Live Chat Accessibility And The ADA

Digital accessibility today

Digital accessibility across the web and websites are becoming increasingly popular and necessary. For one thing, we are in the digital age. Brick and mortar businesses are moving to the web at a furious pace. But that’s not the only reason to keep accessibility top of mind.

Supporting accessibility is even more important from a social standpoint, as broadening businesses scope and reach strengthens company brands. SnapEngage is committed to serving the needs of all types of demographics, including users with disabilities.

Chat opens the door to more powerful customer relationships, and is known as the channel with the highest customer satisfaction rate across the web. Users with disabilities can be empowered to experience greater access to the internet.

We strive to meet the most current guidelines for compliance, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. By addressing and believing in these access standards, SnapEngage is delivering greater value to all users, including our clients’ users.

What is digital accessibility?

Let’s break this term down. Accessibility is about making things friendlier and more accessible to all people, whether they have a disability or not. Digital refers to anything related to the internet, which today, is everything.

Put the two together and see a world where the web is accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. Guidelines can be put into place to ensure anyone using digital tools and platforms are able to have a pleasant experience.

Why are we hearing about this now?

Digital accessibility may be a newer concept to some industries, but for others it has been top of mind for quite some time. One reason is because digital accessibility lawsuits are on the rise. Ask Domino’s pizza. Now is the time when ordering a pizza, planning a vacation, paying bills, and checking package statuses all happen on one device, all without talking to a single person. The SnapEngage visitor experience (what customers experience when they are chatting) has been designed to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA to assist you in overall web presence compliance.

3 important aspects to consider when discussing accessibility

SnapEngage is built to be accessible. Serving a larger community, including community members with disabilities, should not be an afterthought. With that in mind, here are three aspects to consider for your business.

1. Any business using chat for support or to provide a service must make chat equally available to disabled persons under the law. 

2. A disability, like hearing, visual, and color-blindness, should not keep anyone from participating in a web conversation. 

3. Software accessibility can require a lift from both the provider and the business. Take care to do your due diligence.

Web accessibility best practices

There are many tools available today, and we recommend checking out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for in-depth details. From the SnapEngage side, we have a few suggestions.

Keyboard navigation Every component of the chat can be accessed using a keyboard without requiring a mouse or trackpads.
Outlined elements Actionable elements (like button choices) can be outlined with a border.
Color contrast Create high-contrast color schemes palettes in the Design Studio so all text is clearly visible.

Communicating with all visitors

Accessibility needs to cover the entire website, including extra site tools like live chat. Chat enables engagement throughout the entire customer journey and is the quickest way for customers to get in touch with you.

Accordingly, chat should be a top accessibility priority.

Continuing to make your online site accessible will ensure that the internet as a whole becomes more welcoming. For more ways to improve communication, reach out to us.

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HIPAA Compliant SMS Opens New Markets

Extend Your Reach and Efficiency with HIPAA Compliant SMS Messaging

HIPAA compliant SMS offers benefits to healthcare organizations across the board — from new patient acquisition and care to administrative and marketing.

Text messaging is increasingly becoming the preferred method of communication. Americans exchanged over 2 trillion text messages in 2018, a nearly 16% increase year-over-year. Mobile texting has become an expected platform for customer service. Why should healthcare be any different? To attract new patients, you must go to where they are. 

Give your patients a text number so they can text you with questions and scheduling. Update patient information using secure forms, cutting down on the time that patients spend in waiting rooms updating current information, and decreasing front office procedures. SnapEngage HIPAA compliant messaging can get you there with a few simple tools.

Enhanced communication reaches broader patient markets

 

Goal: 10% more value delivered via HIPAA compliant SMS
How: Remove communication hurdles with a HIPAA compliant SMS line. Patients will feel secure and comfortable throughout their conversation, and younger target groups will feel empowered to reach out more frequently.
Outcome: Appeal to new and more diverse patient markets. Improve staff efficiency with streamlined patient onboarding.


