Live Chat for Healthcare & Wellness: Top 6 Solutions

Discover how live chat transforms customer support in the industries of healthcare & wellness.

Live chat software is essential for modern healthcare enterprises. The industry has seen a huge growth in the usage of digital technologies, such as live chat, and its quick evolution since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. During quarantines and the adoption of the “stay safe, stay home” principle, it was crucial to use telemedicine solutions to link patients with doctors regardless of distance.

With the pandemic gradually waning, the trend of digital technology adoption seems more and more like something long-term rather than a temporal fad. For example, according to Statista research, the worldwide telemedicine industry is to grow by 500% by the end of 2020s (from $50 billion in 2019). In this article, we’ll review the use cases of live chat for healthcare & wellness, the benefits of using such solutions, and how to choose a suitable one for your human-centric business.

Table of content

Live chat support: introduction

If a question “what is live chat support” comes to your mind, the shortest answer will be the following.

Typically, a customer visiting a website clicks on a button in the screen’s bottom right corner to make a chat window pop up and type their message. A support agent or a doctor joins the conversation and can communicate with the customer (or patient in that case) via text messages and shared media. Afterward, a chat transcript can be sent to a customer’s email and the company gains valuable business insights (stripped of any personal details) for analytics.

Who needs live chat in healthcare?

The most benefits from employing live chat can be achieved by healthcare providers that seek to increase conversion rates (from visits to the website to visits to physical clinics), experience high visitor volumes, or/and want to get in the telehealth market niche.

Live chat vs phone support: statistics

Being instant channels of communication, both live chat and phone support have many similarities and saw notable usage increase in recent years. However, there are still plenty of differences between them. For example, the implementation and utilization of live chat are cheaper for companies, since a single agent can handle several conversations at once — an impossible feat with a phone. Consequently, this means easier scaling of live chat assistance when a company grows. Also, it is easier to analyze chat transcripts to get insights into the most frequent issues and employees’ quality of work. On the other hand, even the most personalized text conversation can hardly feel as personal and be as useful as a voice dialogue.

Live chat use cases for doctors and beauty salons

Having revised the benefits of using live chat, let’s see the most common applications of the technology in the healthcare and wellness industries.

Appointment management

Live chat platforms are great tools for helping patients schedule their next visit to a doctor through a process very similar to making a good old call to a clinic but are more flexible and less costly for the business. Simple bookings can be processed entirely automatically with the help of chatbots, while a live chat integration with CRM makes it seamlessly transfer into the system for managing customer relations and add up to their entire history of visits and health data while triggering time-sensitive email reminders on the upcoming appointments.

Doctor consultations

Via the widget, patients can have an online chat with health professionals in a convenient and secure manner. Compared to audio and voice calls, live chat offers more flexibility and privacy if a doctor consultation is to be done during a workday in an office or while riding in a noisy subway. There is no risk of private matters being overheard by passers-by while leading live chat providers offer top-notch security features for preventing any data leaks.

Helpdesk support

Depending on the type of healthcare wellness service provided, every company has several critical steps towards the end of the customer journey when the chances of prospective clients changing their minds can get quite high if they don’t get answers to their inquiries promptly. Live chat offers one of the most effective channels of connecting such clients with support agents who can provide explanations, clarifications, and answers to their questions. Not only this improves the conversion of new customers but also boosts the satisfaction ratings among existing ones.

Live chat in the healthcare industry

Live chat benefits for customers and organizations in the healthcare & wellness sectors include:

• Real-time interactions. It is widely known that the optimal timing to help a customer make a decision is precisely when they research the options available on the market, eg. browse websites. A live chat delivers such an opportunity in the best way possible: there is no need to distract oneself with dialing a phone number or composing an email – the whole interaction can happen right on a checkout or appointment booking page.
• Customer loyalty. Live chat is an effective tool to engage customers who have doubts and want to clarify some aspects of the provided services or have had an unsatisfactory experience. In both cases, a live chat can ease doubts and provide a solution to an issue, consequently, improving the long-term bond between client and brand.
• Reduced support costs. As mentioned before, with live chat, it is possible to have several conversations at once for a single agent. This means higher work efficiency compared to phone support and reduced costs of resolving customer issues.
• Additional monetization models. Live chat used for telehealth purposes provides a great way for a healthcare facility to extend its range of services, connect its doctors with new patients from remote areas and offer new services to existing customers. With reduced costs on physical brand maintenance, telehealth sessions naturally come cheaper and can be appealing to patients who have doubts about which specialist to see regarding their problems or want to connect with a healthcare specialist during an ongoing treatment without the need to book a physical appointment.
• Insightful analytics. The majority of live chat solutions for healthcare come with extensive sets of tools for analytics, that allow impersonal tracking of data to establish demographic trends, referral sources, most common issues, and time of activity. Also, live chat makes it easy to monitor the performance of support agents and medical personnel who provide telehealth consultations.

