Improving Patient Experience With Contact Centre Excellence

CallMiner discusses common patient experience challenges in healthcare contact centres and steps your organization can take to deliver better patient experiences.

Delivering exceptional patient care is as important as ever in today’s healthcare landscape. Although patients aren’t “customers,” per se, their experience matters.

Patient experience can determine whether a patient follows up with the same medical professional or looks elsewhere to meet their needs.

Healthcare call centres are often tasked with improving patient experience through quick and accurate responses and helpful agents.

Common Patient Experience Challenges in Healthcare Contact Centres

Healthcare contact centres face unique challenges, including:

Long Wait Times

Patients may need to wait several minutes to get their questions answered due to overwhelming contact centre call volumes. This can be frustrating for patients with limited time to call.

Medical Records Privacy

Ensuring the privacy and security of medical records is paramount in a healthcare contact centre to prevent breaches of privacy laws and patient trust.

Agents must understand and navigate complex regulations, like HIPAA, while managing patient inquiries thoroughly.

Gaps in Communication

Communication gaps between patients and providers can lead to misunderstandings about patient care, like treatment plans or follow-up appointments. Agents may be missing enough context to provide adequate help.

Complex Healthcare Questions

Patients might approach contact centres with complex questions about their healthcare. Agents lacking an understanding of medical terminology or insurance policies might not provide accurate or helpful information.

Patient Satisfaction Measurement

Patient experience is highly subjective, so gauging satisfaction can be difficult. Traditional metrics used to analyse customer feedback may not capture the nuances of patient care and experiences.

4 Tips For Improving Patient Experience Through Your Contact Centre

Patients have the right to receive quick and helpful assistance when they need it most, and the contact centre is often the driving force behind that assistance. Consider these tips to improve patient experience via the contact centre.

Get Comfortable With AI Tools

Modern contact centres adopt AI tools to help carry out and streamline tasks for agents and patients. Rather than shy away from implementing AI in the contact centre, it’s important to see AI as an assistant that can improve the overall patient experience.

AI tools and features that healthcare contact centres can use to enhance patient experience include:

• Sentiment analysis: Sentiment analysis helps contact centre agents detect emotions behind patient interactions, allowing them to gauge what kind of assistance to provide and tailor the conversation accordingly.
• Real-time call monitoring: This AI-driven feature monitors calls continuously to give agents guidance in real time, which provides more personalized interactions with patients.
• Optimized call routing: Optimized call routing sends calls to the right department or agent based on customer call history, patient needs, and other metrics, reducing potential wait times and call transfers.
• Virtual assistants: These chatbot-like tools are available 24/7 for patients to get answers to common questions.
• Automated follow-ups: AI can send patients reminders about appointment follow-ups, medication refills, or even post-call feedback to assist both patients and agents.

Make Agent Training a Consistent Routine

Agent training can boost agents’ confidence in their ability to assist patients. Maintaining a consistent training routine is best so that agents can adapt to evolving tools, comply with changing policies and laws, and meet the most top-of-mind patient needs.

Ongoing simulation-based training is excellent for this. It allows agents to simulate real patient scenarios and enhance their problem-solving and communication skills so they can do the same for real patient calls.

Offer Omnichannel Support

Omnichannel support offers support across numerous channels, including phone, social media, email, and live chat, giving patients more ways to contact a company in the ways they prefer.

If you implement omnichannel support, you’ll need to ensure you have a unified way to collect data across each channel, which allows more uniform patient care. An omnichannel customer experience platform can fulfil this need.

Provide Multiple Avenues For Patient Feedback

Give patients several ways to provide feedback however they feel comfortable, whether it’s via post-call surveys, by replying to emails, or by responding to social media posts.

Also, make sure patients can give feedback anonymously if they prefer, so they can feel more inclined to be completely honest in their responses.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Difference Between Patient Experience and Customer Service?

In terms of healthcare patients, customer service is the process of assisting a customer with basic tasks, like scheduling an appointment or greeting the patient at the front desk for an office visit.

Meanwhile, patient experience is the overall journey a patient has with healthcare providers, insurance companies, and others involved in their healthcare.

How Can Call Centres Reduce Patient Hold Times?

Call centres can reduce the time patients wait before their call is answered by offering self-service options, like chatbots or knowledge bases, for common questions, optimizing call routing to direct calls to the right place, and offering omnichannel service methods.

They can also let patients request a call back from an agent rather than waiting on the phone until an agent is available.

How Can Contact Centres Improve Patient Experience?

Contact centres can improve patient experience by ensuring their agents have consistent training and meet or exceed their goals, offering omnichannel support, collecting patient feedback from multiple channels, and implementing AI tools.

AI has multiple uses in a healthcare contact centre, including call routing optimization, real-time agent feedback, and sentiment analysis to determine patient satisfaction during an interaction.

Reviewed by: Jo Robinson