Quickstarter toolkit

  1. Stay secure and compliant with HIPAA compliant SMS. No cumbersome passwords or portals needed. Patients can save the number in their phone and reach you at their convenience.
  2. Securely request patient data using Audit Logs without the need for an external email service. Patients appreciate a new and innovative way to provide information all in one place. Patients can even send you photos when helpful as your team is trained in HIPAA compliance best practices. Patient information is kept secure, and agents cannot send data or images back to the patient. The process stays within SnapEngage.
  3. Advertise your text number on your website, patient mails, behind patient login and anywhere else patients have access.and provide innovative value requiring minimal effort from patients. Make it easy for patients to reach you. 

Sample workflow

Tools for efficient communication recap

Modernize the patient experience with HIPAA compliant SMS 
Request confidential information using Audit Logs and give patients peace of mind with secure data transfer
Free advertising of the HIPAA compliant SMS number

 

Reach patients where they are

In fact, let them reach you in their single most preferred method of communication — texting. SnapEngage makes it easy for you to stay in front of communication trends with HIPAA compliant SMS. SnapEngage’s suite of HIPAA compliant tools humanizes the patient experience, enhances front office efficiency, and extends your reach to fresh, diverse markets. 

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Improve Patient Acquisition Rate with Healthcare ROI Tools

How to Get the Most out of Your Marketing Campaigns

Your marketing team has spent time and effort creating targeted campaigns to increase web traffic. More website traffic is always great, but increased patient acquisition is better. Do you know your patient acquisition cost? 

SnapEngage Live Chat allows you to recognize and record where visitors are coming from. So, not only can you give website visitors responding to a specific campaign a more customized experience than anyone else on your site, you can accurately measure the return on your investment.

The only way to improve your marketing campaigns is to know where you stand with your current campaign performance. Whether measuring product conversion or new patient acquisition rate, having accurate data is a critical component in evaluating whether your campaign is effective at meeting measurable goals. 

With a few tools in your toolkit, you can collect that data while rolling out the red carpet with exceptional prospective patient engagement 24/7.

Record where they came from and send them where they need to go

Goal: Report on exact metrics from marketing campaigns and increase patient acquisition rate.
How: Qualified site visitors will receive VIP treatment on their very first visit.
Outcome: Reap the benefits of your targeted campaigns with contextual messaging. Capture ROI metrics and offer a 24/7 seamless chat experience to enhance the results of your marketing efforts.

 

Quickstarter toolkit

  1. Recognize where site visitors are coming from and trigger a chat with contextual messaging for each specific visitor with Proactive Chat. New visitors to your website are looking for valuable information and to schedule an appointment. 53% of visitors are more likely to do business with an organization that provides chat functionality. Guide them through this process with a strong proactive chat strategy
  2. Capture prospective patient information, even when chat agents are offline or maxed on chats, you’ll never miss a new patient opportunity with Info Capture Bot. Provide the best possible experience while supplementing your chat agent team. All prospect information left with the Info Capture Bot will be automatically sent to your integration for follow-up providing you with valuable ROI metrics and patient acquisition leads.
  3. Have the right agents online at the right time to provide a seamless chat experience and route your prospects where they need to go using Priority Tiers. As your chat requests increase, the system will always scale up to the next tier of agents making them available when they are needed most. Tiers also serve to maximize chat agent skill sets —  The second tier of chat agents can be specialists, engaging with only the most qualified site visitors. 

 

Sample workflow

Tools for ROI recap

Provide high-touch messaging with Proactive Chat settings
Never miss another connection. Info Capture Bots are an extension of your business.
Provide more cohesive new patient support with Priority Tiers

 

Build your live chat toolkit

Data measurement helps tie campaign success to your overall business bottom line. You can get your money’s worth from advertising campaigns by converting more patient leads from paid campaigns. With a few simple SnapEngage tools, you can correctly attribute which patients came from where and engage with them contextually so you meet their needs immediately. Tiers with a chatbot mean that chats will only route to the bot when no one is online — essentially providing customized service 24/7/365.

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How SnapEngage Supports Inclusivity

A letter from our CEO to the team at SnapEngage

As we face unprecedented waves of social and economic turbulence, I urge all of us to use this moment as an opportunity to inspire positive change in our communities and in ourselves.

So long as racism remains a stain on our collective humanity, we cannot call ourselves truly human. SnapEngage supports the global peaceful protests and calls for reform.

