The art of listening

You founded Authenticx just over six years ago. What inspired you to launch the business, and what is its aim?

I spent over two decades working in different roles across the healthcare and insurance spaces, and what I saw firsthand was
that organisations were missing a critical opportunity to truly listen to their customers. Contact centres handle massive amounts of customer interactions every day, and those interactions hold important feedback that could be used to drive better outcomes. The problem is that most of that data is stored and ignored, so organisations were missing the chance to capture the voice of their customers.

In 2018 I left my COO role in the travel insurance industry to found Authenticx to help humans understand humans – and that’s exactly what we do today. We’re on a mission to empower healthcare leaders to scale how they listen to and understand their patients. With a combined approach of human and
artificial intelligence (AI) analysis, we’re able to transform recorded customer conversations into actionable insights that can be used to improve both the patient experience and the business of healthcare.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are at the heart of Authenticx. Can you tell us how you have harnessed this technology to help your customers?

Authenticx created a product to scale how healthcare and insurance organisations listen to their customers using AI trained exclusively from and for the industry. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning and Generative AI, Authenticx AI uncovers the rich data buried in contact centre conversations that organisations can then use to drive strategic product investments, process enhancements, and quality experiences. The key here is providing quantitative and qualitative data – context is critical when it comes to customer insights.

One of your products, the Eddy Effect, is “the most reliable metric to identify customer friction points for healthcare leaders”. Can you explain how vital it is for businesses?

The Eddy Effect is important in today’s healthcare and insurance environment – both for the customer and the business. Similar to when a large rock causes water to swirl in a river eddy, obstacles along the customer journey can cause members to feel ‘stuck’, ultimately impacting their access to assistance and experience outcomes.

At Authenticx, we call this the Eddy Effect, and it's a tremendous problem that costs healthcare organisations millions of dollars each year. Eliminating customer journey breakdowns can be an incredible challenge, but we’ve developed a methodology to help companies identify, measure, and overcome these obstacles so they can improve member experiences and reduce wasted spend.

What do you think are the biggest challenges in the healthcare and insurance industry at the moment?

Our industry is in the midst of evolution, and most of that is being driven by innovation, such as the use of AI. And with that, challenges have emerged around data ethics, trust, and privacy. In healthcare and insurance, this includes new AI technologies and vendors and ensuring experts are building and maintaining AI models responsibly to mitigate risk, bias, and safety concerns.

As more industries and organisations begin to adopt AI, the more leaders must watch market response, the global sentiment of AI, and how others are bringing forward AI governance.

What’s next for Authenticx?

We are just scratching the surface of what conversational AI can bring to the healthcare and insurance industries. So, what’s next? Impact. Authenticx will keep improving, iterating, and building models that are tuned specifically for the markets we serve. We aim to help organisations tell the story of their customers by continuing to strengthen our product capabilities, such as an integrated AI chat assistant to increase speed to insights.

Our clients are already seeing impacts in member retention, positive sentiment, and top-line growth. We expect this impact to continue to grow and flourish.