Is Your Call Center Creating Loyal Customers?
// By Marcia Simon, APR //
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.
Rachel Donovan, managing director, enterprise marketing strategy, Nemours Children’s Health System
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.
Optimizing the call center experience was among the topics discussed during the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Virtual Summit in August. Here are some highlights from one presentation, “Call Centers: Unifying the Front Door.” Donovan presented with Ken D’Andrea, AVP, Patient Access Centers at MedStar Health; and David Cerino, CEO of Envera Health.