

Published: October 19, 2022

Rebekah Carter

As the healthcare environment grows increasingly complex, business leaders are relying more heavily on technology to streamline processes, and reduce costs. The right CX solutions, from employee engagement and management tools to CCaaS technology, not only enhance the customer experience, but support healthcare businesses in achieving crucial goals.

One Medical, a membership-based primary care practice, knew it needed a powerful CX solution to deliver the meaningful experiences its patients were looking for. One Medical consistently aims to differentiate itself from other care providers across the United States, with a human-centric approach. The company’s compassionate service, combined with its focus on implementing cutting-edge technology, has helped it to thrive even during disruptive times.

When One Medical’s team began to struggle with outdated and inefficient processes, the company turned to Zendesk for help with a transformative new strategy.

Enhancing Customer Experience with Employee Experience

One Medical is a company created by physicians with the goal of transforming patient experience. The organisation wants to adapt patient support to the real and ever-changing needs of busy people in today’s community. This has prompted the team to implement everything from powerful technology to telemedicine, to specialist care from experts across the country.

One Medical prides itself on value and efficiency, ensuring patients can get care when they need it most, whether they’re looking for same-day appointments, or automated prescription refills. However, preserving an extremely high standard of care comes with its own set of challenges.

With around 70 offices to manage and 1,300 employees, One Medical relies heavily on its team of support agents, split between San Francisco and New York City. These support agents play an essential role in delivering support for the Electronic Health Record the company’s team members leverage on a daily basis. The EHR system is responsible for helping every office manage its practice, prescriptions, and appointment scheduling.

The EHR was developed for One Medical from the ground up, designed to tackle the specific challenges the company faces when supporting clients. A huge number of providers and administrative assistants use the technology on a daily basis. When they have an issue or encounter an error, they need an immediate solution to get back on track.

Without the right solution in place to deliver service to employees quickly, the patient experience naturally begins to suffer.

Supporting Administrative Assistants with Zendesk

Ian Wolfley, manager of technology support and product at One Medical says providing comprehensive and fast service to administrative assistants and medical providers within One Medical offices is critical to ensuring a high quality of healthcare. The administrative assistants are crucial in delivering care to end-users and patients.

These employees are consistently under pressure to respond rapidly to patient requirements. However, they’re unable to perform at their best when their technology isn’t working properly. To achieve the best possible level of customer experience, One Medical knew it needed to help employees get the support they needed faster, so they could deliver on the promise the brand makes to its patients.

The needs of the employees in the One Medical environment can be complex, covering everything from arranging medical bills to arranging a prescription pickup in the ideal place for a member. To address the various issues their staff members face, One Medical turned to Zendesk.

Via Zendesk Support and Guide, One Medical was able to create an environment where employees can easily leverage HR, Operations, and IT support in an instant. The team also customised their Zendesk investment with a host of apps from the Zendesk apps marketplace, built to plug into the support environment. These apps include tools for accessing user data, answer suggestions, and related tickets.

According to One Medical, in a month, the average agent fields around 2,000 tickets using this technology, and maintains an 80% adherence to their average resolution time of two hours. What’s more, about 60% of all tickets are resolved in the same business day.

Wolfley notes the team uses Zendesk Support for the ticketing system to keep a close eye on user information. There’s also “Guide” in place for self-help documentation, so users can find answers rapidly, and a “Community” feature in Guide to encourage knowledge sharing and feedback among employees. These tools together help to reduce the guesswork in the customer service and employee experience strategy.

Building Stronger Cross-Functional Support

One Medical is also leveraging the data available within Zendesk to identify trends and enhance user experiences. The company believes data is crucial to driving better decision making opportunities. For instance, the support team can use Zendesk to consistently track the top ten issues across IT, product, and HR support, to ensure problems don’t persist over time.

The support team can also use ticket field forms connected to macros to assist managers in tracking the questions usually asked in support requests. If an issue requires cross-functional support, the company also has the data they need to approach decision makers effectively. Metrics taken from the Zendesk environment have also led to significant improvements in productivity.

According to Wolfley, at a certain point in the company’s workflow, they began to notice a significant amount of time was being spent on manually issuing refunds to members. However, this problem could be more rapidly addressed just by creating a simple button inside of the Electronic Health Record. The analytics collected from Zendesk encouraged the creation of this button, which helped to save the business users significant time.

The team can also conduct a lot of analysis-based tasks after-hours, and keeps track of emerging issues so employees can resolve problems before they occur. With Zendesk, One Medical has been able to provide employees with the support they need to deliver exceptional service to end users, and ensure questions are answered at speed.

 

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