A commitment to diversity is not new for us, it is a core value. We have always been a diverse, international team and we reject any form of racism. SnapEngage was founded on diversity by two foreigners who came to the United States. We are happy we built a team with people from all over the world, regardless of their nationality, skin color, religion, or sexual orientation. Promoting cultural exchanges and creating community within SnapEngage has been a core value for us from the beginning.

In the light of recent events around George Floyd’s murder and protests all around the world (the Black Lives Matter movement is supported by protests across our Boulder, Colorado and Berlin, Germany offices), we need to reinforce our core values. There are a couple things we could act on right away, and there are things that we must continue to have at the heart of our company: Respect, Open mindedness, Willingness to support each other as equals. When we do this, we each do our part in making our world a little better. 

Here is what we are doing to support the cause:

 

1. We will be reaching out and offering our software for free to the following organizations: 

https://www.code2040.org/

https://www.blackgirlscode.com/

https://www.hackthehood.org/

2. Charitable contributions. We will set up an annual budget to donate to one of these charitable organizations. Even in trying times (COVID-19) and even though we are a small company, our contribution will make a difference.

3. We are encouraging our teams to take advantage of an important company benefit: Service Days. For example, Black Girls Code and Hack The Hood look for experienced coders who want to mentor underrepresented youth of color. We will also look to volunteer at upcoming opportunities in Denver.

4. The leadership team will recommit to driving real results around diversity, inclusion, open communication, and tolerance. Not just at SnapEngage, but in our communities as well.  

If you are looking to support the community, here is another idea: support Black businesses. Your money is powerful. Where you spend and how you spend could help change the tide.

Here is a list of Black-owned businesses near our Boulder, Colorado office.

Here is a growing list of Black and Brown businesses near our other office location Berlin, Germany. The map is provided by a website called Black Brown Berlin.I am inspired to see so many people around the world exercise their constitutional and civil freedoms to stand up for what is right.

Thank you,
Sofia Rossato
SnapEngage CEO

 
 
Sofia Rossato, SnapEngage CEO

Curious about the organizations mentioned above? Learn more here: 

1. https://www.code2040.org/
Code2040 is a nonprofit activating, connecting, and mobilizing the largest racial equity community in tech to dismantle the structural barriers that prevent the full participation and leadership of Black and Latinx technologists in the innovation economy.  

2. https://www.blackgirlscode.com/ 
Black Girls Code has a vision to increase the number of women of color in the digital space by empowering girls of color ages 7 to 17 to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology. To train 1 million girls by 2040. 

3. https://www.hackthehood.org/about.html 
Hack the Hood serves under-resourced youth of color, ages 16-25, who are interested in pursuing tech-related careers, but who do not yet have access to the resources they need to succeed.  

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Connectivity: SnapEngage’s Response To The COVID-19 Pandemic

Remote worker

 

Like all of you, we have been closely monitoring the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve always been a global company, with employees working from home part of the time each week. Our teams work to foster connectivity to deliver the most value to our clients, even as we practice social distancing.

Many of our clients are facing the sudden transition to different ways of working. This is happening while shouldering the emotional and physical impact of COVID-19. We are doing what we can to offer our resources and aid as we transition to a new reality. For example, we’ve introduced a COVID-19 Symptom Checker chatbot designed to help healthcare providers triage incoming traffic. We hope the resources below help you stay connected to each other, your clients, and your community.

Stay connected, build relationships

1. How to reduce Coronavirus business impact  

2. How our remote teams use Team Chat to drive connectivity A well-structured knowledge base can resolve a high percentage of common questions. Don’t have a current knowledge base? Google Custom Search allows any website to become a knowledge base. 

3. Automate important messages with Proactive Chat Answer Bot is extremely customizable. Enable the bot to be the first line of defense for clients, or strictly as backup when live agents are busy or offline. Provide 24/7/365 support to eliminate client wait times and boost overall client satisfaction. 

4. Instantly direct visitors to the right location with Guide Bot 

5. Set up a COVID-19 Symptom Checker bot (we’ve already built it for you!) 

Sincerely,
Sofia Rossato
CEO at SnapEngage

Sofia Rossato, SnapEngage CEO