This healthcare-focused call center uses RingCX, AI Quality Management, AI Agent Assist, and a HubSpot integration to improve operations and the caller experience, increase sales, and boost efficiencies by 20%.
MedCare Equipment Company
The leading home/durable medical equipment provider uses AI Receptionist (AIR), AI Conversation Expert (ACE) and RingCentral Contact Center to dramatically improve the patient experience.
Region
Americas
Company size
100–399
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
40%
reduction in average call wait times with RingCentral Contact Center
92%+
time saved on call reviews since deploying ACE
80%
increase in call routing accuracy with AIR
With AIR, our call routing accuracy is already at 80% and above. This is a major step up from the 50–60% accuracy we saw with our traditional menu. It’s a high-performing system that actually has the capacity to get even smarter over time.
Zac Shannon
IT Manager
A leading medical equipment provider for four decades
Whether they’re receiving treatment in a hospital or recovering at home from an acute health event, patients need the right medical equipment at the right time. And for the medical community across Western Pennsylvania—general physicians, hospital staff, and other caregivers—MedCare Equipment Company has become the go-to resource for the durable and home medical equipment they need for their patients. To support more than a million patients on their healthcare journeys, MedCare needs reliable, advanced communication tools.
Take a quick tour of RingCentral
Looking for a phone system to keep pace with the company’s growth
MedCare moved from its on-prem phone system to a cloud communications solution several years ago to help the company manage its rapid growth. But IT Manager Zac Shannon explains that the new cloud system fell far short of MedCare’s needs.
“It was a nightmare,” Zac says. “We had regular outages, which was a particular challenge because we offer 24-hour live customer support, and our small HelpDesk team was receiving downtime tickets at all hours.” The system’s other shortcomings, Zac says, included minimal reporting and analytics, the need to maintain physical desk phones for all employees, and a lack of seamlessly integrated communication services the company also needed, such as live chat and SMS.
But the biggest operational challenge, the shortcoming that sent Zac’s team searching for a new solution, was that they couldn’t make needed administrative adjustments to their phone system on the fly.
If we wanted to make any change to the old system, like create a call queue or buy a new number, we had to submit a request to the vendor. They took at least five-to-seven business days to get it done. Now that we have RingCentral, I can do all of these things myself in under an hour.
Zac Shannon
,
IT Manager
Choosing RingCentral for its suite of integrated solutions
A key reason Zac’s team chose RingCentral was its ability to address the company’s major telephony needs all with a single platform. For example, Zac explains that rolling the RingEX as the company’s cloud phone solution helped free up MedCare’s employees from their desks and improved the experience for callers. “With RingEX, we were able to make our phone menus much more intuitive and guide customers and other callers more quickly to the right people.”
As MedCare also found, selecting RingCentral also meant the company could seamlessly integrate other mission-critical IT communications services, including AI Conversation Expert (ACE) and RingCentral Contact Center.
Streamlining and improving agent coaching with AI
As Zac explains, deploying ACE is delivering significant operational improvements, particularly in terms of coaching and training customer support agents.
With their previous system, they were recording customer support calls, but from a coaching standpoint managers had to listen to the entire call to get the full story. Zac explains, "Now that we're using ACE, we're getting all calls automatically analyzed and summarized. And from what we've seen, ACE is spot-on in its analysis and call highlights, both good and bad."
In fact, Zac adds, ACE’s AI-powered coaching and training capability is saving the customer support department an average of roughly five hours per manager and agent each week. The supervisors no longer need to spend so much time manually reviewing calls, and agents don’t need to have as many one-on-one meetings to discuss what’s working and what isn’t on these calls.
For a manager to review an agent’s full call and summarize their findings, it used to take about 25 minutes. With ACE, we can now review an AI-generated analysis in two minutes. That’s a time savings of 92%—not including the time saved by letting our agents see their own automated call reviews on the platform rather than having to meet with their manager.
Zac Shannon
,
IT Manager
In addition to saving time, the customer support team is uncovering valuable new business intelligence. Zac points out, “Thanks to the visibility we’ve gained with RingCentral analytics, we’ve been able to quickly adjust our call flow when traffic gets heavy for a certain queue or region. We’ve been able to bring down our average wait times by 40%. Considering how important these calls can be for our patients, that’s extremely gratifying to our team.”
This deeper insight is further enhanced by the AI tool, ACE. Using sentiment analysis, ACE identifies something the team had never considered, which is agent uncertainty. When a customer service agent sounds unsure about the guidance they are giving, it can negatively impact the patient’s confidence. Zac explains, “now we receive alerts about these moments of uncertainty, we can pinpoint the specific agents and topics that require additional training or product knowledge.”
