Can Conversational AI Replace Your Call Answering Service?

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Hi. I'm Tyson Franklin, and welcome to this week's episode of podiatry marketing. With me as he is every week, he's a handsome bugger. It is big Jim Mac. How are doing today, Jim?

I'm doing well, Tyson. Thanks for the flattering intro as always. I do appreciate that.

I'd love to see if I can just put you off your game right at the beginning of the of the podcast.

Yeah. I mean, like the big Jim Mac stuff, like it's funny now. I'll sometimes get on calls with some of our listeners who have questions about topics and they'll go on a, you know, a Google Meet call. And one of the favorite things they like to do is like, before we get to start talking, they're like, hey, Big Jim Mac. They always like to, like, throw in the Big Jim Mac there.

Or is it okay if I call you Big Jim Mac? It's yeah. It's definitely it's it's a fun little way that we can tell that the fans some of the fans and some listeners are into the show. It's Yeah.

Sixty years time, it'll it'll on your team's be around. On your team's day, it'll say, Jim McDaniel, the only other lab, big Jim Mac. And people go I've never heard of him. I've had heard of him. Anyway, what are we talking about today?

So today, we're gonna kinda continue the trend of talking about different AI tools. You know, we talked about different ways of doing dictation and kinda having a personal scribe in a way previously.

Yeah.

We talked about some ChatGPT and SearchGPT. But today, we're gonna talk a little bit about conversational AI and some of the use cases. Biggest one being kinda talking about how your clinic currently receives phone calls. Like how do you route those calls? How do you provide a great patient experience?

And is is it time now for these kind of conversational AIs to have an opportunity to maybe take over some of those, you know, whether it's your one of your office members, staff members, maybe it's you're using an outside answering service, maybe you're using one of those annoying kind of phone tree systems, but Yeah. We'll kinda get it we'll kinda get into the ways that, you know, people have been previously trying to take calls and some of the the pros and cons, and then to kind of see where the state of AI is as far as trying to make this a better experience not only for you and your staff, but also for for the patients.

And I think that's the big thing too. It's how is it for the patient? Yep. So where do we start?

Yeah. So I'd say we just jump in a little bit about kinda like what what are the tools or what's the technology that we've used in the past, right, or to receive these phone calls and, you know, what are the kind of some of the the pitfalls or things to consider. Obviously, you know, the most common thing has been along around the longest is having one of your staff members try to take those calls. Right? So the the phone rings and it's it's someone on your staff who A human.

Has the yeah. Human on the other side of the phone, which is pretty rare these days. Right? Like It is. But definitely, you know, I know whenever I'm calling my bank or any other kind of your credit card, had a recently canceled business credit card, all I wanted to do was talk to a human.

I didn't wanna go through any of the other steps. Just what is the fastest way to get to a human? But there are some downfalls with with doing that, especially if you have a busy clinic and that person is trying to multitask. Number one, you know, how long is it gonna take them to pick up that phone call? Right?

If they're doing multiple things, maybe it's three or four rings. And I think people these days, you know, when you're not picking up the phone quickly, it gives them the opportunity to hang up and call somebody else or just feel already like it's not your call their call is not really that important to your clinic, and that's a concern. Another big concern is that, you know, if you don't have multiple phone lines or if you do have multiple phone lines but no one's answering that, you get two or three calls around the same time. That can be a problem because someone's on hold. You know, you're talking to that other person, and it seems like the person you're talking with is always the person that's gonna take the longest.

Right?

Oh, yeah.

Like, even though you've got two or three calls, it always is the person that has 30 questions or 20 questions. You wanna make sure you answer it thoroughly, but it's really degrading the kind of patient or customer experience for the people that are now on hold. So, you know, obviously, you do get a human voice. Sometimes you do get direct answers. It's a direct connection to the clinic, but there are kind of some negative impacts of just only having humans answering the phone.

