In today’s digital age, call centers have become very popular among multiple industries across the nation and the world. And the healthcare industry is no such exception. It requires call centers to offer a framework for practitioners to exchange accurate patient information while maintaining compliance and lowering expenses.
With challenges like high volume calls and complex guidelines in an industry like healthcare, they must hand pick their call center service provider. This ensures that they have the proper security protocols, and infrastructure in place to provide excellent patient interactions.
“Customers will want to talk to you if they believe you can solve their problems.”
The Healthcare call center will enable you to prioritize and proactively distribute work while bridging the gap between the front and back office.
Here are a few healthcare call center best practices to be followed to increase patient satisfaction
1. Be Compassionate and Respectful
A healthcare call center representative works on the front lines and is generally the first person with whom a patient interacts in a hospital or other healthcare facility. Given below are a few tips that one must adhere to serve your patients better:
- Consider the emotional factors while talking to your patients
- Avoid rude/ unpleasant behavior
- Be kind and offer to help
- Go that extra mile and provide quick resolutions
- Always be optimistic
- Make things as easy for patients as possible
2. Omnichannel Support
Patients should be able to seek help via their preferred communication channels, such as email, calls, video chat, SMS, live chat, and social media.
Maintaining a 360-degree patient profile updated in real-time and accessible to all agents in a centralized location is critical to delivering consistent messaging across different platforms. It also allows patients to transfer platforms without losing their place in the discourse.
Kapture’s Omnichannel support aims to transform your customer service and lets you manage queries from calls, chats, social media, email, and other channels on a single software platform.
3. Train Your Agents
Equip your agents with the best level of knowledge to make them self-sufficient and capable enough to solve people’s miseries in the first go itself. Build a solid infrastructure for the learning curve that will enable your agents to perform extraordinarily.
As a part of a healthcare contact center’s best practices, ensure your agents demonstrate empathy for the possibility of any type of emergency. And learn to comfort patients and their families with rapid and relevant solutions.
Always try to connect with the patient. Show them that you care!
Keep track and monitor your employee’s performance through a learning management system that offers training modules and organized assessments.
4. Monitor and Analyze Calls
Monitor call quality to guarantee that your call center’s service standards are met. All calls should be recorded, and patient inquiries should be forwarded to the appropriate departments.
For healthcare call center management, you need to shadow agents on call and do real-time coaching about the necessary practices to serve better.
Focus on the following metrics to get a better analysis of your call center’s performance as a whole:
- Average Response Time: These metrics determine the average time taken by your call center representative to respond to a patient’s call.
- Average Call Time: This measures the amount of time a patient spends on the line.
- First Call Resolution: Also known as FCR, refers to the call center’s ability to resolve a patient’s query in the very first interaction.
- Abandonment Rate: This refers to the rate at which patients disconnect the call before even getting connected to a call center agent.
- Customer Satisfaction: This indicates the overall performance of the call center and can be measured through patient feedback and surveys.
Kapture’s Reports & Analytics feature gives you access to 1000+ reporting formats, allowing you to gain insight into your call center’s performance and guiding you in the appropriate way.
5. Gather Feedback and Actionable Insights
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. But they do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”
We all feel sensitive when it comes to someone’s health and well-being. As call center agents, taking patient feedback is necessary in order to improve and serve them better.
Offer your patients surveys about your call center services and discover what kind of changes or new services they’ve been looking for. This practice will help evolve your call center in a way that is beneficial to both your employees and your patients.
6. Follow HIPAA Security Protocol
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is a national standard that protects an individual’s medical records. All healthcare call centers are completely HIPAA compliant.
HIPAA protects both patient and doctor health information while also preventing healthcare fraud. It also authenticates your health organization in terms of protected health information (PHI) security.
Ensure all your employees have followed all the protocols and also encrypt all your patient data to avoid any security breaches.
7. Always Say The Right Thing
The manner in which we communicate is as important as the information we are communicating. As healthcare providers, one must always provide a sympathetic ear to all kinds of queries and problems that might arise, owing to the industry you work in.
Advise your call center agents to follow these:
- Avoid negative words: Being in this industry will somehow make your agents the bearer of bad news; however, one must always learn to reframe negative words positively.
- Be authentic: Call agents should try to be genuine and organic with every call they attend. They should focus on making everything as easy as possible for patients.
- Always be optimistic: Agents should never give up when it comes to any unsolvable difficulties. They should learn to be optimistic and go that extra mile to figure out additional ways and help the patient in need.
- Escalate when necessary: If an agent is unable to serve a patient due to a lack of expertise, the patient’s request should be escalated. Determine that your agents are aware of when and to whom they should escalate an issue.
8. Provide all Post-Operation Services
Healthcare call centers exist for the sole purpose of serving patients in every positive manner possible. The main goal lies in making them happy and in good health. From scheduling appointments to reminders to postoperative follow-ups are all to be done through healthcare contact centers.
Ensuring your patients are comfortable and happy with your services shows that you care and also helps you improve and provide exceptional customer service as an organization.
9. Integrate your call center with a CRM
The current scenario in the healthcare industry requires the involvement of multiple medical departments for a single patient. Therefore, require access to their details altogether on one single platform.
It is crucial to improve healthcare call center management and incorporate a healthcare CRM for effective communication and a healthier working environment.
Kapture and your Call Center can together aid and enhance your patient’s healthcare experience
Kapture’s Healthcare CRM enables you to provide proper care without negligence and gathers faster updates on all your patients. This CRM software for the healthcare industry is essential for ensuring patient safety and proper directing and interaction with hospital staff.
Promote better and faster decision-making among all your call center representatives and ensure a delightful yet satisfying healthcare experience using Kapture’s knowledge management system.
Kapture’s learning management system will help guide and uplift your call center agent’s learning experience and make it fun and interesting at the same time.
And finally, get a unified view of all your patient’s data coming in through multiple touchpoints on a single dashboard made available through Kapture’s omnichannel dashboard.
