How can Healthcare Providers Transform their Contact Center to be the Experience Hub for their Brand?

In response to the digitally-empowered healthcare consumer we see today, healthcare players must provide the type of experience consumers see in other industries: a single point of contact, simplified operating model and workflows, and next generation technologies. Patients are increasingly frustrated navigating their health care journey, calling multiple phone numbers and experiencing highly fragmented experiences to schedule an appointment, pay a bill, or request a medication refill. This stands in contrast to our clients across other industries and sectors, who have captured value and improved the customer experience by streamlining contact center operations, making it?simpler and faster to resolve multiple customer issues at once.?

Our provider clients are looking for opportunities to streamline the patient experience, improve cost effectiveness, adopt digital technologies, and respond to the tight labor market. Centralizing contact center operations has the potential to support all of these goals. Contact center operating models and capabilities can improve the management of contacts from their patients – both by reducing costs and by improving the patient experience.

High Level Experience / Operating Model:

To deliver an optimal customer experience, providers need to focus on the following:

Single point of entry – The organization has one number to call.

Strategic routing - Patient interact with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to route them to the right agents who can address a range of questions, allowing patients to resolve multiple issues at once.

Standardized processes - A seamless customer experience can be enabled by equipping agents with consistent processes and tools, eliminating the need for agents to navigate multiple systems and workflows to complete simple tasks.

Recognizing high value engagement touchpoints – These should be consolidated into one model to remove duplicative services, leverage a common platform, and be consistent with processes for a health system. These processes should include primary and specialty care appointment scheduling, front end revenue cycle, care triage, pharmacy and benefits, virtual health, chronic disease management, referral and pre-surgical support services, discharge planning, and care follow-up.

Intentional outreach - Provider organizations should assess their marketing functionalities to enhance outreach to and knowledge amongst patients.

The adoption of a digital front door will act as a driver for self-service capabilities. The ecosystem today is characterized by hospitals and physicians operating separately from health plans, pharmaceutical manufacturers, or medical device companies. With the rise in empowered consumers and interoperable data, new business models and enhanced collaboration across the ecosystem, both from current players and new entrants, is expected. Given self-service is less effective as a siloed capability, the growth of self-service will naturally help dissolve internal siloes, connecting operations in ways that enable more coherent, connected customer journeys. Organizations should understand the important balance between omnichannel service integration and right-channel service efficiency to meet patients where they are and meet evolving consumer demands for a more personalized patient experience.

Potential Benefits

The shift from a call center to a digitally enabled, centralized contact center offers significant benefits to providers including:

Reduce administrative costs

• Drive down overall costs to serve and schedule through economies of scale
• Streamline non-clinical, patient-facing interactions
• Optimize clinic front desk management (e.g., reduce duplicative front desk work)
• Automate highly repetitive, low complexity tasks through self-service and AI
• Reduce technology cost of ownership

Increase revenue

• Expand patient access
• Improve schedule fill rate (e.g., physician and mid-level provider (NP, etc.) utilization)
• Increase retention rate through enhanced referral management practices
• Streamline patient throughput
• Operational efficiency

Improve patient experience

• Implement Care Management and Service integration
• Offer a more personalized experience and “one-stop-shop” for patients

Opportunities to expand

• Drive expansion of in-house pharmacy business
• Scale virtual health visits and in person visits

Things that have to be true / how to get started / the basics

To get started, we recommend providers take the following steps:

Evaluate patient experience across all touchpoints – First, providers must align on their organization’s definition and scope of services for the contact center. This starts by understanding the holistic customer journey today, identifying key pain points, and developing a set of guiding principles to shape the future vision and scope of the contact center. With health care consumer demands continuously increasing, providers can exceed expectations by shifting from a simple scheduling center to a holistic experience hub, utilizing a patient-centric vision to lead the way.

Determine optimal channels and routing based on complexity – Next, organizations must think broadly about patient interaction types to determine the most optimal method to serve patients. Looking at a contact center through the lens of a patient, consumers expect their time to be utilized efficiently and have a customized experience through their preferred channel. Provider organizations can start by identifying the full inventory of call types and associated level of complexity to determine future state self-service capabilities, optimal channels to right-channel patients, and routing requirements to meet the patient’s needs.

Identify the people, process, and technology capabilities needed to support a transformed patient experience hub - One of the key steps in rethinking the provider contact center is to assess people, process, and technology capabilities and identify gaps based on their future need.

• People: Contact center transformations often require operating model and organizational structure changes to meet patient needs. A strong governance model should be implemented to drive decisioning and establish buy-in across the organization. Integration between providers, clinic staff, and contact center operations is critical for success.
• Process: To transform the contact center to a patient experience hub that is scalable across the provider organization, streamlined processes are necessary. Start with standardizing low-complexity processes, such as primary care scheduling or medication refills.
• Technology: Provider organizations must modernize their contact center technologies to meet customer needs. Four key accelerators include: migrating contact center and telephony stack to a cloud-based platform, implementing artificial intelligence in the IVR to automate low-effort use cases, using data to personalize experiences, and adopting omni-channel to allow customers to seamlessly switch channels.

Conclusion

The above considerations are challenging and often daunting since it truly impacts the entire organization and is transformational to the operations. Change management starts with agreement to the vision, a solid value proposition and return on investments, buy-in from the physician enterprise, and most importantly, a program built around the consumer for meeting their needs.? Utilizing the contact center as a strategic asset to acquire, serve, and support the patient will enable engagement and experience needed to drive to better outcomes.