It's yeah. I do recall having the receptionist there, and and that was why sometimes clinics had two receptionists and you had four or five phone lines coming in because you couldn't rely just on having that one phone line. And it's been the same thing if they were ringing through the phone line and it was engaged. Okay. I'll ring back in five minutes.

If it's still engaged, you're like, what's going on? And if it was the third time it was engaged, you go you you would ring a competitor.

Absolutely. And that that kinda leads us to the next technology. That's, you know, if it's the phone line is busy or maybe that just, you know, based on the it's a small clinic. They don't have enough staff or have enough revenue to bring on someone to answer phone calls. You're getting, you know, basically your voice mail.

Right? It's going straight to voice mail. You know, leave your name. When is it you're available to come into the clinic. If returning clinic, we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

I think over time, people just I don't know. I I don't know about me. Maybe I'm just impatient or what, but I hate leaving voice mails. I just I know it's gonna take a long it feels like it's gonna take a long time to get replied to. I actually prefer those ones where they say that if you type in your number, we'll call you back Yeah.

Once we're available, because that feels like, you know, it feels like there's like a call to action there that feels a lot more satisfying than just leaving some random message. It just it just I just don't you know, maybe I'm just an impatient person, but just leaving voice mails feels like there's no real time interaction. You have you feel like you have an urgent question and you get a voice mail about maybe it's maybe it's not even that urgent. Maybe it's about is this insurance accepted or what's appointment availability and having to kinda do the phone tag thing because you're calling at a time that's convenient for you, but now maybe you have to go pick up the kids at school and that's the time that clinics gonna call back. It always seems like you get called back at kind of not a great time and then, you know, it can also whether it be a real person or this voice mail, you know that there's only a limited amount of time that you can do some of these tasks.

Right? If you call up the clinic at 11PM, no one's gonna be there. You're just gonna leave a voice mail and you're just pushing more work the next day. So that that's some that's that's one type of system that, you know, feels a bit dated, but still a lot of clinics use.

Well, I do know a lot of podiatrists still have answering machines, And and they're solo practitioners, and they will just let everything go to the answering machine, hoping people will leave a message, and then they call them back in between patients or when they get a break. But then, you know, are they gonna call them back in that half hour, or are they gonna call them back at the end of the day. And I did have someone tell me recently, they just went, if I'm really busy, I just don't call them back. And I'm like, what? Don't say that.

Yeah. Because that's they just get when I'm really busy, I just don't call them back. Don't need to.

Yeah. It's not gonna lead to any good Google reviews or a lot of goodwill with the patient if they do end up coming to see you.

I know. And so what else you've got? The voicemails, basic phone systems, which that has been around forever.

Yeah. So so the next one would be kind of like the phone trees. Right? The kind of, you know, obviously, even smaller clinics, I will sometimes, you know, phone up or if you call in, you wouldn't expect them to have that. That's like, you know you know, that's no one answers.

You're just gonna get this message. And this is like what I said, the frustration of the credit card companies or the banks sometimes. It's like push 1 for this. Push 2 for this. Push 3 for appointments.

If you're a established patient, push 4. And then usually these days, they never give you the option to, like, get in touch with the operator. Like, that used to be in, my cheat code is, like, push zero to get to the operator, and I just I wouldn't listen to any of them. You know? I just wanna, like, get to a human as soon as possible.

A lot of them don't have them anymore. Like I said, you're just kinda waiting. And it always feels like they say thirty second it's always thirty seconds more information you really care about. Even it's, you know, it just you feel you're just wasting time. You wanna talk to somebody, and just you're not gonna actually get that answer right away because sometimes that even those will kind of get back ended with voice mail as well.

Mhmm. So it's it's time consuming. You don't always get to talk to somebody and kind of move forward on that patient journey when you're really feel like you're one to, and there's no personalization. Right? It's just it's the same you're gonna be treated at the same time every time you call those phone trees, and it just kinda kinda get into that routine.

And obviously, you know, it's it's maybe better than nothing, but at the same time, it can be a frustrating thing for a lot of folks.

