How Concilio built a healthcare concierge service using Twilio

What if it were as simple to find a doctor and schedule an appointment as it is to order a ride or a meal through an app? For customers of Concilio, it is.

Concilio is an app-based healthcare service available to employees as a workplace benefit. The company connects users and their families to a contact center agent who acts as a health concierge, helping them find doctors and schedule appointments with general practitioners or specialists for illness, injury, or well visits. Concierges then check in with patients post-consultation to see if they have any questions, provide downloadable prescriptions, and arrange any necessary follow-up care.

There are over 25,000 peer-recommended clinicians in Concilio’s system treating over 5,000 different medical conditions. In addition to arranging in-person visits, Concilio connects users with these doctors directly through phone or video consultations. As the number of patients and clinicians Concilio works with began to grow rapidly in 2018, the company needed to build a more reliable telemedicine platform for these virtual consultations. This was a challenge for Quentin Hayot, Concilio’s system administrator and lead developer on the project.

“I was the only developer on this part of the project at the time, and we had a very short deadline,” Quentin said. Working alone, he was able to quickly build a more robust platform using Twilio Programmable Voice, Programmable Video, and Programmable SMS. This was just the beginning of Concilio’s relationship with Twilio.

A commitment to care

Because users entrust Concilio with the health of their families, the company is committed to providing the best care at every level, starting with contact center interactions. The contact center agents, acting as personal health concierges, are at the heart of the Concilio customer experience. They handle a high volume of inbound and outbound customer calls as well as frequently connecting with medical providers.

Concilio started out using SIP trunks with an Asterisk-based PBX for contact center connectivity. While this setup was sufficient initially, it wasn’t able to adequately support a growing population of users and agents. Each agent was registering at least one complaint about the system with IT per day. Furthermore, once the workforce became remote due to the pandemic, VPN issues led to poor call quality, degrading the customer experience.

To solve these problems and handle the continuing expansion in the number of agents using the system simultaneously, Concilio wanted a single platform that could unify all existing contact center tools and streamline the various scheduling, calling, and texting functions that an agent uses to provide concierge services for each customer.

“We tried several systems that were each very good at doing one thing, but we needed a system capable of doing all the things,” Quentin said. “And Twilio’s Flex allows that.”

A streamlined contact center

Flex is a flexible, scalable, cloud-based contact center platform that companies can set up quickly and integrate easily with the customer relationship management (CRM) software they’re already using. Developers can use the low-code, drag-and-drop application builder system to put together exactly the contact center features they need on customizable dashboards. Flex can be set up for communication on multiple channels, including voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and WebChat, with integrated performance tracking on all channels. It’s simple to update workflows, integrations, and UI as needs change.

Despite spending only a small fraction of his working hours on completing the project, Quentin was able to set up the new contact center in a matter of weeks.

“Having a tool that is reliable and easy to use for both customers and agents really increases our confidence in being able to deliver the best service,” Quentin said. “It also increases our users’ confidence that they will be taken care of in a vulnerable moment without having to navigate a painful customer experience.”

Zero complaints

Quentin said that the experience for both users and agents improved greatly right away. After the new Flex system had been implemented for only ten days, agent complaints dropped to zero.

“Audio quality went up, connectivity issues disappeared, and reliability is higher than ever,” Quentin said. “Agents can really focus on their jobs without having to fight the infrastructure.”

A serverless future

Concilio has plans to continue to grow the tasks it can accomplish through Flex. Quentin intends to add SMS messaging and scheduling capabilities for greater customer convenience. On the backend, qualifying calls with custom tags will make internal reporting automatic, increasing agent efficiency. Quentin also plans to set up the system so agents can send tasks from other systems into Flex. The “wrap up” option will save time by assisting in filling out the post-contact tracking sheet. Finally, he’s looking forward to more deeply integrating their CRM with Flex for more seamless customer care.

While the system is relatively new, Quentin is excited about the potential it offers. “The ultimate goal is to allow our concierges to handle a case from start to finish almost without leaving Flex,” he said. “As a software-first healthcare gateway, our focus is on a serverless approach, and this is why Twilio is a huge part of this strategy.”