Aeroflow Scales Patient Support With Zoom Platform (Full Transcript)

[00:00:02] Speaker 1: My name is Ashley Merrill, and again, I'm here today to talk about Aeroflow Health's partnership with Zoom. So I've worked in a variety of roles here at Aeroflow, I've worked here for 10 years. I started as a customer support rep on the mom and baby team, transitioned to managing our customer support teams across the business, and then after that, I transitioned into managing the contact center platform and the contact center solutions team. So I've been in the contact center world here for a while. Now I'm the vice president of executive initiatives, and I work with our executive team on strategy. But again, I'm excited to talk to you about why we've chosen to deepen our partnership with Zoom. So let's talk a little bit about Aeroflow first. Aeroflow's goal is to make the complicated process of obtaining items through insurance simple for our patients. I think anyone who's worked with insurance knows it comes with its share of complexities, and we really want to streamline that for our patients. So who do we serve? We serve patients across three business units. So we provide breast pumps, maternity compression items, and lactation classes for our mom and baby patients. We provide CPAPs, BiPAPs, and masks for our sleep patients. We provide diapers and catheters for our urology patients. And a few other stats about Aeroflow, we have 175,000 physician partners across the United States. 42% of US births come through Aeroflow Health, and we have a 50% reach of mothers in maternal health deserts. So when it comes to our patient experience, cannot state enough how we take our customer support very, very seriously. Our customer support and contact center are key to our operations. Like I said before, we want things to feel really simple for our patients, and we want them to feel supported throughout the process of whatever they're obtaining. As far as our scale here at Aeroflow, we are a hybrid business. We have over 600 customer support agents working across the US with our contact center platform. So again, it's very important to us that we have a platform that can support hybrid work. And again, having excellent customer service is central to both our patient experience and our growth. So a few common patient questions include, you know, what's my insurance coverage for this product? What's the process like for obtaining this through insurance? What's the status of my prescription? Has my doctor faxed you? Where's my product? Shipping questions are very common as well. And then questions about additional supplies after someone has received their primary item. And so where it all comes together truly is that customer support. That is the glue of everything we do here, where all of our systems, processes, and teams create that seamless experience for the patient. So I'm going to quickly describe how the contact center works and supports the patient journey at Aeroflow. So our patients initiate an order with us in a few different ways. Maybe their doctor faxes a prescription to us to kick off the process. Maybe they give us a call or they fill out a form on one of our websites. And we keep our patients informed every step of the way, but we expect those patients have questions in the process and we're here to support them. That's when they reach out to us, connect with a contact center agent via phone, email, chat, and they receive the support and solution that they need. So why do we need to evolve? When I first started working here with the contact center platform, we had a, you know, a desk phone system, pick it up, press the button for hold, all those kinds of things. And eventually we realized we really needed to utilize a cloud-based outbound dialer to gain efficiency and reaching our patients. After that, we thought, you know what, we need to transition our inbound phone system as well to be cloud-based. So we brought that in, we took our time doing that, we did it nice and slowly. And then we had everything in the one platform together. So you know, you may be wondering why transition from there. Our previous vendor tended to patch systems together. And when you try to patch systems together, the journey can feel a little clunky as the end user, as the customer. And their method of modernization was focused on acquisition without a unified platform. So as we've grown, we've also noticed that we need tools that make it easier for the agents to provide world-class customer service. We need more insight into the nature of our calls, just like Matt was talking about earlier. We also want to incorporate AI responsibly. We want to offer our patients self-service options if that's what they want, but we also don't want to lose our human touch. And having tools under the same umbrella, having native tools is really ideal for us. So let's talk a little bit more about our journey with Zoom. I think like many companies, our first Zoom product was Zoom Video. This is how we built our trust with the Zoom team and the Zoom platform, offering lactation classes for our mom and baby patients. So we've been doing that for years, teaching over 20 class topics to our patients seven days of the week. More recently, we've transitioned to Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Phone. So we just completed in late July, a phased migration to Zoom Contact Center for all 600 of our phone agents across all three business units. And each team offers different tiers of support. And Zoom Contact Center provides that flexibility so that each team can structure their call flow and team dynamics differently. It's really important to us that we have that flexibility. We're also utilizing Zoom Phone for our inner office calls. And we recently moved to a new headquarters building, and we're using Zoom Workspace Reservations for our desk reservations, which is really great. So let's talk a little bit about connecting our agent and leader foundation. Two products that we're currently in the process of getting up and going here are Zoom Quality Management and Zoom Workforce Management. The goal here is to provide centralized reporting to our agents and leaders. We want more insight into what people are calling about and how our agents are performing relative to their quality metrics. We want our supervisors to always have the capability to analyze rep productivity, call themes, and training opportunities. And then finally, as mentioned before, we're expanding our self-service options. So discovery is underway for robust ZVAs, so Zoom Virtual Agents, like Johan mentioned at the beginning. We want to offer self-service options for those patients who like to self-service, but reserve our agents when we do have a patient who needs more nuanced support. And I know I've spoken a lot about unified platforms and natively built tools. Why does that mean so much to Aeroflow? Here at Aeroflow, we love to innovate, and we have a custom-built CRM. So because Zoom is natively built under one umbrella, it's easier for us to integrate with their APIs, which is really important to us. And we're a company that likes to innovate and pivot, and we've noticed that Zoom likes to as well, so it's a really good fit. One final early success that I need to mention is just how great the collaboration has been with the Zoom team overall. They have been so supportive and genuinely just fun to work with. They feel more like coworkers rather than a vendor-client relationship. So in summation here, our goal is to make healthcare easier for patients and to make support easier for our teams, and we're so happy to have Zoom as our partner as we continue our work.