The Relevance of Contact Centre for Healthcare Providers
“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”
– Jeff Bezos (Founder & CEO at Amazon)
Healthcare Providers play a crucial role within their community and beyond. Be it government or a private healthcare facility, its role is crucial in ensuring the overall well-being of its community living within the area from a physical perspective or mentally. Being one of the ‘pioneers’ investing in customer-focused technologies such as Contact Center’s Integrated Voice Response (IVR) would be the way forward. Thus bringing to attention the relevance of a strong Contact Centre support, now more than ever to Healthcare Providers in Malaysia.
How can it help?
IVR allows 24/7 Customer Care support, whereby your call centers are able to switch to automate services for transactions that typically require assistance from live customer service representatives, which can now be executed via voice commands or touch tone key selection. Imagine the assurance you can bring to the community when they reach out to your customer call center and the deep first impression your call center is able to leave with your patients.
Can’t imagine how IVR works?
Here is an example of a seamless IVR managed Call Flow:
Thank you for calling St.Déborah’s Hospital. For emergencies, press 1. For Women & Children specialist appointments, press 2. For billing purposes, press 3, For operator assistant, press 0.
Customize your greetings, and options for call flow to related departments, thus preventing lost-in-translation calls, and frustrated customers. Save on re-training new hires for customer service, and upskill those to be taking on greater responsibilities thus contributing to the hospital overall. Last but not least, IVR is able to assist you to gather data on your patient’s behavior, such as call time, frequency, call resolution, etc. With the gathered data your management will then be able to make sound business forecasts better for the future, be it in addressing the patient’s needs or from a marketing strategy perspective.
Is there any relevant industry experience?
Allow us to share some of the frustration faced, based on a study of Healthcare providers’ current challenges in this area. The Healthcare provider is facing an un-trackable number of missed calls. Sometimes calls to Specialist clinics goes unanswered or are transferred to the wrong one, thus resulting in patient frustration, negative review, and ultimately a loss in business. The establishment is also lacking accurate statistics on how fast calls are being answered. The after-office hours for patients can turn into a fearful nightmare when there’s no self-service option, even during peak periods. After all, emergencies could happen at any time, even during odd hours. However, it’s a gain of loyalty throughout the duration of the patient’s lifetime for the hospital should their call-in experience is positively memorable.
“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.” – Sam Walton (Founder for Walmart)
In keeping with Standards
Thus with the above experience, on point, the establishment is seeking to revamp their patient’s experience starting with the Customer Care team. The first stark point to improve would be routing the patient’s call to the correct department.
Will you place your health in the hands of a hospital that time and again fail to transfer your call to the correct clinic or department? With the integration of the Contact Center’s IVR, the system is able to route callers to the right agents based on skillset. Thus, avoiding miscommunication. What’s more, being able to provide after-office hours customer service care without incurring additional costs would be an important factor to the bottom line. The system also enables the hospital to record agents’ calls for better performance monitoring and improvements thus allowing the training department to create a quality coaching program.
With the recording services provided, the hospital legal team is able to avoid customer unreasonable disputes. Supervisors can manage the team by monitoring the calls on a single platform. With the gathered data, as mentioned above, sound business judgment is now possible. Seeking to personalize each patient’s experience with flexible solutions. IVR is one part of the omnichannel solution provided, whereby calls and emails are gathered in a unified platform. Meaning in one single dashboard with a few clicks the agent is able to pull out patients’ data on billing, previous medical visit records, call logs, and more. Personalized experience within healthcare services is the common core value that every patient requires.
The local community will always reach out to the nearest healthcare provider when they encounter discomfort, a regular health check-up, or in the case of emergencies. Elevate your game.
Talk to our specialist and find out more about how we can help your Healthcare Establishment achieve a better patient experience.
