Today’s patients can book appointments online with healthcare professionals, manage their prescriptions, and access test results through digital channels. They can do it with efficiency and quickly. When patients reach out to healthcare professionals to resolve any issues, they expect the same level of efficiency, speed, and convenience.
A study indicates that 72% of patients want someone to respond quickly to their issues and make things easy for them. They rank such healthcare call centers as their top priority, which act quickly to address their problems. Still, 60% of patients report feeling frustrated when contact centers keep them on hold for an extended period. Likewise, 43% admit to having received inconsistent information when they reached out to healthcare providers through different communication channels.
So, long hold times, disconnected communication channels, and many other such issues are prevalent in healthcare contact centers. These are negatively impacting patient’s trust and paving the way for serious consequences.
But these challenges can be addressed with proper actions. In this blog, we will explore the five major problems in healthcare contact centers and the potential solutions.
The Common Challenges in Healthcare Call Centers & Solutions
Long hold times, scattered communication channels, overwhelming call volumes, and cold conversations are big problems for operational efficiency in healthcare call centers. Such issues have become everyday points of contention for both healthcare teams and patients.
However, modern healthcare contact centers utilize the right combination of smart integrations, purpose-built tools, and AI to effectively manage the situation and deliver the best services to their patients.
Long hold times
Let’s be honest. None of us likes to be on hold for 10, 15, or 20 minutes, listening to a specific repetitive line while staring at the phone. Doing this while you’re anxious about your test results or sick is deeply distressing. This persists even today, and long hold times are one of the most significant pain points for patients.
They can increase stress and lead to delays in treatment. However, the world is full of options, and such delays can encourage patients to seek their care elsewhere.
How do we overcome this situation?
The good news is that there are several ways a healthcare contact center can utilize to help both its patients and agents.
Smart call routing: Instead of sending calls from one extension to another, intelligent call routing ensures that patients are directed to the right specialist or department. Whether someone is calling about a medication refill, a billing issue, or wants to schedule an imaging test, smart routing cuts down on unnecessary steps and saves time for everyone.
IVR & Self-Service options: A well-designed interactive voice response system can help your contact center reduce the burden on agents. It enables patients to handle various routine tasks independently, such as paying bills, requesting prescription refills, or checking appointment availability.
Such types of self-service options remain available 24/7, making the entire process faster and more efficient. Hence, this reduces pressure on agents, allowing them to focus on sensitive calls that require a personal touch.
Call-back options: Introduce call-back options and provide your customers with the choice to receive a callback. This will improve their experience and reduce hold times as they don’t have to wait on hold.
Support with Agent Accelerator: Agent Accelerator can play a crucial role in reducing average handle time in healthcare contact centers. The question is how? It provides agents with a unified desktop interface that displays all relevant information associated with patients, including their medical history, prior interactions, and insurance details from various systems, such as databases, CRMs, and EHRs. Agents can view all the required information on a single screen. It minimizes the need to toggle between multiple screens or navigate through systems and helps to resolve issues faster.
Lack of Personalized Tone in Conversation
When agents don’t have quick access to patient’s details, the conversation may get delayed. Here, patients may feel cold and disconnected. They may think that the institution is not taking their problems seriously
How do we overcome this challenge?
Give agents the tools that can pull together the patient’s details and information from EHRs to prior call notes.
On-screen context: Agent Accelerator allows a 360-degree view of the patients to agents on a single screen. They can see the patient’s past prescriptions, appointment notes, communication history, and more. This means agents don’t need to ask patients for the same information repeatedly and speed up call resolution. They will be more focused on offering empathetic and personalized interactions.
Customization: Agent Accelerator is easily customizable, allowing healthcare providers to adapt this tool to their specific specialties, workflows, and services. Whether you are in a specialized clinic or a general hospital, you can get a tailored experience.
Managing High Call Volumes
Healthcare contact centers are often bustling places. As the influx of patient’s inquiries increases, agents find themselves on a constant treadmill of answering these calls.
