Single Project

In healthcare, patients rarely file formal complaints when something goes wrong. They miss follow-up appointments, stop returning calls, or quietly switch to another provider. Because dissatisfaction tends to surface this way rather than through direct feedback, satisfaction surveys and complaint rates give an incomplete picture of how well an organization is actually serving people.

By 2026, clinical competence is no longer the main differentiator. Most organizations can treat the condition. Fewer can reliably handle what surrounds it: the phone call to book the appointment, the portal message that goes unanswered, the billing query routed to the wrong team, the post-discharge follow-up that never arrives. Patients notice all of it and they judge the organization accordingly.

The Avaya Signals of Connection study (part of the Connected Consumer Research Series) puts numbers to what patients say they want:

• 83% say it’s very or extremely important to be able to speak to a human when something goes wrong.
• 60% expect a live agent within six minutes
• 96% say it matters to switch channels without having to repeat themselves
• 92% value support that is tailored to their history with the organization
• 76% have chosen one provider over another based on the experience alone

These are the conditions under which patients decide to stay or leave.

Contact center limitations

Many healthcare contact centers were deisgned around task completion rather than relationship continuity. They handle individual calls and route tickets efficiently, but tend to break down when a patient’s situation spans multiple contacts or channels.

A patient who starts in web chat, moves to a phone call, then sends a portal message will often find that each transition requires re-explaining the same issue. If an automated tool handles the initial query but cannot manage follow-up complexity, and a staff member then picks up the case without context, the patient absorbs the cost of that organizational gap. Even when the issue is resolved, the interaction can still leave the patient with the sense that no one is really connected.

Being asked to re-explain a situation that has already been logged is not a minor inconvenience. For many patients it signals that the organization does not have itself together, which is a harder impression to recover from than a slow response time.

What patients expect

What patients describe wanting is not complicated.
They want whoever picks up to already know why they are calling.
They want to move from a chat to a phone call without starting over.
They want the automated system to handle the simple stuff and route the rest to a person, without the handoff feeling like a dead end.
And they want a response time that matches how urgent their situation actually is.

Communication across the care journey

Patient experience extends well beyond the clinical encounter. Scheduling, pre-visit questions, billing, post-treatment follow-up, and long-term condition management all involve communication, and each interaction shapes the patient’s overall assessment of the organization. Poor communication at any of these points (slow responses, repeated requests for information already provided, inconsistent advice across departments) erodes confidence even when the clinical care itself is sound.

When communication is treated as back-office administration rather than part of the care itself, the failures stay invisible until they show up in cancelled follow-ups and patients who do not return … by then the damage is already done.

Practical improvements

At the point of first contact, the system needs to know who is calling and why before routing them anywhere. That means recognizing returning patients, flagging open issues, and directing the call without making the patient  figure out which number or department to try next.

When a patient moves from chat to phone, or from one staff member to another, the next person should be able to pick up where the last one left off. This sounds straightforward. In practice most systems do not do it, and patients are the ones who carry the gap forward by repeating themselves.

Automation handles prescription reminders and appointment confirmations well. It handles distressed patients, billing disputes, and unresolved clinical questions badly. The failure point is usually the handoff: the moment the automated system reaches its limit and the patient is transferred to a person who has no record of what just happened.

Patients who are about to disengage often signal it first. They call multiple times about the same issue. They stop responding to outreach. Their messages get sharper. These patterns are visible in the data before the patient actually leaves, which means there is a window to address the problem directly rather than discover it later in an empty appointment slot.

The current environment

Healthcare organizations are managing staffing constraints, cost pressures, and rising patient volume alongside the introduction of new AI tools. AI can reduce load on human staff for routine tasks, but adding automated systems to an already fragmented communication environment tends to add handoffs rather than remove them. Most implementations are designed around what the technology can do rather than around what breaks down in the patient’s experience of it.

The Avaya data shows that 76% of patients have already made a provider choice based on experience rather than clinical outcome alone. The clinical encounter is one part of that experience. The rest is made up of whether someone answered, whether they already knew the context and whether the patient had to say the same thing three times before anything happened. 

Those are solvable problems. 

Most organizations have just not treated them as the priority.

Article written by Angela Călianu