Salud Digna is a Mexican institution that provides affordable healthcare services. Learn how the non-profit uses a chatbot on WhatsApp to offer quick and secure information about appointments, tests, and results to millions of patients.
During the pandemic, companies in the healthcare sector were in high demand, which posed a challenge for the sector. How to answer thousands of questions? How to process an unprecedented number of lab tests? How to schedule and confirm so many appointments?
Salud Digna faced these exact same challenges. Their solution? Automate their patient support on WhatsApp.
Using the WhatsApp Business Platform, Salud Digna and Sinch collaborated to automate the majority of its incoming patient inquiries. As a result, Salud Digna's chatbot on WhatsApp delivers fast and secure information about Covid tests and results, while assisting with multiple scheduling.
This is the perfect example of how digitalization can help health care providers to offer faster services and give more attention to their patients. This is how they made it work!
Salud Digna: Real-time patient support through a WhatsApp chatbot
With the beginning of the pandemic, Salud Digna faced a record number of requests for laboratory tests and appointments. However, due to the restrictions, the company had fewer branches open and limited staff support.
To solve this challenge, Salud Digna opened an official channel on WhatsApp. The main goal was to provide patients with fast and secure access to Covid tests and customer care in general. The patients loved the convenient communication channel, and requests started coming in very fast.
The only issue was how to respond to the thousands of requests that Salud Digna was receiving. The agents simply couldn't handle all the questions.
To increase the efficiency of its WhatsApp channel, Salud Digna integrated a chatbot into the app. For that, the company started using the WhatsApp Business Platform, the only WhatsApp account that supports automation tools. Salud Digna's chatbot was developed in partnership with Sinch Chatlayer, a solution that has the latest in conversational AI technology.
The results of Salud Digna's WhatsApp support channel
Salud Digna's bot is able to handle the vast majority of inquiries. It not only assist patients with lab testing, but also addresses common questions and assists with appointments. The first-level-chatbot has been a great help for the health care provider, says Pedro Josue Vidal Moreno from the Digital Laboratory at Salud Digna.
By 2021, the total number of patient interactions reached 35.2 millions, with up to 190,000 interactions per day.
Salud Digna's bot decreased by half the number of calls. As a consequence, customer care agents now can handle 30% more calls. By the end of 2021, 89% of interactions on WhatsApp were successfully handled by the bot.
Salud Digna’s automated WhatsApp support channel enabled the non-profit to maintain patient satisfaction and trust even during the most challenging times, all while improving operational efficiency:
- 89% of interactions no longer require a live agent
- 50% less time spent on calls, enabling agents to handle 30% more calls
- 712% growth in interactions in 2020 and 135% growth in 2021
- 32.5 million cumulative interactions with up to 190,000 patients daily
- 16.2 million patients served since the pandemic began
- 3.7 million WhatsApp queries made to date
- 5.1 million Covid-19 test appointment confirmations sent
- 2 million Covid-19 test results securely delivered automatically
This shows how digitalization isn't replacing human care, but actually improving it, says Julio César Rocha Cázares, Digital Marketing Manager at Salud Digna.
Advantages of customer service on WhatsApp
Customer habits are constantly changing. Now more than ever, consumers want their queries to be solved fast and also to easily find the services they need.
A good customer experience that meets the customer's needs is one that provides fast, simple, and efficient service.
For this, many companies are turning to messaging apps. Apps like WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, and Facebook Messenger.
Different messaging apps might work better for different markets. For instance, in Mexico, 91% of people that use the internet also use WhatsApp, India has 487.5 million WhatsApp users, whereas in the US, Facebook Messenger or iMessage are more popular.
Regardless of the messenger app, meeting customers on the channels they love, improves their experience, and it creates a more personal bond between you and them. Especially in health care, a field that is currently suffering from staff shortage, using messenger apps can dramatically improve not only the patients' but also the care takers' experience!
The advantages of automated customer care
Besides its popularity, messaging apps like WhatsApp have features that allow companies to optimize their customer service, such as chatbots. Organizations that make use of automated technology save manpower, money, and time. Moreover, with the launch of new technologies such as GPT, there will likely be a new boost in the market. As a model that generates (almost) any type of text, GPT chatbots will be of great help in marketing, sales, after-sales and customer care.
That's why different industries are heavily investing in automated customer care. In the healthcare and financial sector, chatbots are expected to deal with up to 90% inquiries in 2023.
🚀Ready to improve your customer service with the help of chatbots? Try Sinch Engage, and build your first chatbot in minutes — for free!
The best platform to easily build a WhatsApp chatbot
So, how can you start using chatbots on WhatsApp and other messaging apps? First of all, it's important to keep in mind that you need access to the WhatsApp Business Platform in order to be able to integrate chatbots.
Now, you can either start building your own IT infrastructure around this, but let's be honest... if you're working in the healthcare field, you're already spread thin, and you simply want a solution that's ready to go, and can help your staff and patients fast. That's where Sinch Engage comes in!
As an official Meta partner, you get easy access to the WhatsApp Business Platform, and a professional all-in-one messaging platform that doesn't require any IT skills. With Sinch Engage, you can…
- 🤖 … easily set up automation with an intuitive drag-and-drop chatbot builder.
-
👨⚖️ … use WhatsApp and other messaging channels for your customer communication and ensure 100% data protection.
-
🗞️ … start campaigns to send broadcast messages and marketing notifications.
-
🚀… start within a few days, no IT skills needed.
-
💻… edit and reply to all messages from one central inbox, regardless of what channel they’re coming from.
-
↔ … use one central inbox to easily assign customer inquiries to your co-workers, manually or through auto-routing.
-
⬆️ … boost your efficiency with automated reply templates.
-
💰 … use WhatsApp and other messaging channels effectively, at fair price, and without a set-up fee for maximum personal digital consulting!