Popular live chat solutions for healthcare

The growing market of live chat solutions might make it difficult to choose a suitable solution for your healthcare business but, no worries, we have you covered here as well — check our review of the top 6 live chat platforms for healthcare and wellness.

ProProfs Chat

A popular communication tool, ProProfs Chat solution offers everything required to facilitate the management of client communication. This includes real-time visitor tracking, canned messages for instant answers to frequent inquiries, a fully customizable chat window, as well as pop-ups that allow engaging with website visitors proactively. The platform boasts over 50 integrations with various CRM and CMS systems, as well as an extensive set of security settings, including permissions and roles.

Price: Coming with a 15-day free trial period, ProProfs chat has a complete plan that includes all functionality, starting from $19.99 / month per agent if billed annually.

Umnico

Price: Umnico customers may enjoy live chat functionality for free forever, while the businesses that require to link additional communication channels (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) get an affordable rate that depends on the number of connected channels.

MedChat

MedChat App is a communication automation platform. It uses AI-powered solutions such as NLP (natural language processing) to help agents in processing patient messages by categorizing inquiries and converting free-from text into structured data for further analysis. Workflow templates and a low-code development environment make it easy to implement common live chat automation scenarios or create unique ones from scratch. MedChat also has many useful insights, from showing how many patients are waiting to be connected to an agent and the most popular topics to such figures as chat volume, average chat duration, and speed of responses of agents.

Price: MedChat doesn’t provide its pricing publicly, offering subscription options during an individual consultation with one of the company’s experts.

OhMD

HIPAA-compliant texting and telehealth solution, OhMD is a widely-used platform among healthcare providers for establishing a secure and convenient channel of communication with their patients. Along with text-based live chat for a website, it provides a Video Visits feature for telehealth that doesn't require a client to download an app. OhMD also helps with administrative tasks by automating appointment scheduling, prescription refills, and patient referrals, while integrations with more than 80 EHR platforms extend OhMD capabilities even further.

Price: a basic plan that provides unlimited messaging in OhMD app is free for teams of up to 15 members. The price of a paid option that doesn't require clients to download an app and has an extended set of features starts from $175 per month.

Luma Health

Calling itself the world’s first Patient Success Platform, Luma aims to streamline every step in the patient journey, along with the operational workflows of a healthcare establishment. Luma’s Toolkit includes numerous out-of-the-box modules and solutions for patient–doctor communication that support customization and analytics, such as detailed conversation history, patient satisfaction, and NPS. Luma offers a wide selection of integration with leading EHR, payment, RCM, CRM, and call center platforms used by healthcare providers.

Price: with an on-demand demo available, Luma currently provides high-end individual rates available upon request.

TeamSupport

TeamSupport is a software system that handles the whole post-sale customer experience, which enables healthcare providers to understand their clients better and effectively assist them. Its features include a ticket handling system and conversational platform that has chat logging, chat transfer, and proactive chat – all easily available in any modern web browser. Customer data and analytics insights provide healthcare organizations with the data every business requires for long-term growth and success.

Price: TeamSupport offers three tiers of pricing options with several subcategories that allow potential clients to choose between essential, enterprise, and complete customer support solutions. The pricing is available on demand.

Conclusion

With the healthcare and wellness industries increasing their adoption of digital technologies, live chat becomes an essential tool for companies to connect with their patients on every stage of their journey, from increasing brand awareness to virtual appointments with doctors and post-appointment support.

For small to medium-sized enterprises in the industry of healthcare and wellness, an omnichannel messaging platform Umnico can be a perfect gateway to modern, secure, and convenient live chat communication. The platform offers a free live chat widget for a website and flexible subscription rates for companies that want to connect other channels of communication. A free trial period allows testing all Umnico functionality for free with no commitment.