How to convert Hospital Call Center to Growth Engagement Center?
Today strong patient-hospital relationship plays an important role for a patient visiting a hospital for a lifetime. The hospitals turning their focus on “Patient Experience and reduced cost services”. The expectations of patients are growing towards personalized care and extended support.
Every interaction counts for hospital to create the “we care about you” in patient’s mind.
We need a paradigm shift in traditional call centers that all interactions has to provide positive, empathetic , contextual support to patients. The call should be an “experienced call”.
What is wrong with traditional call centers?
The traditional call centers are volume based and the caller’s experience is comparable to a telephone company: “Not Personal” “One Transaction”. The focus is to complete as much calls as possible.
The call centers are not viewed as “impact creator”, “value adder” or “patient retentioner”. They work on metrics like Abandon Rate, Average Handle Time(AHT), Average Speed of Answer etc and not personal. They know the name and one or two demographic profile of patients.
It appears working to certain extend but it limits the agent to impact the caller about health information, physicians available, relevant data that might interests the caller or other value added services that could benefit him/her, a potential cross-sell or upsell etc.
How to switch to Growth Engagement Centers (GEC)?
In GEC, the call center integrates with healthcare CRM and hence the agents has a view summarised profile of patient journey line. The conversation will be personalised and relevant. Engagement starts with positive note with the patient. The GEC can also tailor a call with other forms of engagements which creates a multi-channel touch points. It also helps the agent to remind them about other treatment plans available that could benefit.
When I call hospital, if someone says “Hi Asha, How are you doing, how can I help? “ It makes a difference as a first step then, If the agent knows my medical history and predicts why I am calling, able to converse with me sensibly, it definitely impresses me and create a sense of care. Then my listening capacity increases and also the confident that he might propose right alternatives to me also increases.
The benefits of GEC are improved patient experience, thus attracting patients and patient retention for lifetime, effective impact on topline .
Action Items for the hospital:
1. Train call agents to be engagement agents by medical data
2. Integrate call center to healthcare CRM systems
3. Make call center as a strategic unit for patient experience
4. Change fixed call script to dynamic conversation based on medical data available
5. Define different set of metrics to measure the outcome and performance
Do check this out, https://www.docengage.in/healthcare-crm
Happy care!
Asha Satapathy
Founder, DocEngage Healthcare CRM
