Your Call Center Is a Key Part of the Customer Experience

Kristen Bishop, associate director at Brandtrust

Does your contact center delight patients and uphold the promise your health care organization makes to them? Or is it a pain point with long wait times, less than empathetic associates, and questions not answered?

Kristen Bishop, associate director at Brandtrust, a Chicago-based market research and branding strategy firm, recently discussed strategies to improve the customer contact center experience.

The key, she says, is to align the mission of the contact center with the broader mission of the organization’s brand. Often, when health care organizations merge, they find themselves with several disconnected contact centers.

She encouraged health care organizations to improve the contact center by:

• Developing a contact-center-specific brand promise and applying it to support the overarching brand
• Facilitating organization-wide empathy for those served and ideating from that empathic place, putting empathy before innovation
• Commissioning and engaging a cross-functional team to strategize and find solutions, as people will support what they help to build
• Better understanding how patients view customer experience and how it aligns with the brand
• Mapping patient experience with the contact center, not just from the viewpoint of the different touchpoints they encounter, but by their emotional state. This will offer perspective on the biggest emotional pain points to alleviate, and biggest points of delight to accentuate.

While customer experience has been widely studied, and many organizations do journey mapping, Bishop discussed the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of a patient’s interaction with a contact center, as people ultimately make decisions based on how it makes them feel.

Read more and learn how to put yourself in your patients’ shoes: Is Your Call Center Aligned with Your Brand Promise?

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President