The following is a guest article by James Garvert, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Communications Solutions at Neustar.
Faced with a ballooning epidemic of illegal robocalls and phone scams — in 2020, U.S. consumers received nearly 46 billion robocalls and lost $3.3 billion to phone fraud — legislators and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have taken a variety of steps to combat call spoofing and scams, including mandating that communications service providers implement STIR/SHAKEN call authentication technology.
But the damage, to more than just the direct scam victims, has already been done: 88% of calls now go unanswered, in no small part because consumers are too wary to pick up the phone if they aren’t sure who’s calling. For healthcare organizations, which often call patients about appointment scheduling, test results, medication instructions, and other critical and time-sensitive matters, this is a troubling development.
And healthcare isn’t alone in placing a high value the phone channel: 78% of respondents to a recent Neustar-commissioned Omdia survey of large U.S. enterprises say that even in this digital age, phone calls remain their most important channel for communicating with customers, followed by a four-way tie (33% each) among mobile apps, email, website and online chat. Health is, of course, an extremely personal and high-priority matter, and it’s no surprise that most patients prefer the phone for urgent notifications or to discuss complex issues.
Clearly, there’s a gap between the phone channel’s potential and its current reality. And it’s not due to low answer rates alone: 67% of survey respondents admitted that while the customer’s call experience is important to their overall brand perception, their call experience is not of the same quality as their digital experience.
Tech to the rescue
Fortunately, there are technology solutions that can help restore trust in phone calls — both increasing answer rates and improving the patient experience.
The new STIR/SHAKEN call authentication framework will create greater challenges for fraudsters and hopefully help reduce the flood of spoofed calls that have led consumers to ignore even important calls that they want to receive (like those from their doctor or pharmacist.) But, despite the clear benefits, many organizations are concerned that the new protocols could also cause more of their legitimate outbound calls to be blocked or mistakenly marked as spam — resulting in lower answer rates, increased costs, higher call volumes, loss of revenue and decreased customer satisfaction.
To minimize such issues, you’ll want to work with your carrier or a third-party service to ensure that your outbound calls are accurately assessed. STIR/SHAKEN attestation levels are just one data element that carriers and their analytics partners use in determining whether to block a call, but it’s a significant one. To prevent your calls from being erroneously blocked or flagged, make sure all your outbound numbers are registered across the caller ID ecosystem of carriers and app providers, and have your numbers monitored so that any mistaken call blocking or mislabeling can be remedied quickly.
To address the customer experience side of the equation, consider treating phone calls as part of a unified omnichannel patient experience rather than as individual isolated events. This means, for example, soliciting and adhering to each individual’s contact preferences. Pharmacies are currently leading the way in SMS use and are also tracking call answer rates and increasing mobile app adoption, but in general, healthcare organizations don’t tend to offer the sophisticated Amazon-like communication experiences that today’s consumers are used to.
You can start moving in this direction by implementing a branded calling solution that allows you to provide more comprehensive information on the call recipient’s cellphone screen — for example, your company name, logo and reason for the call, along with a verification mark confirming the legitimacy of the call. Even for landline services, health organizations need to address the basic but essential step of making sure that the names and numbers are presented accurately and consistently for outbound calls, including internal extensions and corporate mobile numbers. The biggest benefit, however, is with mobile displays that allow you to provide patients with richer content and offer an experience that more closely resembles the branded calling customer experience that consumers have come to expect in other contexts.
Beyond the enriched call screen, additional information can be made available after the call – whether the call was answered or not – by providing additional context information such as URL or media link that persists in the call history log.
A branding success story
One example of a healthcare organization that has benefited greatly from branded calling is the Virginia Department of Health (VDH). When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the organization suddenly had to begin making a large volume of critical outreach calls but found that they were not being answered. The agency implemented Neustar’s Branded Call Display, which displayed the VDH logo on the call recipient’s cellphone screen; this reassured members of the public that the calls were legitimate, and answer rates increased by more than 67%.
Healthcare providers work hard to foster patient trust, and many organizations have built up strong brand equity based on that trust. It’s time to make sure your phone communications are contributing to, rather than detracting from, this crucial effort. It’s important that you implement solutions that help you optimize outbound call operations, increase contact rates, and improve the customer experience.
And deploying branded calling can help you present a consistent brand identity and restore your patients’ trust in your phone calls, enabling you to improve patient outreach and strengthen vital relationships at the moments that matter most.
