If you picture a call center as an office with dozens of employees crammed in cubicles, wearing headphones, and fielding incoming calls from irate customers, you aren’t necessarily wrong. These legacy systems certainly still exist in some business, but many business leaders are opting for more modern contact center solutions as part of their digital transformations.
Contact centers aren’t just for companies that sell products directly to customers, either. All sorts of organizations can benefit from an advanced contact center, including those in the healthcare industry. The ideal purpose of a cloud call center is to improve the customer experience, and healthcare workers have to realize that their patients and customers are one and the same.
In this case, customer expectations are that they’ll be treated both as customers and as patients at the appropriate times. Doctors and nurses need to treat them as patients, and contact center agents need to provide excellent customer service. Here are a few areas where contact center software can benefit your healthcare office.
Compliance
Naturally, HIPPA compliance is of utmost importance for all healthcare call centers. Patient information must be kept confidential at all times, and all your communication channels have to remain secure. This isn’t just limited to voice calls, of course. Texting and other forms of messaging have to be secure and confirmed as HIPPA compliant.
Let’s say you’re running an audiologist office that offers services to test hearing, fit hearing aids, and provide tinnitus treatments. It’s crucial that all your lines are secure so confidential patient information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Whenever images like x-rays, patient receipts, or test results are attached to a message and transmitted, it needs to be on a secure messaging service and sent only to the intended recipient. Maintaining HIPPA compliance also helps to improve message accountability.
A cloud service provider can help make sure all your new technologies are fully secure and compliant, so you can focus solely on your customer needs.
Convenience
It’s hard to overstate the convenience of an omnichannel contact center. It opens up options for patients to contact your office using digital channels like text, email, SMS, webchat, live chat, or even a mobile app. This can be incredibly useful for distance services like an online hearing test.
With a true omnichannel solution, customers can even switch communication methods if needed all while staying in contact with the same healthcare expert for a truly seamless experience. Intelligent routing options also waste no time connecting patients with the right expert for their concerns. You can even set up chatbots on your website to begin helping patients immediately.
Thanks to the omnichannel approach, approved doctors can even receive messages from patients on the go, which greatly improves patient engagement and enhances the customer journey as a whole.
Efficiency
An omnichannel contact center solution is good for more than your patients. It also helps boost agent productivity. Now your healthcare experts will be able to keep track of all conversations across all digital channels thanks to a simple unified agent desktop. Not only that, but they’ll be able to pull relevant customer data from one convenient source. In the case of healthcare offices, this will be demographic data rather than private patient data.
Perhaps best of all, the omnichannel platform may be able to help you connect previously disparate systems. Cloud integration means your contact center software can easily integrate with programs you’re already running like Salesforce, Zendesk, and many more.
The role of the call center in healthcare has always been important, and it will only become more so as technological advancements continue to provide more ways to better serve customers.
