PatientFi uses Zendesk AI to deliver human connections at scale

PatientFi is a Southern California–based fintech company that specializes in financing elective healthcare procedures. PatientFi is a leading patient-friendly financing platform that partners with thousands of medical practices and major healthcare networks nationwide.

The company serves a broad network of healthcare specialties, including plastic surgery, medical spas, dermatology, fertility, ophthalmology, dentistry, and audiology. By focusing on transparency, convenience, and ease of use, PatientFi empowers patients to make informed decisions about their care while helping providers grow their practices.

Building CX from the ground up

With a strong commitment to providing customers with personalized service, the company faced immediate challenges with explosive growth following its founding in 2017.

“We come from humble beginnings,” Blake Lucas, Senior Director of Customer Experience at PatientFi, explains. “We had to figure out VoIP systems, ticketing, and how we were going to support customers—all on our own.”

Today, PatientFi now has hundreds of employees and their CX team has grown to a team of two dozen agents who field mostly voice calls from borrowers who have a wide range of questions—everything from basic payment terms to helping potential parents realize their dream of starting a family.

And with support demand climbing upwards of 10 percent week over week, PatientFi needed a CX platform that could grow quickly without sacrificing the most essential part of all wellness treatments—empathy with a human touch.

“We are very much a fintech, but the heart of our company is our people—it’s our soul, our culture,” notes Blake. “As we were scaling, the big question for us was, ‘How can we utilize technology to make us better?’”

Zendesk AI scales at pace with PatientFi’s growth

Growing frustrated with the VoIP restrictions and lack of support on their previous platform, Blake and his team turned to Zendesk’s AI solutions.

“We decided to go all-in on artificial intelligence,” Blake explains. “And it’s opened up new opportunities for our team. We’ve introduced new AI onboarding and training roles—and the team at Zendesk has been with us every step of the way, answering our questions and offering solutions.”

PatientFi serves its customers with email, messaging, and VoIP support, with about 60 to 70 percent of its volume being voice calls. Using Zendesk AI, PatientFi’s autonomous AI agent now resolves about 60 percent of chat conversations, answering routine FAQs before they ever reach an agent. Meanwhile, Zendesk’s Copilot tool for agents suggests replies and completes ticket steps, cutting median time-to-resolution almost in half—from about 19 minutes to 10 minutes.

Copilot translation makes bilingual service a lighter lift

Copilot’s built-in translation lets English-speaking agents confidently handle Spanish emails and chats. This improvement has reduced delays and ensured faster, more inclusive support for PatientFi’s growing bilingual customer base. Most of PatientFi’s support team are native English speakers—and about one in five of PatientFi’s customers speak Spanish.

“In the past, we would rely on our Spanish-speaking agents to communicate with those customers,” Blake says. “And if they were on another call or otherwise unavailable, we were delayed in providing service to those customers.”

Now, PatientFi’s English-speaking agents use AI-powered translation to communicate with Spanish-speaking customers in real time.

“It automatically translates chats and emails with a great deal of accuracy,” Blake explains. “My English-speaking agents tell me, ‘Oh, I just responded to an email in Spanish and it was awesome!’”

Measuring success through greater agent utilization

One of the most important metrics for PatientFi is utilization—how much of the CX team’s available work time is actually spent helping customers. Before launching Zendesk’s AI, PatientFi’s CX team was bogged down by repetitive, routine questions.

To fix that, Blake rolled out Zendesk’s AI capabilities alongside omnichannel routing, which intelligently prioritizes and triages customer requests to the right agents. Zendesk AI agents now handle simple, FAQ-style inquiries automatically, while complex issues go straight to human agents.

The impact was immediate.

“Our agent workload decreased by 30 percent—a huge win for us,” says Blake. “It shows that AI is taking care of the easy stuff, so our team can focus on the more complex conversations that really matter.”

AI helps to navigate a difficult—and uniquely human—situation

At first, a few of PatientFi’s human customer service agents were a bit skeptical of the benefits of AI-powered CX.

“Our people truly care about the customer experience—and there’s a personal responsibility that comes with it,” Blake explains. “And when it’s not your own words, it can be a bit scary.”

Recently, Zendesk Copilot helped one of Blakes’ live agents navigate an incredibly challenging situation.

“A customer was denied their credit application,” Blake explains. “And they didn’t react well. It put one of my agents in a very difficult position—and they didn’t know how to react.”

Copilot immediately crafted a diplomatic and personal response, including a list of resources for the customer.

“It handled the situation with the utmost seriousness,” says Blake. “It was an absolutely beautiful response—it was caring. It was empathetic. And it was exactly how I’d want an agent to respond in that situation.”

An AI-powered future with Zendesk

As PatientFi continues to grow its business, Blake is focused on deepening its Zendesk integration and expanding its use of AI to connect systems and data more seamlessly. He also plans to bring Zendesk data into its company-wide reporting in Looker and BigQuery, while using AI App Builder to surface key customer insights directly within the Agent Workspace.

Blake also aims to leverage autonomous AI agents for more complex inquiries—things like payment changes or account updates—and to connect Zendesk more tightly with tools like Jira for faster issue resolution.

“The technology keeps evolving alongside us, and that’s what makes it so powerful,” Blake explains. “And as we continue to grow, Zendesk’s AI capabilities give us time back to focus on what really matters—helping people.”