We are all familiar with the concept of call or contact centers. Whether reaching out to your mobile service provider, an internet company, or a retail hotline, these centers have become integral to daily life. They offer the convenience of speaking with a knowledgeable professional, helping to resolve issues efficiently.
Leading companies increasingly leverage advanced technologies in their contact centers to enhance efficiency and profitability. For example, in 2008, only 2.2% of global call centers were cloud-based. By 2017, this figure had surged to 62%, reflecting the rapid adoption of more agile and scalable solutions. Today, an extensive range of services and problem-solving capabilities are accessible over the phone.
The healthcare industry is no exception to this trend. Medical call centers are increasingly vital in inpatient service and support. Let’s delve deeper into the significance and operation of contact centers within medical organizations.
Medical call centers are special offices or departments for managing and processing incoming or outgoing client or user calls. Contact centers perform based on a specialized technical foundation. Communication channels can be established via the Internet, regular landline, IP telephony, or special instant messaging solutions.
The well-adjusted performance of such a center can dramatically boost online sales, improve the company's reputation among loyal customers, and expand service market niches through surveys, data collection, and marketing studies.
Modern advanced technologies have covered numerous business and human activity fields, including medicine. Healthcare call center services are among the most efficient ways to gather and fulfill patient requests. Healthcare organizations—private clinics, municipal hospitals, pharmacies, or private practices—increasingly hire phone dispatchers. Depending on the scale and specialization of the organization, individual employees or a whole staff of experts can be employed to provide 24/7 support.
The main use of medical call center services is helping hospitals deal with huge inflows of incoming patient calls. This is a pretty serious and painful aspect of their operation. Register offices at regular hospitals have to process hundreds of requests on a daily basis. Booking appointments, specifying doctor schedules, and getting consultations are all regular patient questions to deal with.
In most cases, patients cannot use time delays and line-to-line runarounds with their questions. They must be aided in the shortest terms possible without taking too much of the doctor’s time. That’s why prompt processing of calls is necessary here. Remember that, according to statistics, medical organizations’ clients spend 2.25 seconds waiting for the answer on average. In contrast, customers in the field of finance can wait up to 3.24 seconds.
As you may have already understood, properly organizing a healthcare call center is crucial. The major aspects to focus on here are the speed, expertise, and overall quality of processing calls. Contact center employees must be attentive and good-willed and have a good medical background.
We can highlight the following major functions of such a contact center:
Apart from everything else, medical call centers can also fulfill a range of other useful responsibilities. Operators can notify clients about special offers, discounts, and such with the help of an auto-dial. Automated notifications are the best way to provide clients with emergency and highly relevant information, boosting their loyalty to your service in the long run.
As in any other field, there are certain specific aspects of healthcare. As for contact center specialists, everything matters in their line of work — tone of voice, types of advice, elaborative questions, clarifications, etc. Clients may be nasty and act distastefully from the get-go. But they must receive the same quality of services as all others do while being subjected to special techniques of regulating conflicts over the phone (of which there are many).
One of Simply Contact’s clients is a company that arranges non-emergency patient transport in the UK, and communication with patients is very different from that in any other sphere. When we speak with elderly patients or patients who do not speak English well, we adjust our communication so they feel heard and understood. We use a calm tone, talk slower, and stop more often to make sure everything is clear.
Among other healthcare contact center best practices we follow is not repeating the same question again and again. Instead, we say it in a different way. Medical words can be confusing, so we replace them with simple language. We give the information step by step and ask if the person understands before we continue.
For patients who are not native speakers, we avoid idioms or very technical words. We use short and clear sentences and when possible, ask questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no.”
We already know what a call center is and how it stands out in healthcare. If you need one in your healthcare company, you can go for the two major types of such facilities:
A corporate contact center is an in-house department in an organization that handles remote client interactions. It isn’t simple to implement a dedicated phone support department. Thorough analytics, calculation of hardware-software expenses, costs to hire specialists, and rent and maintain the working space are required, among other things. When it comes to medicine, you also need proper education, expertise, and special phone conversation scripts.
Having a call center that corresponds with the above at your side, you will be able to:
Interested in enhancing your customer support through outsourcing? Explore our range of services and see how Simply Contact can provide the perfect solution for your needs.
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An outsourcing call center, in turn, is a more cost-efficient and less effort-intensive way to get your company a full-blown support team without forming any in-house department and hiring more staff. You just hire an external healthcare customer service outsourcing provider that takes up all the contact center responsibilities under your command for the time you pay for their services.
Working with a third-party medical call center organization means you get a team that is fully equipped to deliver healthcare customer support. They handle processes, compliance, and the introduction of the latest AI tools, figuring out how to integrate new technology into operations so you don’t have to. This allows you to maintain focus on your core business without disruption.
Surely, an outsourced call center has many benefits. However, implementing an in-house contact center, as cumbersome as it gets, may still be a priority for most large-scale organizations. In this matter, all the pros and cons should be considered.
| Function | In-house call center | Outsourcing call center |
| Info support | Efficiently handled with quality education beforehand. | Experienced personnel that is trained to clarify any niche questions from the get-go. |
| Deep medical knowledge-based consultation | Well handled; a support employee can always turn to a medical specialist. | Experienced personnel who is trained to clarify any niche questions from the get-go. |
| Client focus — database interaction, knowledge of special offers, work with loyal clients & specific requests | Adequately handled, but the primary goal is to receive & process calls. | Specialized software helps outsourced agents efficiently work with the database, specifying individual client data. |
| Business promotion | It is not a regular function when it comes to the in-house support personnel responsibilities. | Specialized software for an automated newsletter, notifications, & auto-dial for regularly informing clients about new services, special offers, etc. |
A healthcare contact center is a unique and specialized operation. Expert guidance is essential to implement it properly. Such a structure should operate with precision—like a Swiss watch—while maintaining the high reputation of your healthcare establishment. No reputable clinic can afford to overlook the importance of client support.
As with any business, the focus should be on increasing profitability, reducing costs, and delivering the highest quality of service to achieve success. The personnel at medical call centers must be well-trained, knowledgeable about medical topics, and pleasant to communicate with.
Ensuring all these factors are in place will help you build and maintain long-term, trust-based relationships with your clients and patients.
Contact us and let Simply Contact assist you in building an efficient and trustworthy customer support solution for your healthcare establishment.
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