From an aging population to worldwide pandemics and workforce shortages, healthcare systems are facing many challenges. Thriving in such an environment will require providers to focus on delivering exceptional customer service with contact centers playing a vital role. However, for agents to fulfill their potential and help patients, healthcare contact centers must first overcome a range of challenges.
1. Overreliance on voice-based support
Patients use social media, messaging apps, email, and other digital channels to talk to their friends and family. They expect the same level of convenience when dealing with their health. But many healthcare institutions are telephony-centric, with almost half of them not using digital communication tools. Not only is this a bad customer experience, it’s also expensive. The average cost of a customer service phone call is between $6 and $25, while a live chat session costs around $5 as agents can handle multiple inquiries.
2. Lack of a unified communication solution
Even when healthcare contact centers offer support across digital channels, many of their agents have to keep switching between various applications when interacting with patients. They lack a unified solution that would allow them to chat, reply to emails, respond to social media, and take calls from a single interface. This leaves agents less productive and frustrated.
3. Insufficient reporting and analytics capabilities
Inefficient legacy tools and on-premise solutions lead to other problems as well. For instance, teams will suffer from limited reporting and analytics capabilities. Instead of using advanced technologies to collect data, track trends, spot problems, and take corrective actions, management will have to rely on outdated KPIs and parameters.
4. No holistic view of a patient
Delivering outstanding patient experiences requires agents having access to comprehensive caller profiles. But this is often not the case. And without reviewing the history of patient interactions through various touchpoints such as email, chat, social media, and phone, agents won’t be able to provide the CX patients are seeking.
5. A high turnover rate of staff
All of the above inefficiencies are contributing factors in the difficulty to recruit and retain contact center staff. The current pandemic has pushed contact centers to a remote / work from home environment which has actually helped with recruitment. However, contact centers must have the correct solutions in place to accommodate remote work as well as enable agents to be engaged with patients.
Move to the cloud
The healthcare landscape is becoming more complex and providers have to innovate to thrive in such an environment. That first step is by moving from on-premise systems to more flexible, cloud-based technology that can deliver a truly connected customer experience. This way healthcare contact centers can engage with their patients by any medium and rely on data-driven reporting to deliver a competitive edge.
If you’d like to learn more about a cloud-based contact center solution, including how Leap Connect can quickly and cost-effectively support your remote workers and home-based agents, email us at ccaas@leap.tel.
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