Medbridge’s new AI agent helps agents and users alike

Medbridge is a healthcare education and digital patient care platform with a benevolent mission: to raise the quality of healthcare globally by offering comprehensive digital patient care and online training resources.

The company has helped over 350,000 healthcare professionals and more than 2,500 healthcare organizations streamline and simplify patient care. With users ranging from individual patients to clinicians to executives and administrators at some of the largest health systems in the country, Medbridge measures success not only by the quality of its products, but also by the caliber of its customer service.

A culture of CX excellence

Since its inception, Medbridge has viewed customer service as a crucial part of its brand identity, not a cost center. Joshua Bentley, Manager of Customer Support, credits senior leadership.

“Some organizations see customer service as a necessary evil,” he says, “but we see it as the cornerstone of building long-lasting relationships.” The philosophy has paid off; the company enjoys a 97% customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

Zendesk has been an integral part of Medbridge’s customer service since 2014. Today, a team of 10 agents use Zendesk Suite with AI to handle roughly 1,400 customer inquiries a week.

Queries come in through web forms, phone, chat, email, and the help center which, according to Bentley, was originally “pretty basic”. “When I started, much of the information was out of date and it was stored in a lot of different places.”

So in 2022, Bentley worked with internal teams to revamp the help center. That effort paved the way to a successful launch when Medbridge sought to adopt Zendesk AI across the business in 2023. The successful launch of an AI agent was also aided by a solid knowledge base leveraged by the AI solution.

Building an AI-powered help center

As part of due diligence, Medbridge explored various AI tools, including Zoom Contact Center, but kept coming back to Zendesk. “Zendesk AI aligns with Medbridge’s values to help more people and improve lives,” explains Bentley. “And because we’re part of the medical industry, we needed to consider the security requirements of HIPAA and private health information (PHI).”

To ensure the new AI agent would have high-quality and relevant content to draw from, Bentley carefully audited and consolidated all of the articles from the old knowledge base. “If your help center is optimized, AI agents are more likely to provide accurate answers,” explains Bentley.

Medbridge also set up a sandbox environment to train the AI model and reduce the risk of it generating incorrect or misleading responses. In this secure space, the team populated the model with fake customer messages and off-topic questions.

“We wanted to make sure our AI agent wasn’t hallucinating,” explains Bentley. “So we asked it questions like, ‘how do I make the best sandwich?’ and it didn’t know the answer, which was great.”

Easing agent workloads with self-service

Medbridge launched its new AI agent, Alfred, in March 2024. Bentley monitors Alfred’s performance using the prebuilt Zendesk AI dashboard, which displays engagement and transfer rates.

“About 70 percent of users engage with Alfred,” reports Bentley. “And eight percent of queries are transferred to agents. With the dashboard I can also drill down to see if we need to make any tweaks in the answer flow, or update our help center to improve the performance.”

Ultimately, Medbridge would like most of its users to find answers through self-service, without needing to talk to a human agent. “Our one-touch resolution rate is down by five percent, from 85 to 80 percent, which I attribute in large part to no-touch AI,” says Bentley. “My goal is to get it to 70 percent.” He also reports that AI, among other improvements, is contributing to a reduction in year-over-year ticket volume, which is down an average of 700 tickets per month.

Happy employees make happy customers

One of Bentley’s philosophies is that happy employees make happy customers, and happy customers are return customers. At Medbridge, the customer service team is delighted.

Bentley credits easy-to-use Zendesk tools, speedier onboarding, and increased efficiency. For instance, one of the more popular tools is the tone shift feature in Zendesk AI. Agents simply write out what they’re thinking and Zendesk adjusts the tone. “It’s really impressive and a huge time saver,” adds Bentley. “And our onboarding process is faster because Zendesk is easy to learn.”

Another efficiency gain comes from using macro suggestions. If Bentley sees that agents are writing custom answers for the same question, he creates a macro for it. “It’s been really valuable and helpful. I credit our efficiency improvements over the years to our regular use and maintenance of robust macros with Zendesk.”

All of these operational improvements have come without needing to increase headcount. “Medbridge has grown exponentially over the last four years,” explains Bentley. “The Zendesk AI agent combined with our revamped help center have been critical in helping us manage this growth. Winter is one of our busier seasons and I’m confident we can handle it without increasing headcount.”

AI plays a pivotal role in CX

AI will continue to play a pivotal role in Medbridge’s customer support strategy. Bentley is optimistic about AI’s potential, not as a replacement for human workers, but as a tool to enhance their roles. “AI can help people function better in the roles they’re already doing. It frees them up to focus on what they’re passionate about,” he says.

Medbridge also plans to further refine its AI engagement tools and explore generative AI capabilities for agents. Bentley concludes, “We’re excited to see how generative AI can help our agents be more efficient, especially while ensuring compliance with Protected Health Information (PHI) requirements.