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Healthcare providers, hospitals, clinics, and other facilities saw how patients became more skeptical about visiting physical locations for treatments. Increasing numbers of COVID cases and the rules around social distancing also made it difficult for patients to physically meet their doctors for healthcare.
WhatsApp chatbot in healthcare came into the picture during these hard times only. Medical enterprises and healthcare facilities started using top-notch, AI-powered WhatsApp bots to easily and safely provide high-quality services to patients.
Omnichannel Marketing with WhatsApp Chatbot in Healthcare
With patients using both offline and online channels for healthcare, doctors are faced with another challenge. They need to ensure a seamless experience for every patient at every touchpoint. Patients don’t want to be asked the same questions about their medical history, previous discussions with health consultants, and other information over and over. But that can only be possible when there is a single intelligent platform to connect all patient touchpoints. This is when an omnichannel AI chatbot comes into the picture.
With an AI-powered WhatsApp presence, omnichannel healthcare marketing becomes really simple to adopt and implement. After all, you combine the power of AI with the most famous messaging platform around the world.
WhatsApp is being used by 2 billion people worldwide, which makes it a leading platform for instant messaging. And the best part is that you can integrate with other channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, websites, and more. In fact, you can even connect your offline facilities with online services using QR scan codes that lead patients to your verified WhatsApp account.
WhatsApp Business API makes it easier to engage a huge number of patients individually without spending too much time or money on marketing and customer support. The instant connection with patients allows healthcare marketers to run personalized campaigns based on the concerns and queries of every patient. An AI healthcare chatbot helps in this process by automating WhatsApp conversations at any scale with existing and potential patients. Marketing campaigns on any channel can be integrated to WhatsApp to enable instant interactions at any time of the day.
An AI WhatsApp bot can mimic humans during automated conversations to make users feel valued. A WhatsApp healthcare chatbot is easy to train for one-on-one interactions with technologies like AI, NLP, NLU, and ML. This results in rich and highly personalized experiences for patients on any given day.
Omnichannel Healthcare Marketing – How Does WhatsApp Chatbot Help?
Healthcare marketing and home care marketing revolves around the convenience of patients. Mostly, your patients prefer an integrated engagement approach for a seamless experience despite any channel they choose.
Omnichannel healthcare marketing makes more sense now more than ever before when patients are coming to healthcare providers from multiple directions. Incorporating a WhatsApp chatbot for omnichannel healthcare marketing can significantly improve the ROI of your campaigns with many benefits like:
1. Improved Market Exposure
A single channel for marketing limits your ability to reach out to potential patients. Similarly, disconnected multiple channel presence also creates the issue of irritating patients with the same marketing messages.
However, once you create a multi-channel presence and combine them together for an omnichannel experience, it takes your patient outreach to a whole new level. The consistency in your communication increases the word-of-mouth around your brand. For example, satisfied patients can simply forward your WhatsApp business account details to their friends and family members. Omnichannel healthcare marketing makes patient targeting simpler and allows you to bring a seamless continuity in every patient’s journey.
2. Personalized Engagement of Patients
Today, patients use multiple devices and platforms to seek healthcare services instead of physically visiting a hospital or a clinic right away. Hence, an omnichannel marketing campaign for healthcare becomes the right approach to gain higher conversion and engagement rates.
3. Multi-Layered Message Marketing
Every channel connected with a single AI WhatsApp bot allows you to create a multi-layered messaging approach. You can leverage the strengths of various channels to convey your service capabilities step-by-step. Omnichannel campaigns have a greater impact on potential patients rather than a single email or a post on social media. You can combine multiple themes like social media posting, web pages, Google ads, landing pages, emails, SMS, and other platforms with a single WhatsApp chatbot.
4. Finding and Qualifying Leads
Omnichannel healthcare marketing with WhatsApp chatbot gives you greater exposure, resulting in more leads. Moreover, it can automatically assess and qualify every lead for you while conversing with potential patients. An AI-enabled bot can assess user behavior across all integrated channels to identify when and what to send in a message. Hence, prospective patients receive relevant messages, which encourages them to take a commercial action.
While doing all that, the bot can easily collect user data and securely store it to improve patient experience over time. Hence, more leads turn into patients and spread the word about your healthcare services everywhere.
5. Higher Conversion Ratio
Merging all different touchpoints with a single WhatsApp chatbot helps to increase your conversion ratio. Consistent messaging with AI-enabled personalization impresses prospects with relevant information. They feel well-informed about the services and procedures to make their final decision faster.
WhatsApp Chatbot for Healthcare – Other Use Cases
Apart from omnichannel marketing, there are countless other healthcare chatbot use cases to amplify your cost-effectiveness and business efficiency.
