Have you ever wondered how outbound medical call centers ensure that patients get a satisfying customer experience? Well, it all comes down to certain strategies that improve their outbound call controls. Here are a few best practices of my medical call center that are used to help patients and give them the best experience.
Staffing And Scheduling
Medical call centers have the right number of staff who possess the skills required to deal with customer queries. However, you still need to ensure that they have a well-planned scheduling strategy that considers shift coverage, peak call times, and staff breaks in order to ensure that patient calls are answered promptly and efficiently.
Data Privacy and Security
Patient information is sensitive and requires strict measures to ensure data privacy and security. The call center staff are trained to handle and protect patient data properly. They make use of secure technologies for data storage and transmission.
Quality Assurance and Monitoring
Quality assurance and monitoring can help identify areas for improvement and ensure that call agents are providing quality services. They need to monitor the call center data, address any issues or gaps in performance, and provide feedback. This leads to continuous improvement.
Regular assessment of performance and identifying areas for improvement help to enhance patient satisfaction. The evaluation can be done by gathering feedback from patients, providing ongoing training and development for staff, and implementing new technologies.
HIPAA Compliance
One of the most basic and critical aspects of a medical call center is keeping patient data safe and secure. Hence, HIPAA compliance is an important act passed in 1966 to safeguard patients’ health information at all times. The act requires healthcare providers and organizations, as well as their business associates, to ensure the security of protected health information that is handled, shared, or transferred. It also regulates the standards for healthcare information on electronic billing and other processes. This has significantly reduced healthcare fraud and abuse cases.
Personalization, Empathy, and Compassion
Empathy plays a crucial role in building smooth communities and positive customer experiences. The medical call center staff cannot sound robotic to patients, nor stern and imposing. They may have to apologize in some situations, provide first-aid counseling whenever required, use empathy statements to avoid any patient-provider conflict, and maintain a polite and positive tone.
The patients would be already undergoing a lot of stress, difficulty, and unsure times. So, the call center agent will have to ensure that they are doing everything in their power, even if the patient is angry, upset, or combative. These centers have tolerant, calm, attentive, and empathetic agents who can provide a positive experience to offset the negative experiences.
Multichannel Support
Medical call centers can reach out to patients through any communication channel possible. They focus on ramping up their email, SMS, and call support workflows. Though calling is the most preferred method of putting forward queries, the SMS support channel is easier to work with. So calling is best accompanied by SMS and emails since it opens up preferences for patients, thus making them easily reach you through their channel of choice.
Optimization can allow them to speak to patients in their own languages and use channels they feel most comfortable with. Most healthcare call centers hire multilingual workers and also work with interpreter services to ensure support for languages that the agents cannot speak. Thus, you can provide patients the option to continue through email, SMS, video chat, live chat, or other media. They also maintain a complete patient profile to switch seamlessly between channels whenever they need, thus giving a more positive patient experience.
Analyze Key Metrics
Call-center interactions play a major role in patient satisfaction. If the call experience is negative, patients may turn elsewhere. Hence, call center services should identify what went wrong and also determine how they can improve interactions. For this, medical call centers keep track of their useful metrics for analyzing their call-center effectiveness.
These metrics focus on patient satisfaction like Net Promoter Score or NPS and Customer Effort Score or CES. These are simple metrics that patients can use to quickly evaluate their call-center experience. More traditional metrics and KPIs can be used to develop a clear picture of how effective the outbound efforts are.
Hiring Right Agents
The medical call center agents have impeccable interpersonal skills and ability to function calmly in high-stress situations. The best call centers will focus on applicants who demonstrate prior experience working within healthcare so that they are more prepared for the realities of their job and also have received HIPAA training to ensure regulatory compliance. Some services also focus on providing quality training to bring new agents to speed up.
Full-Service Voice Platform
Allowing medical call centers to include their name, phone numbers, company logos, and a brief description describing the purpose behind the call enables patients to answer the phone with confidence.
To Sum Up
With these practices in place, medical call centers offer an enhanced service to your healthcare facility. This will help your patient get the best customer experience.