Why Consistency at Your Call Center Is so Important

Rachel Donovan, managing director, enterprise marketing strategy, Nemours Children’s Health System

Google is often the place people look first when seeking health information online. Assuming your health care system has done all the right things to optimize discoverability, the patient’s next step is to access care, most often by making a phone call.

That first impression determines the course for a potentially long-term relationship.

For a patient, the first human experience can make the difference between scheduling an appointment or becoming a dissatisfied consumer.

Whether it’s a prospective patient, an unhappy customer, or a current patient looking for an appointment or follow-up information, centralized call centers keep complex systems with multiple care settings running efficiently, with consistency that does not exist when individual facilities and practices have their own way of doing things. A call center connected to a centralized source of information like the CRM or EMR (or both) makes the patient experience that much more seamless.

Otherwise, the experience can be “consistently inconsistent,” according to Rachel Donovan, managing director, enterprise marketing strategy at Nemours Children’s Health System, a dedicated pediatric system with 80 care centers serving patients in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Donovan joined Nemours last year and found that the structure of the organization was highly distributed, and the patient pathway decentralized. Individual practices or care settings followed their own patient contact protocols. “When these patients call, who is answering? Who’s going to call them back? What’s that timeline?” asks Donovan.

When marketing spends money to acquire patients, figuring out what happens when those consumers contact the organization is key to learning how to optimize the experience and maximize ROI. “You need to start understanding what those variables are,” says Donovan.

Learn more: Is Your Call Center Creating Loyal Customers?

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President