How Cleveland Clinic enhanced its service desk operations to optimize the patient and employee experience

Meet world-renowned health system Cleveland Clinic

For more than a century, Cleveland Clinic has been at the forefront of modern medicine. What started as a small outpatient hospital by four physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care, Cleveland Clinic has grown to more than 200 locations around the world, employing more than 65,000 caregivers administering care for more than 6 million patient visits each year

Challenges Cleveland Clinic faced without integrated voice solutions for ServiceNow

In order to better serve patients and employees, Cleveland Clinic adopted ServiceNow as part of an organization-wide investment in their IT Department and the tools they use. ServiceNow gave Cleveland Clinic a single, unified platform that could provide everything from patient data management to employee workflows.

However, there was still a crucial element missing from this single, unified platform: a communication layer to manage incoming calls from patients and employees. Instead of managing those critical interactions within ServiceNow, these calls were being handled through their on-premise Cisco phone system. This system was completely separate and siloed from the patient and employee data in ServiceNow, making it difficult to access when it was needed. To make matters worse, that phone system was administered by a separate team, causing further delays.

As a result, service for patients and employees alike was suffering.

Top challenges 

Unable to administer call workflows:

Any changes that were needed to voice workflows had to be performed by a seperate department, and required submitting a ticket in order to request changes.

No system to prioritize urgent requests:

Without an integration between the phone system and ServiceNow database, urgent requests, such as calls from organ transplant teams, could not be properly prioritized among other day-to-day requests.

Unintelligent routing:

Without any background information from ServiceNow for an inbound caller, it was an extremely manual and time-consuming process to route a patient or employee to the right agent.

Inability to handle call volume surges:

When a major incident would occur causing a surge in call volume, the Service Desk was unable to manage the influx of calls or provide preemptive voice self-service options to users who would be inquiring about these issues.

Long wait times:

Inbound Service Desk calls were often placed on lengthy holds or forced to go through tedious IVR prompts — damaging the patient and employee experience.

Inefficient reporting:

With the high volume of calls, it took a single employee up to a full week each month to report on important data such as user satisfaction and time spent on hold — meaning the Service Desk was always behind on making improvements.

How Cleveland Clinic improved service desk operations with 3CLogic & ServiceNow

Implementing ServiceNow as the platform of the future for Cleveland Clinic was step one. Step two? Finding a solution that natively integrated their phone system with ServiceNow to improve both patient and employee experiences.

With only a barebones IVR and limited automations in place, the Cleveland Clinic team saw an opportunity for their Service Desk to not only leverage the latest conversational AI technology, but to do so with a solution that complemented and enhanced the tools they were already using.

After exploring its options, the answer was clear: 3CLogic’s cloud contact center solution that natively integrates with ServiceNow.

This, along with a hybrid integration with its existing on-premise Cisco voice solution, would allow for full control over the patient and employee journey without relying on IT to configure these experiences.

Benefits of integrating voice with ServiceNow

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Workflows

Intelligent call routing quickly connects patients and employees to where they need to go, while the IVR conversation designer allows for easy creation of new Intelligent Voice Workflows in-house.

Voice-based self-service

Self-service streamlines resolution of common inquiries and reduces wait times especially during major incidents — allowing patients to resolve simple queries on their own and employees to self-authenticate based on pre-existing information.

AI-powered analytics & real-time reporting

IVR analytics and granular call and operations reporting help Cleveland Clinic identify pain-points and greatly improve agent coaching and training.

Native integration with ServiceNow

A native ServiceNow integration allows for automation of manual tasks, call and message transcriptions, and gives agents the ability to immediately pull up patient and caregiver data from ServiceNow during live calls — helping them deliver the best possible service and solve issues faster.

Hybrid cloud deployment with Cisco telephony infrastructure

3CLogic's Hybrid Cloud solution enables the Service Desk team to manage all call center operations under one roof, completely integrated with ServiceNow, without having to overhaul their existing on-premise Cisco system.

The impact of leveraging 3CLogic with ServiceNow

Since implementing 3CLogic, Cleveland Clinic has seen a significant improvement in how Service Desk requests are handled. Thanks to the native integration with ServiceNow, everything related to patient data and requests are all in the same place.

Key advantages of implementing 3CLogic

Thanks to tools such as voice self-service, intelligent call routing, and natively integrated analytics and reporting capabilities, Cleveland Clinic has been able to get its world-class healthcare providers back to what they do best — focusing on patients’ care and wellbeing.

One specific use case unique to the healthcare industry is being able to prioritize incoming Service Desk requests that could be lifesaving. By using data in ServiceNow to instantly identify critical care providers that are routed through intelligent IVR workflows built with 3CLogic, Cleveland Clinic can now expedite urgent caller requests, such as organ transplant updates, to be instantly routed to the right person.

Prior to using 3CLogic, Cleveland Clinic’s existing voice system was far too slow and inefficient for the high volume of calls that came into the Service Desk. With 3CLogic, 20% of that Service Desk call volume is now handled with voice self-service, enabling callers to resolve issues themselves or be routed much faster and more efficiently than ever before. This gives patients a much better experience and frees up agents and caregivers to focus on more complex and urgent issues.

By deploying 3CLogic’s Hybrid Cloud option, Cleveland Clinic is able to enjoy the immediate features, benefits and flexibility of a Cloud Contact Center platform while leveraging the existing on-premise Cisco phone system.

With this direct integration, caregivers can utilize the most advanced voice technology within the platform they’re already using to service customers. This gives them a fundamental advantage: the ability to access critical caller context from ServiceNow in real-time while fielding calls.

As a result, First Call Resolution (FCR) has gone from less than 60% to now more than 86% — meaning more patients are able to solve their healthcare issues right away and healthcare specialists gain back more time to focus on providing exceptional care.

ServiceNow is the single source of truth for Cleveland Clinic’s Service Desk. Because of this, all analytics and reporting lives within the platform.

By using a voice solution that integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow, the team is able to easily pull call-related analytics into their ServiceNow dashboards, marrying the existing data with data from 3CLogic.

When it comes to monthly reporting, what used to take a single employee an entire week to do, can now be done in 45 minutes — allowing for optimizations and actions to be taken much faster.

What’s in store for Cleveland Clinic’s future?

Cleveland Clinic has no plans of slowing down its century-long tradition of growth, and with that comes an always increasing emphasis on providing exceptional care to its patients.

With 3CLogic in place, the possibilities are virtually endless. One feature on the horizon is utilizing 3CLogic’s voice integration with ServiceNow Virtual Agent to further improve the IVR experience for employees and patients alike.

Harnessing ServiceNow’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine, the voice integration for ServiceNow Virtual Agent expedites users' self-service experience — allowing them to speak to the self-service prompts instead of needing to go through all the available options. This will make the time to resolution even shorter than it is today.

With robust reporting from 3CLogic that is integrated directly within their existing ServiceNow dashboards already in place, the Cleveland Clinic Service Desk team plans to to get even more detail when it comes to the data coming out of callers’ experiences.

Even with self-service numbers increasing, the healthcare industry will continue to see higher numbers of callers who need to speak to a live agent. When it comes to urgent health issues, oftentimes they still want to talk to a caregiver to get the information they need.

With Speech Analytics from 3CLogic, it will be even easier to spot trends and areas of improvement for agents, giving the service desk team more opportunities to make the patient experience even better.

Discover how integrated voice workflows can improve your ServiceNow patient experience

For healthcare institutions, patients and caregivers are top priority. To create seamless experiences for both, it may be time to integrate your voice solution with ServiceNow.