So the phone tree is almost like a phone funnel. It's almost like pushing you down through. But, you you know, one thing I did, speed up this process sometimes. Usually, if it's somewhere where you know they want money, I just hit the one that says I wanna give them money. You know, wanna pay something.

I don't. I not want that because you know that that one will get answered pretty quickly, and then it gets answered by a human, and you go, oh, did I push the wrong button? Oh, can you just push me across to whatever my inquiry was? And usually, they can sometimes speed it up.

That's a good that's a good strategy. I'll have to I'll have to remember that one.

But it is. It is annoying, especially when you're you're listening to it and goes, yeah, press 1. And for this, press 2, and you go, when are they gonna get to what I want? And then it gets away for every everything else, press 9. Because if you just go on to the other 8, they didn't apply.

Okay.

So now we'll jump into conversational AI and kinda how this technology is kind of a growing segment especially for making appointments and you know, what is conversational AI. So it's really kind of these basically AIs now have kind of natural language processing. You know, not only do can you go on a chat GPT and you know, type in text. It will sometimes be able to tell what your you know, basically do do natural voice processing. Basically, you can talk like on my ChatGPT app.

I can talk to my ChatGPT and it'll give me answers back. Mean, sometimes it has, you know, things I told it, so it has certain context available. So there's some different softwares out there, and I I have no association with any of them, but one of them is called Wendy. And basically what it does is, you know, has kind of advanced machine learning, and basically what it sets apart from voicemails and phone trees is that, you know, this is like a real time conversation. It'll ask you questions, you know, you'll call up, you can have multiple lines on some of these systems so there's never a busy signal.

Yeah. But you'll get directly to one of these conversational AIs and they'll ask you, hello, you know, who's how's this going? Sometimes they'll say they're an AI, sometimes they all sound almost human in a way. They'll ask you your name, you know you know, in what reason are you calling. And then it will sometimes, you know, it's HIPAA compliant so it can gather some of that patient information about, you know, whether or not you know, what insurance do you have.

And sometimes it can run an immediate check to see if that's something an insurance plan that you have that you take. Also, it can, you know, sometimes sync up with different scheduling calendars and different EMRs to see when your actual availability is Okay. For for a new patient or for an established patient. So it's a very interesting way to kind of maybe combat some of the, you know, issues associated with some more of the legacy ways of getting in touch with the clinic over the phone.

Just like, I've used ChetGDP a few times just to have a conversation. You just know this is where it's gonna go because a few times I've used AI and I've been talking to it, and like I said and my wife says exactly the same thing. She goes, sometimes I forget that I'm actually talking to a machine because the conversation just seems so natural even though it still sort of sounds like still AI. Doesn't sound like a human a %, but just the interaction and the backwards and forwards. And sometimes you can try and throw a curly question in there, and it just nails it.

And and like you said, it's it's really about those follow-up questions which which are important. Right? Like, you know, how can I help you today? And then you're kinda getting your information, and then it's able to adapt some of these things in real time. Right?

So if you're a podiatry clinic for example and you know if someone's mentioning that they have like a a red hot swollen foot with a wound, there's ways of like triggering different kind of you know keywords to say, hey, it'd be best for you to, you know, immediately come into the clinic or maybe whatever your protocol is with those types of things, you're able to have the the conversational AI learn some of those ways that you wanna have certain things seen. So you're not just, you know, being held liable that your your AI didn't recognize that someone had a foot infection, for example. But like I talked about, it can also ask questions about their insurance coverage to make sure that it can adjust the response appropriately. It's also like, talked about just there's this flexibility which makes the conversation smoother and reduces that frustration to a lot that a lot of these systems, you know, people have. You know, unless you just get that really helpful, you know, receptionist that has all the time in the world to spend with you on the phone.

But, you know, that receptionist probably also has other tasks in the clinic. So if you're really looking not only to improve that that kind of workflow as far as the calls go, but also the workflow in the clinic itself. These conversational AIs could be something that could be really, really beneficial. Like I talked about, you know, sometimes it's it's integrated appointment scheduling. Right?

