Scaling Telehealth Support During the Pandemic

I got my start in telehealth about 6 months before the pandemic , and boy was that a crazy time! 🙈 Talk about your hockey stick growth! 📈

My company was bootstrapped, and we didn't have the funds to hire additional support team members. So we learned to work smarter, not harder. 🤓 Our in-app chat was homegrown ... and didn't support saved answers. Needless to say, that significantly slowed our response time - copy/paste was not working! 😂 But one day I realized that our whole team used Macbooks, which meant that we could create Mac keyboard shortcuts ⌨️ as a workaround. Game. Changer. 👏 With that time freed up, I moved on to the next biggest time commitment - our email support! Automated tags were cleaned up, and I rebuilt our Contact Us form with our FAQs listed as a dropdown. Then 😈, I automated our responses based on those options. Clicking "Forgot Password" brought the customer to a step-by-step troubleshooting email that walked through every possible scenario (Are you sure you entered the email associated with the account?). And so on, and so forth. Suddenly, our little team wasn't just keeping up with the support volume - we were on top of it. ✨ And we used that time to champion our customers internally - following up on known issues, documenting pain points for each customer segment, and providing training materials for our clinician customers. We were met with - you guessed it - unprecedented growth during the pandemic, and I think we rose to the occasion. 💙 It was an honor to work (virtually) alongside essential workers providing much-needed care during the COVID-19 crisis.