How athenahealth Empowers Agents Through AI Customer Support

140,000 healthcare providers in its network

$1.2B annual revenue

60,000 support calls per month

24,000 online cases per month

Cloud-based healthcare products & services

athenahealth’s transition to a unified knowledge base integrated the wisdom found in seven siloed systems, including Microsoft SharePoint and their own homegrown platform, into one. This empowered agents to do a single, manual search for the resources most likely to address their needs. Now athenahealth is experiencing an over 75% increase in resolution discovery.

Agents are getting relevant answers to their questions sooner and can also easily attach articles to cases to show how they solved each issue. This indicates they are finding what they need from the machine learning suggestions and optimized data analytics included in Coveo's artificial intelligence technology.

Problem: Customer care agents had to search several resources to get the right answer for each case they received, using time they didn’t have and causing them to escalate cases.

Solution: With a single embedded interface and personalized article recommendations, agents get AI-powered, case-relevant answers first. Then they can search within the UI to find even more help for each customer interaction. Most can resolve issues on their own, without having to bother co-workers or escalate the case up a tier.

Problem:athenahealth absorbed the cost of customer inquiries, and these providers were often too busy to stop and call during patient care hours. They needed a way to quickly get help for common issues without a call.

Solution: Coveo’s technology unified information from the top provider resources to provide a self-service experience providers could access on their own, at any time. Data from the self-service interactions could be later used to optimize the provider relationship and improve future case handling.

Coveo’s AI customer support tools not only provide each new customer support agent with what they need to meet customer service expectations, but they also impact the company's internal culture. With new agents needing fewer steps to find what they need, they can often locate the right resource the first time, without moving to another tool.

It's simple to search the Salesforce environment if they cannot find what they need from a personalized recommendation. This reduction in friction and fewer tools to learn helps them onboard quickly and with less stress. It also keeps them from using other agents as resources, as they are busy with their own caseloads. Customer satisfaction happens in more cases, which is seen in the reduction of escalated cases.

Centralized content access

How athenahealth uses Coveo to build and maintain a unified search index as its only knowledge base. (Page 2)

Simplified customer self-service

How a self-service provider portal reduces agent caseloads and helps meet customer needs. (Page 6)

Improved agent retention

How athenahealth’s Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) model reduces turnover and empowers agents from day one. (Page 10)

When the health network athenahealth merged with Virence Health in 2019, it became responsible for supporting over 140,000 providers with everything from billing to community initiatives. The company answers customer questions through 60,000 calls and 24,000 online cases each month, with agents distributed across the U.S., Manila, and Chennai.

The network sees over $1.2 billion in annual revenue from its offerings, with each provider case depending on information from its knowledge base to ensure a high-quality customer experience.