Let us show you some of those use cases:
1. Automated Appointment Booking
As a part of omnichannel home care marketing, you can use an AI-enabled WhatsApp bot to automate appointment bookings with doctors. The bot can remind patients about their appointments and even arrange a video chat call between doctors and patients on WhatsApp.
2. Instant Assessment of Symptoms
A WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare industry can be used to ease the process of symptom assessment. A patient can share his or her symptoms with a secure AI bot over WhatsApp. Accordingly, the bot can instantly connect the patient with a suitable specialist on the same platform using 3-way conversational ability.
3. Everyday Health Tips
Using an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare brings your healthcare facilities closer to patients. You can keep your patients engaged and make them feel valued with daily tips on maintaining hygiene, exercising, diet, and other habits. This will enhance brand loyalty among patients.
4. Sending Lab Report Updates
WhatsApp chatbot in healthcare can be used to track lab reports. Patients can even locate testing centers nearby, find price information for various tests, and more using the presence of an intelligent bot.
5. Providing Medicine Reminders
Bots can directly message patients on their mobile phones to remind them about taking medicines.
6. Answering Questions
A WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare can answer all kinds of patient queries when powered by AI/ML technology. It makes patient experience satisfying, while doctors and medical staff find more time to provide better care, consultation, and assistance.
A well-designed WhatsApp bot can give smooth, instant responses to patient queries and answer questions so patients don’t have to call up again and again for support.
7. Offering Guidance for Health Insurance
Healthcare insurance involves a lot of queries, receipts, and documents. Patients can seek guidance 24*7 in the presence of a reliable WhatsApp chatbot. Such a bot can collect necessary documents right on the chat platform.
8. Personalized Mental Health Consultation
With the technology of natural language processing and machine learning, WhatsApp chatbots are now capable of providing aid to people who struggle with mental distress. These bots can augment the work of a therapist using context-based replies.
9. Assistance with Payments
Online payments can become easier for patients with bot assistance while booking a doctor's appointment. Similarly, other multi-layer processes of paying for healthcare facilities can be simplified for patients.
10. Effortless Tracking of Patient History
The life of your hospital staff becomes easier with a WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare marketing and management. They can use the predictive intelligence and centralized storage of data to ease their everyday tasks.
How to Get an Omnichannel WhatsApp Chatbot for Healthcare?
To get a telemedicine chatbot on WhatsApp, you’ll need to get the setup of WhatsApp API and integrate it with an omnichannel chatbot, so you can connect all other digital channels into one.
1. WhatsApp Business API
If you want to scale up your business communications with clients, customers, dealers, vendors, and other stakeholders, WhatsApp has a Business API for that. WhatsApp Business API comes with a verified business account usable to share messages, offer services, showcase products, and send discount offers on a large scale. Enterprises and organizations majorly use it for these types of messages:
Customer Support Messages: Conversations required to resolve a query raised by a customer. These messages are initiated after a customer raises a request, asks a question, or sends inquiries about something.
Notification Messages: These include various reminders, notifications, alerts, and others sent by businesses to individual customers.
Drip Marketing Messages: Communication initiated by drip messages sent in a personalized manner to customers based on their previous inquiries and behavior.
Commercial Messages: Messages that help customers to take commercial actions like placing an order, submitting payment, etc.
At ORAI, we provide WhatsApp Business Verification service, under which, you get your WhatsApp Business API with a verified “green badge” account to enable scalability in your business communication.
2. WhatsApp Chatbot Powered by Conversational AI
There are chatbots and there are chatbots powered by conversational AI that gives a bot humanlike conversational ability. The presence of Machine Learning (ML) allows a chatbot to learn faster with every interaction and Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps to understand human inputs with accurate intent and context. Hence, your WhatsApp healthcare chatbot should have the power of conversational AI built-in for top-notch intelligence.
We are a leading specialist in offering WhatsApp Conversational AI for healthcare providers, clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations. Click here to experience our omnichannel WhatsApp chatbot in action.
In Conclusion
This pandemic crisis has shown that the healthcare sector is full of scenarios where automated communication is required to provide better care efficiently. A WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare can make your services, consultation, and facilities available to patients round-the-clock. Continuity in interactions across all touchpoints will ensure satisfied patients, resulting in more leads, improved market position, and higher revenue .
At ORAI, we have provided leading healthcare organizations with an omnichannel WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare along with its adoption and implementation. Our virtual assistants are helping healthcare providers with automated medical diagnosis, data entry, appointment booking, out-patient and in-patient support, omnichannel healthcare marketing, and more.
Simply click here to understand how your hospital/clinic can grow its business with our WhatsApp chatbot.