According to market research, the global animal health market was valued at approximately $139 billion in 2020 and is predicted to grow to more than $190 billion by 2027. Even without its projected growth, animal health organizations, much like their human pharmaceutical counterparts, often do not have the adequate technology infrastructure to support or streamline their call centers.
Depending on the season (i.e., equine vaccine or flea and tick season), veterinary pharmaceutical companies experience extremely high call volumes (statistically, more people call animal health companies about pet products than people call about human-related products).
With so many regulatory reporting agencies (i.e., USDA, FDA, EPA) in the United States alone with whom these organizations must comply, having effective methods to support customer service and adverse event and product quality collection reporting is critical for compliance, product surveillance, and delivering white glove customer service.
Many veterinary pharmaceutical companies feel the strain of the increased load factors on call center resources and realize that their traditional workflow practices are ineffective in high call volume situations. High call volumes, combined with changing regulations and increased complexity of calls, can quickly overload even the most efficient call centers.
For example, suppose a field veterinarian calls an animal healthcare company to report an adverse event (AE) that noted approximately 200 out of 725 exposed cows after receiving an antiparasitic. In this example, the veterinarian is working with the rancher. Every minute the veterinarian is forced to spend waiting to be transferred to the right support resource or retelling the details of the AE to different representatives is frustrating and a waste of time and money.
At Perficient, our approach of utilizing a cross-functional team, combined with subject matter experts from pharmacovigilance, medical information, and technology disciplines, can help veterinary pharma companies design smart roadmaps that introduce the use of virtual assistants to their existing call centers.
These virtual assistants enable organizations to quickly triage calls, provide human-like dialogue, capture call contents, translate those contents to text, and from there, pull AEs or product quality complaints (PQCs) and case data into an E2B XML file that is directly imported into PV-Works (Vet).
Artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have a proven success record across many types of regulated call centers. The capabilities of these technologies can enable companies to have a “one platform” concept that helps manage the waxes and wanes of inbound calls.
Our expertise can help you streamline your call center practices and maintain high-quality customer service without necessarily adding more live agents. This approach allows the first-line call responders and specialty veterinarians to utilize their phone time more efficiently and prioritize the most pressing cases.
With a custom metrics dashboard, a strained call center is transformed into an atmosphere where virtual assistants can gradually manage more of the workload and those on the phone can provide higher quality customer service.
This can all be accomplished within the boundaries of your workflow and approved responses, minimizing the manual rework of entering AE/PQC cases into the database. With today’s AI, you can also get the empathy of a human – the days of the robotic responses and the frustrations of, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” are over.
Organizations that leverage this type of holistic approach experience decreased wait times, reduced costs, improved customer and agent satisfaction, fewer dropped calls, higher regulatory compliance, and boosts in productivity.
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Interested in learning more about how AI and NLP with virtual agents can increase efficiency and streamline high-stakes customer service scenarios? Want to learn the realistic journeys of virtual agents using these technology platforms in medical information or AE call centers?
Join us for our webinar, Improve Medical Product Information Sharing With Virtual Agents, on Wednesday, January 12, 2022 at 11 AM Eastern, featuring pharmacovigilance, regulatory affairs, and artificial intelligence thought leaders Prabha Ranganathan, Kari Blaho-Owens, Ph.D., and Nico Frantzen.
We look forward to your questions and to following up with a personal demo of a POC that truly shows how voice-to-text or text-based queries can be used to triage higher risk calls to the appropriate live agent, manage quick and accurate information reporting, and create an adverse event/product quality control case that replaces mundane data entry and pushes data into PV-Works.
