Customer service is the key to changing medical care from a mere transaction to a favorable experience. Such an experience has become the yardstick to determine a healthcare enterprise’s commitment to its customers. This is why it is critical for a healthcare call center to provide customer-friendly services.
The Covid-19 Pandemic has heightened the need for seamless healthcare call center services. It normalized the practice of consulting doctors through video calls, along with telemedicine. In fact during the pandemic, the demand for virtual clinics shot up to 91% throughout the world. Customer-centric services provided by healthcare call center outsourcing companies ably supported clinicians for telehealth patient monitoring.
In this article, we will explore more about how healthcare call center companies can make their services more customer-friendly.
Why are Healthcare Call Center Services So Important to Companies?
Healthcare call center outsourcing companies provide support to healthcare institutions, workers, and organizations. It is crucial to the healthcare industry in the following ways:
- Patients use their customer service experience as a benchmark to know what they can expect from the healthcare service provider. In order to have a long-term relationship with your customer, you need to provide them with efficient healthcare call center services. Patients that deal with inefficient healthcare centers tend to never return to the provider, even after receiving quality healthcare.
- Inaccurate data in the healthcare industry can prove to be fatal. Erroneous patient data can result in a wrong diagnosis and ultimately a wrong treatment. A healthcare call center with its stringent processes and expert staff brings down the numbers of errors taking place, significantly.
- Poor customer service indicates that the business is struggling in streamlining its processes. It also indicates issues in training staff and handling data properly. These factors further impact the business’s ability to serve the patient.
On the other hand, efficient customer service shows that the company is functioning seamlessly, and has its operations, processes, and systems in place.
5 Tips That a Health Care Call Center Can Use to Be More Customer-Centric
Here’s enlisting the top 5 tips that will help healthcare call center outsourcing companies make their services more customer-centric.
- Developing Compassion Towards the Patient
It is very important for a health care call center employee to develop a rapport with the patient. Many of these patients may be suffering from mental health issues. Such interactions are of sensitive nature. The agent in this situation has to exercise extreme patience, should be understanding, and have integrity.
Healthcare call center companies should train their representatives to
- Listen to their patient’s concerns carefully
- Respect their patients
- Let the patient ask questions
- Identify the patient’s priorities
While it is challenging for a health care call center to handle all the patient issues compassionately, doing so will ensure long-term association with the patient.
- Integrating to CRM Technology
Healthcare call center outsourcing companies need to adapt to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. This platform helps agents to make appointments, deal with documents, share prescriptions, and perform other important patient-related tasks. There are many platforms to choose from. These platforms include EngageBay, Hubspot, Salesforce, among others.
A CRM software will help the healthcare call center to streamline its communication with its customers effectively. It will enable the health care call center employees to perform their duties at ease from their remote devices. CRM software allows a number of healthcare call center employees to work together to solve the patient’s problem.
- Improving the Call Quality
Healthcare call center outsourcing companies must make sure that they adhere to all the international standards for call centers. They must record all the inbound and outbound calls from patients. Supervisors analyze these calls to make necessary improvisations in call scripts or reallocate agents.
They should ensure that every inbound call is routed to the right department. This will prevent the wastage of the patient’s time.
Healthcare call center companies can improve their calling services by gathering feedback from their agents. The agents know which scripts perform better while interacting with a patient. They know which medical terms are easier for the patients to understand. You can include such first-hand insights in your training lessons in order to enhance the agent-patient conversations.
4. Communicating with Patients on Multiple Channels
Patients these days use a number of different platforms to communicate. These platforms include email, video chat, phone call, live chat, and social media. Businesses must provide customer service to their patients on all of the available platforms. This will allow the customer to choose a medium of his/her choice.
For instance, a dental patient may have difficulty speaking and hence he/she may choose to email the service provider. Healthcare call centers can use video chats to demonstrate a medical procedure that may be difficult to explain in words.
A health care call center should take care to maintain Electronic Health Records (HER) and update them regularly. This will give the agent the necessary access to patient information, and help them in developing a rapport with the client.
5. Being HIPAA Compliant
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) is a law established by the US federal government. It requires all healthcare providers and their business associates to secure Protected Health Information from being used without the patient’s consent or knowledge.
Healthcare call centers must ensure that they are HIPPA compliant. This will prevent expenditure on pricey settlements and corrective measures. Healthcare call center companies must undertake the following steps to avoid any security breaches:
- They must train their employees on the HIPPA rules and update them in case of a change.
- They should encrypt the entire data to prevent it from being transferred, handled, or shared
- They should have a privacy policy that prohibits the transfer of protected information.
How Do we We Assist You With Our Healthcare Call Center Services
ExpertCallers offers modern-day call center solutions to healthcare companies. Our experts work diligently to deliver risk-free results. Our process begins with Automatic Call Distribution (ACD). ACD assigns the call to the right operator. The level 1 support agent uses his/her expertise to provide resolutions to the patient. Level The level 2 support agent takes over the call in case the level 1 agent is unable to provide a satisfactory resolution. The agents collect the feedback from the caller, once the call ends. This helps us to evaluate the quality of the interaction and the customer satisfaction level.
Our 500-member strong team ensures that every patient call is answered. We collaborate with your team via phone calls, email, or text in providing emergency healthcare services. Our team makes sure that they make the most out of the knowledge transfer sessions. They ensure that they collect all the vital information regarding, insurance, billing, and payment options healthcare call center Our team provides 24×7 call center support to your patients. Our team is well versed in scheduling, modifying or cancelling appointments in you calendar management application. We also provide reminder services to ensure that you don’t miss any appointment. We are one of the few 100% HIPPA compliant healthcare call center companies and ensure complete data privacy.
Who Are We and Why Are We Considered as An Industry Authority?
ExpertCallers has 12 years of Experience in providing call center services to companies globally. We have call centers operating in several parts of the world like Philippines, India, Columbia, Bolivia, and Kenya. Our healthcare call center provides 24×7 phone answering service, claims processing services, insurance verification services and appointment setting services. Unlike standard healthcare call center service providers, we are 100% HIPAA compliant, ensuring that there is no breach of patient privacy at any given time. The team also screens and validates the quality of the answers to ensure standards are met always.
Here’s How Companies Have Benefitted by Outsourcing Medical and Healthcare Call Center Services to ExpertCallers
Our physician answering services helped a US based hospital to efficiently manage patient visits, insurance forms and patient calls.
Our medical and healthcare call center services helped a medical product manufacturing company in successfully promoting their new product in the field of diabetology.