Healthcare centers and medical practitioners are utilizing call centers to help elevate their quality of service. It's not enough to just use a call center, though, you need to regularly analyze metrics to ensure your level of service is consistently improving.

Learn how using a healthcare call center can help to improve patient relationships and retention, along with the important healthcare call center metrics you need to track and analyze.

What Are Healthcare Call Centers?

When a patient calls a healthcare provider or medical office, the last thing they want is to be put on hold or deal with an unhelpful receptionist. Healthcare call centers exist to help improve patient relationships while improving your bottom line.

Call centers can either be entirely outsourced or integrated within your in-house staff. Typically, you’ll be using an outsourced third-party provider to help reduce administrative burden.

A healthcare call center will be uniquely qualified to help you provide things like:

  • Quickly respond to patient needs and questions
  • The ability to always create a positive experience with your patients
  • Improved patient retention and faster scheduling
  • Built-in analytics and tracking to improve the level of service
  • Free up your existing staff to focus on their jobs

Important Healthcare Call Center Metrics

Simply using a healthcare call center won’t solve all of your problems. There are certain quality metrics in healthcare you'll need your agents to adhere to. This will help you elevate your quality of service over time and improve overall patient satisfaction.

Here are a few of the biggest healthcare call center metrics you’ll want to track:

  • First-Call Resolution: Probably the most important healthcare call center metric is a first-call resolution (FCR). This metric deals with the ability of your call center agent to resolve an issue right away, without the need to be transferred or require a follow-up call.
  • However, this metric needs to be validated on the end of the customer. They need to report the resolution, instead of this being assumed by your call center agent.
  • Call Agent Efficiency: This call center metric relates to the speed and effectiveness of your agents, from answering the phone to call completion. Your patients don’t want to be on the phone forever, so having properly trained agents can help to reduce overall call time.
  • However, call time shouldn’t be sacrificed for things like maintaining patient privacy and ensuring all of their needs are met.
  • Agent Response Time: Response time is a valuable metric that’ll tell you how long your patients are on the line before talking to a service representative. This metric has a correlation to the overall satisfaction of your patients.
  • You’ll want this number to be as low as possible. If this number is too high, then you might need to bring on additional agents or update protocols to ensure a more efficient call answering process.
  • Customer Satisfaction Rates: Customer satisfaction is usually reported by your patients themselves. This can be achieved through patient surveys or even quality-based questions at the end of a call.
  • Ideally, you’ll want every phone call to end with a satisfied customer. This might be impossible to achieve, but it’s something to aim for.
  • Customer Retention Rates: Improving your retention rate will have a huge impact on your bottom line, and it starts with the first phone call. With a quality call center, you should see an improvement in your retention rate and a reduction in overall patient churn rate.

Boost Your Bottom Line With the Right Tools

We live in a data-centric world. Obtaining data is useful, but you’ll need to analyze and implement these figures to actually get results. Here are the metrics you'll want to keep an eye on in order of importance:

  • First-call resolution
  • Customer satisfaction rates
  • Customer retention rates
  • Agent response time
  • Agent efficiency

Tracking the right quality metrics in healthcare will make or break your call center. Keep the above metrics in mind as you evaluate your agents and the success of your healthcare call center.

When it comes to healthcare, 8x8 provides reliable and compliant cloud solutions at a demanding level rarely seen by other cloud providers. Don't take your chances with a subpar cloud-based telecom system. Call 1-844-468-4521 or fill out the form below to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.

RELATED TOPICS

Effects of Poor Communication in Healthcare

Healthcare Call Center Best Practices

HIPAA Compliant Fax

Communications Solutions for Healthcare