Managing communication with patients is a key to the success of any healthcare business. Setting up a call center can help you provide holistic customer support, especially if you're operating in the healthcare sector.
Your patients expect you to deliver great customer support in a timely manner. Healthcare call centers are a must-have these days in any healthcare facility, patients are concerned about their health, they want to be answered, feel safe and relieved in no time.
According to a study by Solucient LLC, a healthcare information company based in Evanston, IL. The study was conducted on 1.9 million calls from 807,000 people at 11 hospital call centers, researchers concluded that callers represent a return on investment (ROI) of at least $3 in downstream revenue for every $1 the hospital spends on the call center.
This study demonstrated that having a call center for your healthcare can convert a patient into a paying service-seeking customer. Your call center is the front door of your business, most patients interact with a call center agent before they actually schedule an appointment. Having a professional call center system will increase your patient loyalty and satisfaction, and by extension your profits.
What Is a Call Center System?
A call center system is a complete and integrated center to help you efficiently manage and control inbound and outbound calls for your medical facility. It also offers insights on metrics to keep an eye on, in order to evaluate your call center agents’ performance, and improve customer satisfaction.
Read more on Call Center Systems and how to set up one.
What Are the Benefits of Having Healthcare Call Centers?
Although, it’s not common for small healthcare facilities to have a call center system. Marketing by the Numbers found that while 88% of hospitals with more than 400 beds have a call center, only 37% of hospitals with fewer than 200 beds have one.
Let’s say, for the sake of this article, that a medical facility -could be a hospital or chain of clinics- has 5 branches at different physical locations and >50 employees. The challenge executives face is they want to have a robust, easy-to-use and configure system in order to manage all your inbound or outbound communications. They want to have a unified communication system to connect all branches and simultaneously handle patient calls. Using the traditional landline telephony system, it costs the hospital a lot of money and time to upgrade their system to handle the increasing number of patients calling.
With easy-to-use, robust VoIP solutions from Yeastar, costs can be reduced by a significant percentage. With 21st century communication technology, Yeastar supports all your communication transformation with feature-rich systems that create high-end experience for your patients and enhance their loyalty.
If you have a healthcare facility and are wondering what benefits you’ll get out of using a call center system. Here’s a list of some benefits:
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Reduce Costs
Every business on the earth is looking for ways to reduce costs and maximize profits, executives evaluate options to balance cost versus efficiency. Yeastar all-in-one VoIP call center solution is your choice for this. Using VoIP is very cost-effective because it simply relies on the internet to connect. And who doesn’t use the internet these days?!
Not only is it cost-efficient in terms of set up, but also - and more importantly- the maintenance.
As a Yeastar official distributor in the K.S.A., Modn has success stories from top healthcare leaders in the KSA that were able to transform their way of communications using our tools and services.
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Increase Patient Loyalty
No doubt, there’s a direct correlation between great customer support and increased loyalty of your patients.
In his book, The Loyalty Effect, Frederick F. Reichheld demonstrated that “getting new customers is mostly more costly than retaining an existing one”. Loyal customers are your brand promoters, and the nice thing is you don't have to pay them. Your loyal patients are your valuable asset.
One way to increase your patients’ loyalty is through installing a call center for your healthcare to offer better customer support.
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Improve Patient Engagement and Satisfaction
With VoIP call center solutions, you can provide patients with instant information they need, such as hospital location, working hours, and available doctors through a technology like IVR. IVR technology enables the hospital to direct any call to the right department based on the data the caller has provided, this will save time and cut the long way on both the patient and the call center agent.
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Get Insights on Your Performance
Measure your performance month over month by keeping track of some metrics such as numbers of calls received, types of calls, whether it’s a reservation or raising an issue. This will help you provide consistent service.
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Improve Your Employee’s Daily Communication
Call center systems aren’t just for outbound communications, you can use it internally to connect your employees within the same or a different department. In addition, if multiple branches exist in different regions, you can bring all these branches together.
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Increase Return on Investment
As mentioned in the study above, it’s worth investing in setting up a call center system for your healthcare facility or hospital. This is a great opportunity you might want to consider the coming quarter.
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Scale on Your Demand
Every business looks for scalability in the tools and the technology they use. We at Modn have this in our mind to support your growth, you can scale your call center system with a few clicks.
In Conclusion
Setting up a call center system for a healthcare facility, whether it’s a hospital, infirmary or a private clinic, is the next step to take your communication to the next level and improve patient experience when reaching out to your hospital. Yeastar offers you a scalable cloud solution that runs totally on the cloud with no hardware installation in your office or healthcare.
References:
J. B. Strother, "Call Centers in Health Care: Effect on Patient Satisfaction," 2006 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, 2006, pp. 291-298, doi: 10.1109/IPCC.2006.320362.