eHealth NSW turns on advanced capabilities of Amazon Connect

eHealth NSW is using more advanced parts of Amazon Connect, the cloud-based software that runs its internal and externally facing contact centre operations.

The health service runs two instances of Amazon Connect and has been a customer since 2019.

The initial implementation of Amazon Connect was characterised as a "like-for-like" replica of an existing on-premises system.

Presenting at the 2023 AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, eHealth NSW's product owner of Amazon Connect and ServiceNow Knowledge Poppy Mosses, and AWS technical account manager Harry Clarke outlined some of the more advanced capabilities that have since been enabled.

In particular, calls to the contact centres are not only being recorded but automatically transcribed so that the reason for calls, the caller’s live sentiment and other data can be automatically detected in real time.

In addition to scanning the transcribed call for customer sentiment, the software also looks for keywords and connects the agent to relevant support material to help them resolve the customer’s issues.

Insights can also be used to create responses to common inquiries.

Call analytics 

eHealth NSW is collecting more data about calls by using Amazon Connect’s Contact Lens feature, which has “theme detection” and “conversational analytics” capabilities.

The feature was rolled out to one of eHealth NSW's "major contact centres" at the start of this year, Clarke said.

Citing July 2023 figures, Clarke noted the most common reasons for calls was to make or modify a health appointment.

While these "themes" aren't surprising, Clarke noted that the theme detection functionality is useful for detecting "themes that you might not have thought about, or things that are only just emerging."

He noted one such theme, where 27 people requested the services of an interpreter. 

"You can drill down into those calls and see what languages people were requesting," he said.

"This can help you plan your services to cater for those languages and get a better idea of what your citizens are requesting when they call."

Contact Lens is also used to measure customer sentiment and “overall talk time for both of the people on the call.”

Clarke said that call length is recorded so that eHealth can investigate “what factors” are responsible for calls that take a long time to resolve.

The customer’s sentiment is recorded throughout the call so that supervisors can evaluate agents’ ability to steer the caller’s mood in a positive direction, and to identify skills that the agents may need additional coaching on.

Clarke said that “theme detection” and “conversational analytics” had given eHealth NSW a “data-driven understanding of what people are looking for each time they pick up the phone”, which could be used to “streamline" common inquires. 

Chatbots

Clarke said that eHealth NSW is starting to use chatbots in its contact centre operations.

In September, a chatbot capability was launched for the Murrumbidgee Local Health District" in regional NSW, he said. 

Clarke said that the chatbots saved citizens time by using their information to transfer them to the right service. It also saved agents' time by determining, for example, whether a caller met the eligibility criteria for public dental health services.

Wisdom 

eHealth NSW is also using Amazon Connect Wisdom to connect agents to knowledge base material stored in ServiceNow during a call.

Wisdom, according to technical documentation, "uses real-time speech analytics and natural language processing (NLP) to detect customer issues during calls and chats, and then provide agents recommendations and answers."

It saves agents time that they would otherwise spend navigating internal wikis, FAQ stores, and file shares to find the right content to solve the customer’s problem.