Our Customer Engagement Solutions group at Perficient is focused on helping our customers improve communication and interactions with their customers. Through our partnerships with industry-leading communications frameworks, we enhance and implement various ways companies interact across multiple channels.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every part of our lives and the contact center space is no different. There are huge spikes in traffic to health care, financial and government customer service lines. Contact center agents are trying to figure out how to work from home. Legacy contact center systems requiring agents to be at an office desk to take voice calls have been rendered unusable for the time being. Long wait times have increased the need for self-service options, bot interactions for common questions and use of alternate channels.
In light of these issues, our team at Perficient spent the week of March 23rd on an internal hackathon. The goal was to generate various proof-of-concept projects to address some of these needs. We’ll highlight some of this work, both to provide ideas to the community and to show ways we can quickly scale up solutions to help your company in this time of crisis.
These blog posts will take the form of an interview with one of our internal hackathon teams.
Team Concept – What is the use case or problem you are attempting to address?
Team Knights of the Roundtable (Adam Hadlock, Soroush Ashrafi, Jameson Taylor): We approached this COVID challenge from a few different angles. At first we thought trying to create something to entertain quarantinees would be useful and fun. We also thought about solving small restaurant food ordering challenges and delivery using Twilio.
While both ideas were interesting and viable to build through Twilio, we ultimately settled on creating something that could address the two largest concerns of this pandemic.
- The first concern we wanted to address (and probably the most important) is reducing the load on doctors.
- The second concern is to help ease patients’ concerns about COVID-19.
We hoped to answer questions like “Should I leave the house to visit a doctor?” and “Do I have or am I at risk of getting COVID-19?” without a personal interaction with medical staff being involved unless deemed necessary.
Who is the target company or organization for this solution?
Health care professionals such as hospital/medical clinic staff or family doctors.
Describe the services or components used in your solution at a high level?
Our solution allows a patient to contact the system via Web Chat, Voice, SMS or WhatsApp channels. Each channel presents a consistent step by step assessment to develop a level of risk “score”. We use this score to route the patient to auto responding prompts or to health care personnel skilled as Twilio Flex agents.
We stayed inside the Twilio realm for all functionality, utilizing the omni-channel nature of the platform. Twilio Functions and Assets allowed us to omit usage of external cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This provides a single configuration and deployment target, allowing target customers to spin up a solution quickly.
- Twilio Services Used
What challenges did you face in approaching this problem?
- thinking through what patients might want to hear
- determining what information doctors would need to make their decisions
- adding multiple channels without creating additional architecture (single Studio Flow)
- hosting a platform for doctor and patient to attend a video call together while maintaining security and compliance
Tell me about some enhancements or additional features you might add to your prototype
- tiered support levels
- triage Routing
- AutoPilot Chat bot
- video options for additional channels
Our Team
Customer engagement goes beyond customer service. Our team takes pride in our personal approach to the customer journey. We typically help enterprise clients transform and modernize their contact center with Twilio Flex, a programmable cloud contact center platform.
We have over 10 years of experience in delivering customer care solutions, including building, supporting, and deploying contact center solutions, and we consider it our personal responsibility to apply our expertise to helping our global community through the pandemic in any way we can.