Instead of someone having to physically look up and get into your EMR and say, oh, we have these days and these days, things like Windy and other types of softwares that can be integrated into your EMR. You know, it just saves the clinic time, but also saves the patient time and it and it kind of eliminates that, you know, phone tag or that back and forth that just is really, really frustrating these days.

Yeah. Well, we know, like, as podiatrists, and you've been and when you've done podiatry for enough years, and when you're with a patient, it wouldn't surprise you if you said to someone, 90% of my conversations are exactly the same. The same question. They'll tell me the same things. You'll ask the same questions.

They give the same responses. And, yes, everyone every individual is different. But you can take that, like you're saying, take that from a risk a patient ring in the clinic to make an appointment. It's gonna be less complicated there than it is with a patient in the room. So you can see how AI can really just take over that particular role, especially when it's answering basic questions, giving basic information, making a basic appointment, and and who it is that they wanna see.

And I think with some of these AIs, like I said, the different kind of ways that, you know, you you wanna filter or, you know, let's say, only wanna see routine care on a Tuesday afternoon. You'll have be able to build in different types of filtering tools into the way that they respond to patients. Right? Just because you have open appointments maybe like every day of the week, maybe they talk about what they need and you're able to better kind of I think that's one of the things that people have about using some of these tools is like, well, I don't wanna use online scheduling because then they can kinda like have free rein within my schedule. I I only wanna see certain patients on certain days, and I think some of these AI tools will be able to kind of better kind of, for lack of a better term, kind of filter those patients to the right spots in a way.

Also say like I talked about, you know, clinics open from maybe, you know, the phones open maybe from seven until five or seven until six. But there's a lot of time, you know, so that's, you know, what maybe thirteen hours when someone is not physically present in your clinic and it's going to voicemail. Know, these these AI agents, you know, this conversational AI can be available twenty four seven with consistently, you know, pulling in patients, making appointments. It's just it's not just waiting for that that staff member to to show up at, you know, six or 7AM to pull off the voice mails or to, you know, go to the the email to look and see who's wanting to make an appointment. This can be a task that's automated and really, you know, whether it's weekends or holidays, just keep the clinic moving in a positive direction and get people on the schedule.

I think it's a really, really powerful thing in that way. You know, obviously, that's kind of the the promise of, like, having your clinic be online in the first place is that, you know, you have this kind of twenty four seven online version of your clinic, but now you can actually make appointments during that time makes it very, very powerful.

It's just amazing where it's headed. Like, yeah, like, the whole AI. I mentioned it every couple of weeks when we talk about just how fast this is progressing. And the podiatrists that get on board, the early adapters or adopters so the early adopters of this, think you're really gonna benefit from the ones who sit on the hands and go, I just wanna stick to having Mabel at the front answering the phone, you know, that that interaction. So I think this sort of stuff people need to investigate it.

No. Absolutely. And I think there's also, you know, ways that it can be even more personalized and like context aware. So let's say, you know, you have a patient that missed an appointment, you know, there's gonna be kind of recall campaigns that can be done with these conversational AIs like, you know, hello, you you know, missus Jones. We know that you missed this appointment last whatever day.

You know, would you be interested in rescheduling? And instead of tying somebody up to have to do those types of recall campaigns, it can be a voice, it can be interactive, it can get more people on the books, you know, whether the person's gonna come back or not or you wanna see them back after the missing appointments. That's it's another the topic for a different discussion. But, know, whether it's maybe, you know, you wanna do one year recalls on orthotics. Right?

Instead of just sending an email blast, maybe it is these conversational AIs that someone has opted into that are calling them and and getting them back on the books and basically automating everything from the phone call to them being on your schedule. So it can be a real real time saver.

That'd be really cool. Yeah. Can you imagine your your phone rings, you answer, you go, hello. This is Tyson. He goes, hey, Tyson.

