How We Automated Doctor Appointment and Scheduling Through a Chatbot

There is a strong demand of personalized human-like care in an effective and timely manner. Technologies such as chatbots are made to tackle these issues. They are built to handle repetitive tasks and streamline day-to-day functioning and reduce the workload.

In this story, we will tell you how Frontman-made chatbot for a healthcare center enhanced the efficiency and improved customer satisfaction.

The challenges regarding scheduling appointment with doctor online

The healthcare center located in New Delhi has been in the field of assistive reproduction and helped thousands of women achieve their dream of having a child. It served about 100-200 customer calls on a daily basis with majority of them related to repetitive tasks such as booking appointments or checking doctor schedules.

This was taking a significant amount of the center’s capacity. As they could have easily benefitted from a chatbot for these repetitive tasks, we contacted them and demonstrated the simple chatbot conversational flow made through Frontman.

When they explained all about their problem, we decided to focus on two key areas of the existing process. The first one was to reduce the load of calls by about 45 percent, the amount of time majorly spent on answering phone calls about schedules or appointments with the doctors. This was definitely creating problem for the staff.

Further, they wanted to reduce the waiting period of response from the contact center, especially during the peak operating hours. And this was really frustrating for the patients since the assistants were busy talking to other patients and resolving their queries.

How chatbot can automate appointment booking process for the doctors?

The objective behind all this was to increase reach to the existing and prospective patients. And since it’s about reproductive medicine and type of services the healthcare center offers, many patients due to shyness prefer talking a chatbot rather than contacting directly on phone.

So, we created a bot using Frontman through which a patient can directly interact with the healthcare center and register his queries. The moment a visitor or patient arrived on the healthcare website and clicks the small chat icon on the bottom right, it starts interacting with the visitor.

For instance, whenever a user selects ‘schedule an appointment’, the chatbot would ask number of questions one after the other such as ‘type of services’ and ‘Department of Doctor’. After initiating the conversation it further asks ‘Are you visiting for the first time or following up’, ‘when do you prefer to meet the doctor’? And then an option comes to book the time slot by choosing a date and available slots in the calendar.

Through these smooth conversational flows, hundreds of patients were able to freely register their queries and reduced waiting time calling a human staff. And what was special with the Frontman chatbot is that it can be customized to blend with the healthcare center such as giving an ‘avatar’ or name and logo of a healthcare so that the people can easily recognize it.

Reduce workload by 45% post deployment

With the deployment of the chatbot, the healthcare center was able to achieve its objective of cutting down workload of staff by a huge margin of 45 percent. This freed up a lot of time of the contact staff to focus on deeper issues related to patient engagement. For them, this was simple yet great solution that proved helpful in improving the experience of the patients or visitors.

The round the clock availability of the chatbot make the patients experience a virtual connection with the healthcare center in some way or the other. This also increased reach to not only of the existing patients but also the prospective clients who earlier felt uneasiness in contacting with the clinic.

Create an appointment scheduling bot now

More often a patient prefers to get an appointment with the doctor as early as possible. A few simple quick tap questions on the availability of doctor, date and time slots would be enough for a patient to make a decision. From the healthcare perspective, chatbots like Frontman can help the staff focus more on major tasks and not to lose attention on non-primary activities.

Besides scheduling medical appointments, a whole lot of things can be done with Frontman to increase visitor engagement, boost efficiency and business. A free trial can let you explore more features.