Zac notes that the longer the team has been leveraging these tools, the better the company-wide buy-in has become. Once people realized how easy it is to get call details transcribed and share that information, RingCentral’s ACE quickly became a popular and essential part of their tech stack. This has been especially impactful for distributed employees: “Our remote teams probably use it the most because without it, what other way do you have to review calls?”
Achieving a 40% reduction in wait times
When they rolled out RingCentral Contact Center, MedCare’s customer support team found several ways to improve their workflows and the caller experience. One such improvement, Zac explains, was the ability to consolidate solutions.
“Because the old system provided phone service only, we used third-party apps to support our customers with chat and SMS. And if a customer mistakenly faxed an order to our main number instead of our fax, we’d never know we missed it. Now everything is integrated with RingCentral, which means our agents can handle voice and chat inquiries in the same queue, and we have full visibility and reporting into what’s happening across all communications.”
Additionally, because RingCentral Contact Center makes it so easy to adjust call queues, routing instructions, and other important workflows, Zac points out that the customer support team has been able to dramatically improve their callers’ average wait times.
RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center have given us a lot of capabilities we didn’t have with our previous solutions. But the fundamental benefit for us, and the biggest difference from our old service, is that we have complete confidence in our phone system. In the three years since we rolled out RingCentral, we’ve had less than two total hours of downtime.
Zac Shannon
,
IT Manager
Enhancing the Patient Experience with AI Receptionist (AIR)
Even with the improved workflows and reliability of the RingCentral platform, the critical first line of engagement with the patient—the phone menu—remained a challenge. MedCare faced an ongoing problem: their existing menu was too "cumbersome and long" due to their complex list of products and departments. To solve this, IT Manager Zac Shannon looked to the growing potential of AI to fill a major gap. He sought a way to manage the crucial "zero option" that historically only forced the inadequate menu to replay, all without the prohibitive cost of staffing live agents 24/7.
"We already have a lot of trust in RingCentral and the RingCentral platform as a whole. We know that RingCentral does a great job with its security, its engineering, doing its due diligence. So it's an easy win for us because we know that AIR and all the products under the RingCentral umbrella follow the same security principles and tenets."
AIR was deployed to manage the "press zero" option, which historically would only force the menu to replay. Now, patients can simply ask AIR for a specific product or product category and get "transferred to the appropriate department instead of going through a two-minute long intro message".
Patients might know they have a portable oxygen concentrator, but that product doesn't get mentioned in the menu. Now, they can just ask AIR. That's the value for us—giving people a more streamlined, quicker way to ask questions that may not have been obvious within the traditional menu.
Zac Shannon
,
IT Manager
MedCare's success hinges on the AI Receptionist's ability to leverage "transfer by context," a feature Zac Shannon considers the "most important one" for their business. This intelligence immediately drove up call routing accuracy, which is now estimated to be in the 80% or higher, a significant leap from the traditional menu's estimated 50-60% range. For the patient, this streamlined process translates directly into faster service. Calls are now moving to the correct destination within a minute , a dramatic improvement over the historical average wait time of three to seven minutes on certain queues. Ultimately, this leads to a better patient experience. Patients are expressing "less complaints" about being transferred around or picking wrong options. Furthermore, the AI Receptionist is providing a cost-effective solution for MedCare's 24/7 business. “We were not really trying to use it as a money-saving item, but the cost of AIR is quite reasonable, so it felt like a no-brainer.” To staff the IVR’s "zero option” for immediate assistance with live agents round the clock, Zac estimates MedCare would need at least three to five people. He points out that the cost of AIR is "far less costly than one employee" making it an affordable option to maintain the high level of patient support they desire.
Looking ahead: Increasing value with RingCX and RingCentral features
Finally, Zac explains that MedCare is looking ahead to improving more workflows across the company using RingCentral's openAPI and the various tools available on the open developer platform. The customer support team is anticipating adding more contact center functionality and is testing RingCX. Based on the quantifiable improvements they’ve already experienced with ACE and AIR, Zac expects that deploying more RingCentral functionality will continue adding tremendous value to their business.
The true value of RingCentral's AI is that it simply works in the background. It's transparent—nobody really sees it. I prefer that because when it's working properly, I don't hear anything bad; calls are just going great. It's doing a job that nobody else was going to do, and it allows us to grow our capabilities and care level seamlessly.
Zac Shannon
,
IT Manager
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