Coordinate with Marketing
The Call Center Should Be the First to Know, Not the Last
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.
Too many call center agents learn about the launch of their healthcare organization’s product, incentive, or promotion from callers, not management. I hope your operation is different, but I fear you, too, have found yourself in this unenviable situation.
The results are dismayed callers shaking their heads in frustrated disbelief, flustered agents fumbling through the calls while irritation bubbles inside, and a peeved call center manager scrambling to piece together the details, while simultaneously trying to educate staff on how to respond.
Marketing doesn’t intend to leave the call center out of the loop, yet it happens. And each time it occurs, a wall of distrust and animosity builds in the call center toward marketing.
And marketing—not knowing they dropped the ball—is angry at the unprepared call center for bungling their carefully constructed marketing initiative.
Establish an Interdepartmental Connection: Though you may be upset with marketing for their latest oversight, don’t take a confrontational approach. Instead adopt a cooperative mindset to seek your mutual benefit. Discuss ways to develop a standard communication channel.
One option might be a fixed, recurring meeting between marketing manager and call center manager, where the two sit down for marketing to talk about their projects. In doing so, the areas needing coordination will surface.
Another thought is for marketing to assign a call center liaison, who has the responsibility to look at every marketing project for possible call center application, be it direct or ancillary. Then communicate needed details to the call center.
Also invite marketing to tour your call center—preferably sitting with an agent to better understand the scope of their work. They will leave with a greater respect for the complexities of the call center, replacing a simple view of the job as “just talking on the phone—anyone can do that” with a more realistic appreciation.
Items to Consider: Sometimes your call center will be able to handle the work generated by a marketing campaign with no problem. Other times will require training. This could be on the new elements of the initiative or how to access an unfamiliar app or navigate a database.
You may also need to adjust your call center schedule on launch day and thereafter. This could require overtime, scaling back on nonessential tasks for a few days, or even hiring more staff.
If you need to hire staff for a marketing campaign but lack the needed time to fully train them, teach them only the skills needed for the marketing project, letting existing staff handle other communications. Then, once the campaign is over, consider completing their training for all other call types and communication needs.
Also have a candid discussion with marketing about launch dates, addressing contingencies should a mail piece drop early or if delivery delays occur.
The Outcome: The result of following these recommendations is your call center and marketing working together for your organization’s common good and your callers’ welfare.
Peter Lyle DeHaan is the publisher and editor of Medical Call Center News and AnswerStat. Read more in his latest book,Healthcare Call Center Essentials, as well as Sticky Customer Service.
Featured Sponsor: Pulsar360
Pulsar360 provides SIP Trunking and disaster recovery solutions for medical answering services. Pulsar360, Inc. has served the telecommunications requirements of SMB to enterprise business customers since 2001 and the medical call center industry since 2008.
Pulsar360 services over 170 medical-centric answering services, meeting their special requirements, which includes at no additional charge: 20 percent burstable SIP trunking; SIP trunking, toll free number, and national network redundancy; T38 faxing that meets HIPAA compliance regulations; carrier services; and an infinite number of automatic failover alternatives.
In addition, Pulsar360 offers hot-standby business continuity/disaster recovery solutions designed for medical call centers. If the call center’s premise system is down or cloud system is off-line, calls automatically failover and are delivered directly to operator desktops with calling party ID and customer name or account number. Also included are cloud-based IVR, multiple call queues, and skills-based routing when in failover mode.
With Pulsar’s SD-WAN offering they can provide QoS over the internet to their data centers. Their 24/7 internet quality of service monitoring and issue alerting, which includes scheduled VoIP quality tests with archived test results, insures they deliver the reliability to meet and exceed their customer’s expectations.
News
TriageLogic Publishes E-Book on RPM: While healthcare providers acknowledge the value of remote patient monitoring (RPM), many have found it difficult to set up a successful program. TriageLogic recently published an RPM e-book that outlines the common reasons why providers may experience setbacks with implementation, along with the steps they can take to overcome them.
Providers interested in creating a successful RPM program can download TriageLogic’s e-book. Those who wish to partner with TriageLogic’s outsourced RPM data review can contact them at 800-723-4290 or through their contact form.
MobiusVP Launch Patients-Count: Mobius Vendor Partners (MobiusVP) expands into the healthcare market with the launch of its latest product, Patients-Count®. Patients-Count is an online enterprise feedback management system tailored to the healthcare industry to capture, measure, and report patient and employee experience at each step of the care journey.
Patients-Count offers a customized survey platform that enables healthcare providers to measure not only episodes of care, but every step of the patient journey, including between-care episodes. It also features the strategic ability to capture and report the experience of all stakeholders, including family members and critical members of the care team to understand and improve the wholistic patient experience.
Watch a video of Patients-Count or visit mobiusvp.com/patientcount for more information.
Send us your healthcare call center articles and news for the next issue of Medical Call Center News.
A Thought for Today
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.” -Samuel Johnson