Answering the phone and responding to inquiries are important to any healthcare practice, whether you manage a clinic, a doctor’s office, or a healthcare network. Healthcare call centers seem to be a fundamental part of many industries.
They support various inquiries, customer service, valuable outreach, and management support for day-to-day operations. To capture the attention of leads and retain patients, healthcare call centers must have a specific protocol, while also serving as an essential part of a practice’s marketing plan.
A solid foundation for patient engagement is built by providing both inbound and outbound communication that is centered around potential and current patient needs.
The patient experience includes connecting with the right healthcare provider, learning about the practice or clinic’s services, and scheduling an appointment. However, oftentimes patients describe their experience with healthcare call centers or patient coordinators as unsatisfactory.
They believe they do not demonstrate that the provider cares about their needs or has an open line of communication. If you have received complaints about bad customer service, but are unsure why your healthcare call center is having issues, read on to learn about what the problem may be and how to address it.
Lack of Compassionate Communication
When it comes to healthcare call center communication, a lack of compassion towards leads or patients on inbound or bound calls can be a huge issue for your healthcare brand.
It is common for practices to find it difficult to get the attention of their leads to turn them into patients. It could be a question of creating a hospitable environment and truly getting to know who you are talking to on the other end of the line.
Serving leads with straightforward answers, dates, times, and scheduling when they are not yet warmed up to the idea that your healthcare practice is the right fit for them can be a surefire way to lose potential clients.
Solution: Instead, make sure your healthcare call center takes time with each caller, to build rapport, develop a commonality, discuss their ailments, and then ask if they are interested in making an appointment.
Compassion is at the core of a healthcare brand and the best way to provide patients access to the right care. Patient care coordinators that connect to leads with compassion, understanding, and industry knowledge, will be the difference between leads that drop off the radar or convert into customers.
Focus less on call volume as a metric for your healthcare call center. Instead, emphasize the quality of leads and train your call center to take their time with each phone interaction. Train your agency to create quality call experiences for anyone on the other end by focusing more on customer satisfaction.
The better they become at genuine interactions, the easier it will be for potential patients to choose your healthcare brand over the competitors. This will lead them to feel understood, listened to, and have a positive interaction to reflect on.
Lack Of Integration In Your Healthcare Call Center
The quality of communication between leads, patients, and patient coordinators is not always the problem. Instead, the issue may lie with the lack of integrated technology that efficiently captures and utilizes information gained during individual conversations with leads or patients.
When your patient coordinators conduct their calls, do they tend to waste time searching through spreadsheets, documents, emails, and paper files to find the relevant information they are seeking? Do they ever mix up the most up-to-date information or have to confit with other agents in-person rather than online?
Without a CRM or salesforce integration capturing and retaining leads may become a difficult task when tracking, monitoring, and housing data. Your healthcare call center agents will have trouble capturing medical records, storing patient data, and retaining pertinent information divulged during patient communication.
Solution: Adopt a compatible software that will consolidate all information under one system such as Salesforce. This will allow your patient coordinators to have easy access to all organization information, patient data, and lead details. With a CRM, all your patient data can be organized and stored in one place, resolving the issues listed above.
For example, a Salesforce Health Cloud can drive your healthcare company forward. It includes patient acquisition tools that will track marketing, record-keeping for inbound calls, providing targeted useful patient information, and direct outreach tools.
NewGen is a healthcare marketing agency that has years of experience creating CRM integration and compatible network systems for healthcare brands to fully integrate the entirety of their business.
If you are looking for someone who can help streamline your healthcare call center operations contact NewGen today.
Lack of Brand Representation
If you often struggle with patient expectations, it’s essential to address this from the very first interaction that the public has with your healthcare brand. This starts with your healthcare call center interactions.
If your agents are not properly representing your brand, patients may walk into your organization with false expectations as to what the brand is all about.
Your brand helps distinguish your practice from competitors and sets the tone for the patient experience. Defining what sets your healthcare organization apart from others that are similar in services, is a way of getting ahead of your competitors.
If your patient care coordinators do not have the tools they need to distinguish your brand from others they will fall short when it comes to convincing leads to convert to patients.
Solution: Provide regular brand training and review sessions. Provide real-time updates to your patient coordinator regarding hours of operation, service changes, patient data, etc.
From the tone and diction that is brand appropriate to specific terms, keywords, and slogans, brand representation is crucial when presenting your practice to the public.
Providing comprehensive training and ongoing growth and development processes can contribute to better brand representation with your patient coordinators.
If you are looking for a healthcare marketing agency to help streamline your healthcare call center, or if you are looking for a new marketing strategy, NewGen can help.