Specifics of Implementing Medical Call Centers

Updated: 24.09.2024

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 are increasingly leveraging advanced technologies in their contact centers to enhance both 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. Contact centers in healthcare settings are playing an increasingly vital role in patient service and support. Let’s delve deeper into the significance and operation of contact centers within healthcare establishments.

What Is a Medical Call Center?

A call center is a special office or department for managing and processing incoming or outgoing client or user calls. Contact centers perform based on the specialized technical foundation. Communication channels can be established via the Internet, regular landline, IP telephony, or special immediate messaging solutions.

The well-adjusted performance of such a center can give a dramatic boost to online sales, improve the company's reputation among loyal customers, and expand service market niches due to surveys, data collection, and marketing studies.

Call Centers for Medical Facilities

Modern advanced technologies have covered numerous fields of business and human activity, including medicine. Healthcare call center services are among the most efficient ways to gather and fulfill patient requests. Healthcare organizations - be it a private clinic, municipal hospital, pharmacy, or private practice - tend to increasingly hire phone dispatchers. Depending on the scale and specialization of the organization, individual employees or a whole staff of experts for providing 24/7 support can be hired.

The main use of medical call center services is in helping hospitals out 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, getting consultations - all those are 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 simply necessary here. Keep in mind, also, that, according to statistics, medical organizations’ clients tend to spend 2.25 seconds waiting for the answer on average, whereas customers in the field of finances can wait up to 3.24 seconds.

Healthcare Contact Center Specifics

As you may have already understood, it is crucial to properly organize a healthcare call center. The major aspects to focus on here are the speed, expertise, and overall quality of processing calls. Contact center employees must be not only attentive and good-willed but also have a good medical background.

We can highlight the following major functions of such a contact center:

• Providing quality info support for existing & potential clients in various questions (schedule clarifications, appointments, description of services, pricing, special offers, etc.);
• Processing of complaints & wishes as to the overall establishment performance;
• Quality assurance & indication of the level of client satisfaction;
• Informing patients about any service shifts & changes as well as about relevant news related to the healthcare establishment.

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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 as a whole are the best way to provide clients with emergency and highly-relevant info, boosting their loyalty towards 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 a bunch).

Types of Call Centers

We already know what a call center is and how it stands out in the healthcare field. If you need one in your healthcare company, you can go for the two major types of such support providing facility:

• Corporate or in-house call center;
• Outsourcing call center.

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, rent and maintain the working space are required among other things. When it comes to medicine, you also need proper education and expertise as well as special phone conversation scripts.

Having a call center that corresponds with the above at your side, you will be able to:

• Properly receive & process requests & other information;
• Analyze healthcare call center metrics
• Gather lots of useful statistics;
• Reduce the number of lost clients.

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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 employees. You just hire a specialized service provider that takes up all the contact center responsibilities under your command for the time you pay for their services.

In such a way, you simply cooperate with an outsourcing provider that already has everything it needs to provide the support services you need and specializes narrowly in customer service in the healthcare industry. It is a good way to go if you don’t want to hinder any of your in-house processes in a bit and continue working without shifting focus.

Surely, an outsourced call center has lots of benefits to it. The implementation of an in-house contact center, however, 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.

Comparative Pros & Cons

Summary

A medical contact center is a unique and specialized operation. To properly implement one, expert guidance is essential. 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 handling calls 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.

Need help setting up a top-notch medical contact center? Contact us and let Simply Contact assist you in building an efficient and trustworthy customer support solution for your healthcare establishment.