Evolving contact center operations is not easy, especially in healthcare.
With fragmented data, complex backend integrations, and strict compliance regulations, there’s a lot to consider.
Yet, as service leaders mull this over, staying on top of customer and patient contact volumes is proving tricky.
Indeed, last year, 16 US states received warnings from federal Medicaid officials over long wait times, which resulted in high abandon rates.
In each state, the average wait time exceeded 25 minutes, and hang-up rates reached 29 percent.
Thankfully, new Five9 research – which unpacks data from verified healthcare companies - has uncovered tried-and-tested efficiency hacks for such contact centers to follow.
Here are two excellent examples stripped from the study.
1. Take the First 30 Seconds from Every Call for Human Care Navigators
Every call that enters a healthcare contact center requires user authentication to maintain HIPAA compliance (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
While regulations are similar in other sectors, like financial services, authentication processes are typically even more grueling in healthcare. Why? Because there are often many people with the same name. Also, people often call on behalf of other family members.
Thankfully, AI and automation can streamline those processes. As Roni Jamesmeyer, Sr. Healthcare Product Marketing Manager at Five9, stated:
“On every single call, it takes 30 seconds to validate who you are with two or three pieces of information like a zip code, the last four digits of your social security number, date of birth, or whatever the primary care GP uses. Simplifying and automating these steps can save a lot of time.”
Contact centers can achieve this with a task-specific bot on the front-end of the IVR and digital channels. There, the bot can authenticate callers, understand their intent, and pass them through to the best-skilled representative, along with additional patient context.
That live agent – or human care navigator - may then dive into the crux of each conversation, cutting down handling times, reducing costs, and enhancing agent engagement.
2. Automate These Two Queries & Reduce Contact Volumes by 50+ percent
There are two core reasons that make up the bulk of all phone calls into a health system: managing appointments and getting prescriptions. Together, these typically comprise 50-70 percent of all voice interactions – according to the Five9 research.
Thankfully, simplifying these workflows is often straightforward via self-service mechanisms.
Of course, not all patient intents are easy to automate, but mechanizing queries related to these two core contact drivers – such as appointment confirmations, reschedules, and cancelations - can be.
Moreover, removing these more common calls from the contact mix lowers agent workloads and avoids the inevitable voicemail, which just requires double the work on the back-end to listen and respond. That’s time that staff simply doesn’t have – especially as brands factor in the time lag to return voicemail (likely hours later) and live agents have a frustrated patient to deal with, too.
After making this point, Jamesmeyer stated: “Healthcare is still in the basic stages of simplifying and offloading redundant calls.