Scripps project goal: Access on customer terms
Scripps project goal: Access on customer terms
By Nancy Harkin, Senior Consultant
Superior Consultant Holdings Corp.
Southfield, MI
The future is today for Scripps Health in San Diego, a five-hospital system with a history of community and stakeholder responsiveness. Scripps is examining stakeholder access issues to determine how work process groups across the enterprise can further improve and streamline their people, process, and technology to empower agents at customer touch points.
Customer touch points in health care have grown to include Web sites, fax, e-mail, and regular mail in addition to traditional face-to-face and telephone contacts. Electronic commerce also is heavily influencing the dynamics of access in health care.
Communications-savvy customers are demanding to conduct business on their own terms, and successful health care access strategies will be the ones that handle customer contacts efficiently, winning customer loyalty for the long term. Due to multimedia contacts and consumer demands, the strategic positioning of consolidated contact centers has become a critical competitive factor in health care.
For providers like Scripps Health, the reasons for consolidating and enhancing internal contact centers are many:
• improve market presence;
• standardize branding for Scripps Health at multiple customer touch points and geographic sites;
• capitalize outreach into the community;
• respond to physician, patient, and employee service requirements;
• manage both inpatient and outpatient services and processes more efficiently.
Stakeholders are no longer willing to settle for the old health care model, wherein data are maintained in separate nonintegrated silos across the organization. This old model is particularly troubling because the required data are rarely available to customer service representatives at the point and time of initial customer contact. Therefore, first contact resolution becomes unlikely, and customer issues must be handled through multiple contacts crossing organizational data silos, resulting in low customer/stakeholder satisfaction.
As contact centers in health care move to expand handling of multiple media contacts, new work processes will be required. Most voice-only contact centers use queues to handle incoming calls, and agents process those calls singly, in order, with no overlap between calls. Blending inbound calls with outbound activities already has outmoded this model to some extent. New workflow processes in the customer-centric contact center may include:
• agents choosing contacts from a queue based on certain business rules instead of handling the contact with the longest time in queue;
• agents preempting a non-real-time contact in order to handle a real-time contact;
• agents processing multiple contacts in parallel (such as e-mail or chat);
• ability to assign "true blending" of skills and media types to agents on an individual basis;
• simultaneous multiple media interactions with the same customer (such as voice plus chat).
Typical health care contact centers use quality-of-service parameters such as service level, average speed to answer, calls in queue, calls offered, abandon rate, and agent occupancy in order to assess performance, and, consequently, to manage customer satisfaction. However, these traditional measures were designed primarily for phone calls and are not adequate to provide a true picture of multimedia contact. For example, the fact that e-mail has no abandonment rate does not imply that it is OK to queue e-mails indefinitely.
Vision of the future
Process changes and new technology will be enablers for the health care contact center of the future. Opportunities for reworking contact centers around customer touch points include:
• Consolidate isolated pockets of contact activity in the enterprise to make work flow across the organization more effectively, capitalize on legacy technology, and create economies of scale.
• Address training issues in customer service and provide a consistent customer experience at all geographic locations and through all media.
• Develop e-mail as a reliable transaction channel, in addition to inbound and outbound voice calls. Teach customers how to use this tool effectively and ensure that e-mail processes are standardized and responsive.
• Create Internet sites for customer service that provide comprehensive information access and the ability to initiate and monitor transactions. Tightly link the contact information from the Internet with other contact management systems in the contact center.
• Integrate voice and electronic transactions into a single workflow with integrated queues that allow work blending and load balancing of multiple media types.
• Create virtual centers that allow employees to choose work locations and that provide the organization with additional options for coping with staffing needs due to weather emergencies, unexpected loads, special events, and natural disasters.
• Use computer telephony integration (CTI) to provide personalized routing and work-object handling and to produce fully integrated reporting on both electronic and voice transactions. CTI can allow the passing of computer information screens from one contact site to another without customers needing to repeat any part of their captured information.
• Tightly integrate automatic call distribution and integrated voice response (IVR) systems to allow seamless transfers back and forth between IVR and agent-assisted service.
• Simplify voice response interactions to make them fast and easy to use, as well as standardizing voice response interactions to facilitate organizational branding.
• Remove dead-end voice mail and IVR loops that frustrate customers.
• Provide employees with the ability to access internal (intranet) and external (Internet) data rapidly and to execute transactions with an integrated desktop, empowering the agent to deliver excellent customer service the first time, every time.
• Develop contact management systems that integrate e-mail, fax, phone, and Internet transaction information into a comprehensive history of customer contact.
Today’s busy consumer is holding health care to a high customer service standard. Benchmarks for health care customer service are created not just by other health care entities, but also by banks, brokerage houses, and dot-com companies that provide the ultimate high-tech, high-touch stakeholder experience.
Scripps Health is moving rapidly to capitalize on best-of-breed practices across vertical markets. Scripps Health is committed to integrating people, process, and technology strategies for its multiple customer touch points, forging into the new millennium with fresh customer service approaches to most effectively serve its multiple constituencies.
(Editor’s note: Nancy Harkin is part of a five-person team from Superior working with ScrippsHealth on its customer contact center project. Look for project details and outcomes in the October issue of Hospital Access Management.)
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