At Hinge Health, great patient care hinges on Freshworks-powered support

Here’s a good problem to have: Hinge Health was helping more people with back and joint pain. But the company found its existing tools resulted in a disjointed patient and employee experience. The support team relied heavily on email to communicate with members and internal teams, and it was inefficient and inconsistent. After evaluating different customer service solutions, including Zendesk, Hinge Health invested in Freshworks for its ability to provide exceptional customer service at scale.

Hinge Health, a fast-growing digital health startup, connects members—digitally and in person—with leading-edge clinical care and exercise programs. These employer-backed programs reduce back and joint pain while helping patients avoid surgeries and lower reliance on prescription medication. Administering high-quality clinical care and support through a “digital clinic” presented operational challenges to Hinge Health as its member population grew.

Just as Hinge Health has grown, so has its need for a scalable, all-in-one solution. The company began with eight seats for Freshworks’ omnichannel customer service solutions and has grown to 335 seats. This has allowed the company to scale, increasing its capacity to handle tickets from 5,600 members before the Freshworks implementation to 212,000 today. Hinge has centralized support operations and workflows covering a range of different use cases, from streamlining member support to handling insurance queries and technical support for wearable devices. As it adds AI capabilities, it is beginning to see additional benefits, as well.

"Freshworks enhanced our support capabilities,” says Mahmoud Shehadeh, director of member support at Hinge Health. “The unified platform streamlined tasks and boosted efficiency. Customer service is now a seamless, exceptional experience.”

The company 

Hinge Health is a fast-growing digital health startup that allows patients with back and joint pain to get personalized care and exercise therapy from a suite of healthcare professionals through the Hinge Health app. Alongside customized programs designed specifically for each individual, members and healthcare providers are able to work together via in-app messaging, text, email, phone, or video chat. 

The challenge

Shehadeh’s support teams previously relied on email to communicate with members and internal teams. Without a centralized digital platform, internal workflows were clunky and case resolution times grew as inbound inquiries increased.

Hinge Health faced challenges in tracking internal SLAs and needed a solution that could scale fast. “We were a smaller company at the time,” Shehadeh recalls. “We didn't have a CRM or anything. We were just doing support through email.”

The solution

After evaluating different customer service solutions, including Zendesk, Hinge Health invested in Freshworks for its ability to provide exceptional customer service at scale. Shehadeh’s support teams now rely on Freshworks’ customer service solutions for a wide range of use cases:

• Enrollment support: With omnichannel support, new members receive real-time assistance across channels, guiding them through the enrollment process and ultimately driving revenue growth.

• Technical support: Freshworks’ omnichannel support provides in-product chat so members can get immediate assistance through their wearable devices to ensure the best possible customer experience.

• Member support: Using Freshworks, the support team assists enrolled members with questions about their program and managing their account. If an issue requires more help, agents can collaborate on the ticket to solve the problem faster.

• Order tracking: Freshworks integrates with other internal tools to help agents do all their work in a unified workflow instead of searching through other applications to find information. It makes things fast and streamlined for agents, improving their experience.

• Internal support: Freshworks’ HIPAA-compliant solution allows the support team to coordinate care and connect patients to their dedicated care teams.

The company has begun to explore Freshworks’ AI-powered features for service and support. In particular, it’s using Freshworks’ AI agent assistant, Freddy Copilot, to make support chats more engaging and helpful. Support agents are tapping into the Rephrase feature to tailor written scripts to members’ needs.

“Rephraser is helpful because it allows us to quickly rephrase our email responses to make them more suitable for chat support,” says Taylor Matson, support operations lead at Hinge Health. “We don’t need to manually convert those scripts. We can use Freddy Copilot to do that, which saves us time.”

With Freshworks’ AI-powered Freddy Self Service, patients can find answers and resolve issues on their own through AI chatbots. When they have more complex queries, the bot routes the issue to a live agent to handle, ensuring a smooth handoff—made even easier by Freddy Copilot, which summarizes the customer/bot conversation for agents so they can get up to speed immediately. As a result, they are more productive and can respond to the customer faster with full context, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction.

“We use the summarizer feature the most when we hand off from the bot to the live chat agent,” says Matson.

Impact

Through deployment of Freshworks’ AI-powered omnichannel customer service solution, Hinge Health has maintained high customer satisfaction while scaling to support a rapidly growing member base. Implementing chatbots has lowered its first-response times from hours to minutes, improving the support team’s ability to help patients quickly access the exercise therapy, education, and program support that relieves their pain. 

Since Hinge Health was also looking to safeguard member health information when it sought a support vendor, maintaining HIPAA compliance with Freshworks has proven invaluable. The security and privacy settings ensure regulatory compliance while still allowing for much-needed customizations.  

Matson may look to expand productivity gains even further with greater use of Freddy Self Service to improve customer self-service across all channels, Freddy Copilot to improve agent productivity, and Freddy Insights for leaders to gain proactive and predictive insights (in beta now). In the meantime, the Freshworks-powered foundation of support operations continues to pay off.

“The automations, triggers, and routing abilities greatly improved our overall efficiency,” says Shehadeh. “That's what's helped us scale and grow our support team.”