Agents often feel overwhelmed not only by the increased call volumes but also by the emotional weight that comes with those calls.
How to overcome this issue.
AI assistance & automation: Implementing AI-powered tools can help you handle simple interactions more efficiently. It simplifies the entire process and provides human agents with enough time to focus on handling more emotional or essential calls.
Smart agent desktops: Agent Accelerator supports agents by displaying all relevant data. It eliminates screen toggling and provides real-time access to agents about patient’s information, reducing manual errors. The result is faster calls, more supported agents, and fewer mistakes.
| 💡 Also Read | Unified Agent Desktop : All You Need to Know |
Streamlined systems: When agents have the required tools that enable them to handle calls efficiently, it makes them less stressed and more satisfied. They don’t need to dig through multiple tabs, which saves them time.
Fragmented Communication Channels
Patients reach out to agents through various channels that often include emails, texts, phone calls, and even social media. They expect agents to answer their questions quickly. But when these different communication channels are not connected, things can fall through the cracks. Agents would not be able to answer the patient’s questions as they don’t have the proper information. Also, patients will get inconsistent answers.
How to overcome the challenge of fragmented communication channels.
Omnichannel integration: Implement the tools in your contact center that can unite every conversation, whether it is email, chat, or voice, into a single view. With this, your agents always have the complete picture of patient’s conversations because omnichannel integration is all about providing a full and unified view of every interaction with the patients.
Agent Accelerator = Single pane of glass: Agent Accelerator, when integrated with your contact center system, enables agents to view all interactions in a single, unified view. It helps agents to pick up the conversation where it last left off, regardless of how the patient reached out or who handled it.
| 💡 Also Read | Accelerating Agent Efficiency with a Single, Unified Agent Desktop |
Integration with healthcare systems: You can integrate Agent Accelerator with your contact center’s EMR/HER, CRM, and other ticketing platforms. With this type of integration, agents can view the communication history and the patient’s entire journey, gaining invaluable insights that help them address the complex health requirements of patients.
| 💡 Also Read | Top Healthcare Software Integrations to Personalize the Patient Experience |
Compliance & Data Privacy Risks
When patients call any healthcare provider, they trust that their details, such as insurance information, nature of the illness, and health history, will be kept private and handled with care. It’s a huge responsibilitsy. Even a single careless word, improperly stored recording, or an unsecured system can lead to a HIPAA violation and data breach. Hence, patients begin to lose their trust in the institution.
How to Overcome this Challenge.
Call recording with redaction: Call recordings are very common in contact centers. These are done for quality assurance and training purposes. However, patient’s calls to healthcare contact centers often include sensitive information such as payment details or diagnosis reports. Such type of information demands to be protected at any cost. Advanced call recording systems can mask or hide such sensitive data from recordings.
Regular Training: To ensure compliance, you must keep your team informed about HIPAA rules, the latest security practices, and data handling protocols. Such trainings are not only required to keep your team current with these compliance rules but also to build a culture where your team learns to respect patient’s privacy.
Secure Implementations: Fragmented systems that are not correctly integrated, lack adequate safeguards, and require agents to switch between multiple ones often pose a significant threat to data privacy. Therefore, you should ensure that all your tools, such as CRM, ticketing systems, or EHRs, are HIPAA compliant.
How Agent Accelerator Helps Here
It provides a single, secure interface when integrated with contact center systems, allowing agents to view all relevant information on a single screen. They don’t need to hop between unprotected systems in search of information. When agents don’t need to switch between multiple systems, it reduces the risks of patient data exposure and help in better compliance with privacy regulations.
Conclusion
Healthcare call centres don’t need to stay stuck in inefficient and outdated systems. Modern technology has evolved enough to meet today’s patient demands. Whether it is artificial intelligence that handles routine tasks or Agent Accelerator that provides a complete view of patient’s information to agents in one place, using the right tools helps healthcare call centers personalize conversations, reduce call volumes, and ultimately create a smooth journey for patients.
