Customer Context
Our client, a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, point-of-care mobile applications, and electronic health record (EHR) systems for small to medium-sized (SMB) physician practices and hospitals, supports over 100,000 providers and 100 million patients. Access Healthcare handles inbound customer service calls, customer complaints, general billing, and product walkthroughs related to network-enabled services for healthcare and point-of-care mobile apps.
Through our partnership, spanning over half a decade, we have continually adapted to the client’s evolving business needs and focused on delivering exceptional customer service adaptability, flexibility, outreach, and investment in the ongoing training of our front-line employees. In 2022, our call center teams embarked on a daunting yet welcome challenge of exceeding expectations (once again) to delight our customers and their end clients.
Challenges
Take a problem-solving-based approach to bring about holistic improvement in
Average handle time (AHT)
Customer experience and satisfaction scores
Improve resolution rate
Improve quality scores
Solutions
To resolve the daunting task of improving call center metrics, we realized that our teams across Operations, Service Quality, Learning & Development, and Human Resources must collaborate to build a scalable and institutionalized solution. Further, they must focus on creating the right culture and instilling the correct values to shift the focus from “response” to “resolution .”To achieve this, we set our sights on three main objectives:
Hiring Right: Refined our candidate selection process to improve language proficiency and comprehension testing at the recruitment stage to ensure we are hiring top talent. The focus of this initiative was to pre-empt any errors or gaps that could cause a break in communication, resulting in a negative interaction.
Training Right. Implemented creative, effective, and efficient training solutions in onboarding our new hires, utilizing immersive, practical, scenario-based, customer-focused, hands-on training to help drive speed-to-proficiency by maximizing resources and training time by delivering end-to-end hybrid skill training.
Coaching Right. Empowered our group leaders and quality coaches by providing them with a standard, structured and systematic coaching model they can utilize in each coaching interaction. The coaching model ensured consistency and efficiency in preparation, delivery, and follow-through to help the coaches deliver a consistent coaching experience that enables performance improvement and team member development.
Results
Through this multi-pronged approach of hiring, training, and developing the right talent, we were able to equip our customer service team with the skills, knowledge, and behaviors necessary to provide our clients with exemplary service to meet and exceed our client’s expectations.
Higher Quality and CSAT Scores.
Quality Scores significantly improved from 76.97% in 2020 to 85.40% in 2021 to 88.31% in 2022 YTD, an 1134 basis points increase.
CSAT improved from 2021’s 8.80 to 9.0 in 2022*
More Efficient Call and Chat Handling
Average Handle times and Average Speed of Answers for Chats showed improvement year-on-year.
Voice AHT improved from 20 minutes in 2020 to 18.4 minutes in 2021 (AHT sustained 18 minutes in 2022 YTD).
Improved Service Levels
We achieve higher service levels in both voice and chat queues due to more efficient handling of calls.
Average Handle Time (Mins)
Quality Scores
Conclusion
Delivering customer service at scale requires a high-performance team focusing on issue resolution and customer delight. Even during the COVID phase, where the client and its end customers faced challenges related to backlogs, delayed payment postings, and evolving Product enhancements, our team was relentless in its pursuit of excellence. Through 2023 and beyond, our team is focused on enhancing the customer experience while expanding coverage to 24/7 operations and supporting in-flight contact center technology transformation programs. We will continue to help the practices and clinicians within the client’s network save time and focus on delivering exceptional patient care by reducing technology issues and support time.