A healthcare provider with impeccable service is fine and dandy, but to reach your patients and care for them, service isn’t enough. Patience and attention are rare commodities.
Let’s picture a situation where you’re losing hair. Too real?
Ok, let’s say there is a funny feeling in your ears, and it’s impairing your hearing.
You don’t know any otolaryngologists (ENT specialists) so you do what any well-informed decision-maker does in the 21st century – google Best Ear Doctors In My City or Best Ear Doctor Near Me.
You find a contact number that you don’t know is active or inactive, listed on an obscure website.
Alternatively, you can find a listed phone number on the Google Business page.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. That gnawing feeling in your ear compels you to ring an unknown number. If you’re lucky, your call is answered by the hospital or the clinic’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
After about 30 minutes of testing the thresholds of your patience, just when you manage to get through to a human, the call drops.
😖 The struggle is real.
Not only for users but healthcare brands too. I am talking about hospitals, diagnostic labs, clinics, and online health platforms.
Using IVRs or direct phone calls leads to bottlenecks and leakages in the funnel. At the risk of sounding insensitive, every call dropped is a dime lost for healthcare brands.
Healthcare stakeholders were equally vexed with the broken user experience.
- Researching a medical professional
- Booking an appointment
- Following up on that appointment and
- Accessing your prescription
shouldn’t be difficult, but things were so until a few years ago.
🤷🏻♂️ What changed?
Google concluded that 5% of searches in the world are health-related.
A simple realization led them to introduce Google Business Messaging (GBM) to their Google Business Profile page.
Clicking this button opens a chat interface powered by conversational AI. Mind you, this interaction is more sophisticated than a rule-based chatbot. It’s an automated AI chatbot equipped to handle queries on myriad use cases like:
- Researching specialists
- Scheduling appointments
- Rescheduling appointments
- Answering FAQs
- Pulling out prescriptions,
- Transferring you to a live agent in case of complex queries
- Redirect you to other channels like a website if necessary.
It’s frictionless.
Designed to care for you.
To be there for you.
🙇🏻♂️ How can healthcare brands use GBM?
By creating a Google Business profile and configuring GBM in the process. There is an official step-by-step guide by Google to get you started.
Having said that, there are more advanced options – Brands can integrate their platform with a conversational AI tool to do the heavy lifting for them, saving the resources and time that go into the learning curve.
Once integrated, healthcare providers can go a step further in using the user interaction data from the GBM chats to service users better by engaging them across communication channels like WhatsApp, Push Notification, Email, SMS, and more for plenty of use cases like
This is where marketing automation tools like WebEngage come in to connect the dots using an all-in-one solution.
Strictly speaking, WebEngage has a list of certified partners who specialize in conversational AI on GBM and can help healthcare brands get set up using out-of-the-box or custom integrations.
Using WebEngage, healthcare providers will be able to provide a holistic user experience.
If you think this promise is too good to be true and need to touch the paint to make sure it’s wet, we totally get it.
You can book a free demo for a comprehensive tour of WebEngage’s platform to learn about the host of benefits it can offer your brand in caring for your users.
Sharath Byloli
Inioluwa Ademuwagun
