Five Guiding Principles for Leveraging the Healthcare Contact Center

The following is a guest blog post by Mike Wisz, Director, Analytics – Healthcare, Advisory Services, and Melissa Baker, Business Analyst, Healthcare, Advisory Services, at Burwood Group.

Consumer experience is more critical than ever for healthcare organizations. Today, the financial performance of health systems increasingly depends on converting consumers into patients and retaining patients within network—patients who now have expanding options for urgent, primary, and elective care. A contact center is a critical component of an inviting “digital front door” for consumers—which is why forward-looking healthcare organizations are envisioning how to transform call centers into patient engagement centers.

As part of an enterprise approach to patient access and experience, each organization will chart its own path in building out contact center capabilities. Healthcare CEOs increasingly recognize that consumers want to interact with their healthcare services as they do with companies in other industries, such as retail or hospitality.

The following are five guiding principles for developing a consumer-grade contact center experience.

First do no harm.

A poorly performing call center can result in frustrated patients or guests whose experience prompts them to look elsewhere for services. So first, deal with current problems, even if they are not easily discoverable. Using all available data sources, assess call handle times, customer effort required, and call routing accuracy against established targets or external benchmarks. If service levels are not acceptable, these problems must be resolved.

Make it easy for patients to connect.

Health systems should make it very easy for customers to access services using their preferred channel of communication. This access should be aligned from the customer’s perspective across touchpoints such as consumer-facing websites, patient portals and self-scheduling applications, and mobile applications offered to patients.

Remember: Productive agents create happy customers.

Consolidating contact center operations should result in more efficiency. Improving efficiency while offering additional services across more medical groups requires automation. Domain-specific knowledge support including scripts and protocols, empowers agents to rapidly resolve service requests. Skills-based routing gives managers the ability to staff flexibly while ensuring target service level performance. Desktop integrations with scheduling, billing, and clinical systems inform agents of highlighted information to reduce contact handle times and increase first-contact resolution rates.

Focus on outcomes. Measure and monitor.

Identify the business outcomes that are most important to determining success. These will likely focus on customer experience, agent productivity, and overall operational effectiveness. Many KPIs and metrics can be measured, but pick a few that will highlight performance against your most important outcomes. Ensure reports are available that provide visibility into key metrics and that reporting is timely enough to be actionable.

Align to enterprise vision and objectives.

It is not always clear in healthcare organizations who owns the “consumer experience.” Leaders from groups representing marketing, population health, clinical quality, and revenue cycle management should align and work together to ensure the contact center serves as a vital component of the organization’s comprehensive approach to patient experience.

In this new environment driven by consumerism, competition for patients will only continue to escalate. Successful health systems will learn to better leverage their contact centers as a way to attract and retain patients and optimize physician utilization, and to tackle a complex set of new challenges.

About Burwood Group
Burwood Group, Inc. is an IT consulting and integration firm. We help forward-thinking leaders design, use, and manage technology to transform their business and improve outcomes. Our services in consulting, technology, and operations are rooted in business alignment and technical expertise in cloud, automation, security, and collaboration. Burwood Group was founded in Chicago, IL and is celebrating over 20 years in business. Today, Burwood includes 250 employees and seven U.S. offices including a 24×7 Operations Center in San Diego, CA. Whether you are developing strategy, deploying technology, or creating an operational model, Burwood is a dedicated partner. To learn more, visit www.burwood.com.

   

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