How are you doing? Just it's it's Gordon the robot.

From from from doctor McCannell's office.

Yeah. From doctor McCannell's office, and it's time for your one year review. Would you like to make that appointment now? And I go, oh, I don't know. What were the football scores on the weekend?

And it tells you. Yeah. This is pretty cool. I reckon you would have a bit of fun with it, and then you would probably make the appointment. Because have you been to the Sphere at all?

I've not been to the Vegas Sphere yet. No.

Yes. We went there. They had the AI robots in the foyer area that you could talk to before we went in for the show. Okay. And and they were very interactive.

Some people were trying to put throw them off by asking him questions that really left field and every time just nailed it. They they brought the conversation right back to what the person was really trying to say. And who's the main character from the Terminator?

Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yeah. No. Know the actor. The the the kid that he was there to protect.

Edward Furlong? John Connor?

John Connor. So the person walked up to one of the robots, and the robot said, oh, and what's your name, sir? He said, John Connor. And he went, Very funny. And I suppose with next to you is James Cameron.

So it just straight away just knew what this person was trying to do and and but kept it going. So it was it was really interesting to watch what they were doing with AI in there.

Absolutely. I'd say the, you know, the real kind of evolution of we're kind of going from this, you know, these kind of older systems with voicemails and phone trees and now to conversational AI. It's gonna potentially kind of transform the way clinics, you know, handle patient communication, kinda like the examples we provided. You know, with you know, I talked about, you know, voicemails are very passive and frustrating for people in a playing phone tag. No one likes kind of navigating through phone trees.

So, hopefully, this the adaptability with this conversational AI with tools like Windy can allow clinics to really provide better patient experience, kind of reduce the staff workload, and, like, let them take care of patients in the clinic and really provide that great patient experience just to really have kind of a you know, as these AIs even get better, it's gonna provide kind of a human like interaction that will hopefully be satisfying both the clinics and to the people that are, you know, visiting the clinics and making these phone calls.

Yeah. Well, seeing how far it's come even when they have the little chat box down on the right hand side of some websites. And how accurate they've been just when you and you know you're talking to a computer. So if they've been they've been able to do that for years. So, you know, the AI, I think this this part is going to move ahead really fast until there'll be a lot of place in a couple of years, you'll be ringing a place, you won't know whether you're talking to a human or not.

And you don't care as long as you get your appointment or get get the information you need.

No. Absolutely. I think it's it's something that it doesn't have to be used all at once. I think, know, there there's there's use cases from the software if you're still wanting to see if it if it works or, you know, using it, like I said, in the evenings or on the weekends or on holidays and seeing if that, you know, test test driving some of these things. But I think this is the way things are moving because it's operationally efficient on both sides.

You know, patients call in and they they get to make an appointment. They get to kind of have that feeling that okay, things are moving forward as opposed to like, I've got a call three, four more times that call me back, and then we have to kind of do that kind of dance. So I think it's it's a win win both for the patient and for the clinic. So I'm excited to see kinda what direction this heads and as there's more, you know, obviously advancements made in this field, we'll we'll touch on them and we'll have additional podcast on the subject.

Oh, no. I'm looking forward to it because I think way back when we first that episode where we mentioned ChatGDP the first time and how much it's changed. We listen to that now, how much it's changed over that couple year period.

Yep. Absolutely.

So maybe the first time you brought it up and I just like, had no idea what you're talking about.

Yeah. It's like kinda happens slowly, then all of a sudden, it's just like it's everywhere. Right? So

Well, now, you can probably mention it to my mom who's 80, and she'd probably know exactly what you're talking about. So that has gone really fast, and I think it's just gonna keep moving that quick.

So Yeah. Totally.

It's been a great great topic. Love this one.

Glad you enjoyed it, Tyson.

Okay, Jim. I look forward to talking to you next week.

Alright. Sounds great. Okay. See you. Bye now.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDaniel. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.