Misplaced Calls and the Contact Center
A major challenge faced by modern healthcare contact centers revolves around managing misplaced calls. For instance, callers might end up at a scheduling center with a billing inquiry or reach out to a loved one only to end up in a provider’s clinic. How significant is this issue? According to data from Parlance customer insights, up to 30% of the total call volume in healthcare contact centers consists of calls that don’t belong, which are intended for other destinations or service lines.
The culprit is human nature. Many caregivers and patients engage with a healthcare organization on the phone. They typically resort to a quick online search and dial the first number that appears. This not only results in wasted energy towards navigation, but repercussions for each individual involved.
Repercussions
Misplaced calls bring more consequences than you might expect:
- Healthcare Consumers
Misplaced calls waste the consumer’s time. Callers are often forced to engage with an old-fashioned interactive voice response (IVR) that doesn’t have the options they need. When they finally get to a person, they often have to repeat themselves or be transferred elsewhere.
- Agents
Misplaced calls waste the agent’s time. Healthcare agents spend extensive time and resources triaging misplaced calls and connecting them to the appropriate resource. Meanwhile, calls that truly require agent assistance stack up in the call queue –creating longer hold times for callers.
- Operators
Misplaced calls make extra work for switchboard operators. Agents faced with calls that don’t belong will frequently just forward the caller back to the switchboard. Operators have a great deal of administrative responsibilities; this makes their jobs quite frantic and overwhelming.
- Managers
Misplaced calls prevent managers from making appropriate staffing and investment decisions. Managers rely on metrics, and numbers such as average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR) can be totally skewed by misplaced calls.
Solutions
So how can healthcare contact centers efficiently navigate misplaced calls to the appropriate destination? How can they ensure a seamless caller experience, no matter which line people dial? How can they relieve agents and operators from the burden of misdirected calls / calls that don’t belong?
Parlance solves the problem of misplaced calls by enabling healthcare consumers to use their voices to connect to the people, destinations, and services they need.
