How To Improve The Efficiency Of A Healthcare Call Center

Healthcare call centers play an important role in patient satisfaction and experience (PX). Making certain mistakes when serving people can not only cause a bad first impression, but also reduce efficiency.

How To Improve The Efficiency Of A Healthcare Call Center

1) Avoiding Missed Calls

Most new patients are likely to come through phone calls. This is where most patients get lost: through missed calls.

In fact, according to Medical Marketing, healthcare call centers lose between 20% and 30% of calls. When a potential patient ends up on voicemail, only a small percentage will leave a voicemail; most will never call again and many will contact other providers.

2) Returning Calls In The Shortest Possible Time

When a potential patient leaves a voicemail, how long does it take for the contact center to call them back? If it is more than 24 hours, patients are lost.

In fact, research has shown in many industries that responding within 1-hour means you are 7 times more likely to get back to them. Therefore, if it is not responded with a certain speed, many of these potential patients will be lost.

3) Avoiding Delays In Responding To Online Forms

Another common problem for medical centers is in website form submissions, such as “Contact us” or “Request an appointment”. Most clinics receive these requests in an email inbox, where, pending email review, it can take a few days before a return call or email response to the patient occurs.

The delay in responses is a mistake that medical centers should not make.

4) Encouraging Contact Attempts

Whether it’s returning a call or submitting a form, the attempt to contact a potential customer should occur in the shortest time possible, but often requires multiple attempts. Simply put, most clinics give up too easily with just a few tries over a few days. This approach to customer service causes the loss of patients.

The reality is that 80% of calls go to voicemail. This means that you have to try to call at different times of the day and different days of the week.

5) Using Text Messages

Relying solely on phone calls is a risk. Medical centers must use all communication channels at their disposal, including email and text messages.

Phone calls often go unanswered or returned because they come at a time of overwork. However, texting is very effective for getting a quick response from a potential patient as to when might be the most convenient time to talk or address quick questions they’d like answered.

The additional losses due to the management of no-shows to the medical visit and cancellations are not taken into account either. According to Modern Healthcare, only 41% of practices contact patients in advance of appointments to provide reminders.

Omnichannel, Key To Increasing The Efficiency Of Call Centers

With Enreach’s Omnichannel Contact Center, users will be able to contact you from their favourite channels, resolve their queries through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and connect with the most appropriate agent thanks to Smart Routing.

In this way, the agents will be able to manage all the conversations from a single web application, you will be able to control the level of service in real time and analyse the results to make the right decisions. All this from an intuitive control panel!