About Piedmont Healthcare
As a private, not-for-profit organization with nearly 600 locations and serving 2 million patients across Georgia, Piedmont Healthcare‘s mission is to transform healthcare, creating a destination known for the best clinicians and a one-of-a-kind experience that always puts patients first. Today, more than 110 years since it was founded, Piedmont is known as a leading health system in cancer care, treatment of heart disease and organ transplantation with 11 hospitals, 24 urgent care centers, 28 Piedmont QuickCare locations, 555 Piedmont Clinic physician practice locations and more than 2,000 Piedmont Clinic members.
The Challenge
Piedmont Healthcare was looking for a better way to address billing and financial assistance questions for their patients. Since growing from a 5 to an 11 hospital health system in less than 6 years, the Piedmont billing contact center was seeing call volume double from the previous year without an increase in staff. Patients calling in with questions on their bills were experiencing hold times up to 40 minutes (average 7 minutes).
Our Solution
Piedmont partnered with Loyal to implement Guide, our AI-driven, healthcare-specific web chat solution across their website. Through the multi-functional technology, the chatbot is able to answer the easy, frequently asked questions with 24/7 availability, while the live chat is available during business hours for more complex questions related to bill payment.
The Results
In a 12 month period, Guide addressed nearly $5M in billing inquiries through a combination of live and AI-driven chat. Patients up to 78 years old are happily using the chat feature on the Piedmont site – waiting an average of only 63 seconds to connect with an agent- an 85% decrease over the 7 minute average phone hold time. Additionally, the bill pay web page experienced an 80% decrease in bounce rate over the previous year.
To increase chat volume even more, Piedmont plans to promote the billing chat feature on the hold messaging for the bill pay line with the goal of having a full team just dedicated to the chat function. Implementing live chat has also opened up remote position opportunities and expanded business hours for Piedmont Healthcare’s billing contact center.
