(Originally published in
Healthcare Call Center Times in September 2020.)
MCFARLAND, WI—In past issues of this publication, we have periodically discussed the process of acquiring and implementing new technology and software. This has been from the perspective of call center leadership describing new additions into their call center and how they have been actualized. It has also been discussed from the consulting end, providing recommendations to call center leadership on how to shop for new technology and software. This story takes a look from the other side: how vendors perceive the process of working with prospective clients and how that has changed over the years.
Jill Bennett, Regional Sales Manager for the McFarland, Wisconsin-based 1Call, A Division of AMTELCO, has been on the vendor sales side of the healthcare call center professional for a number of years. She has seen a lot of change over the years in how prospective clients interact with vendors. “It’s like a second marriage where you are paying for the sins of the first marriage,” she says. “There is a lot more due diligence on their end. We welcome that as a vendor.”
One example of this is in the scope of work. “Now, they want to know from A to Z how everything is going to layout,” she says. “It used to be not so detailed. People want no surprises, ever.” Toward that end, one of the company’s clients went through a two year due diligence process.
“Buyers are more educated today, more literate,” she says. “For example, we advertise that we have scripting. It’s not enough to just say it; they want to see, touch or feel it.”
Bennett observes that once a sale is made these days, the implementation process is much more detailed than in the past. It is more thorough and more complete. As such, full implementation may take longer than in the past.
When investigating vendors for whatever your needs are in the call center, Bennett suggests digging deep. “Talk to references and visit them to see how they use it and how they manipulate it,” she says. Also, look at how much effort the vendor has made to keep up with the times (e.g. updates, new products, etc.).
Additionally, it is important to widen one’s horizons and “not only think about what the call center is doing today but what it will be doing in two to three years,” says Carol Zeek, Vice President of Sales for the Mesa, Arizona-based LVM Systems. It doesn’t make sense to buy less today if it has to be replaced in a few years, she adds.
Leann Delaney, Vice President of Sales and Client Growth for LVM Systems, adds that when evaluating purchasing decisions it is important to be aligned with the goals of their health system. These goals, in turn, are increasingly focused on the patient experience. “How can this tool promote the best customer experience?” she says. “That’s a question that should be asked every time.”
She is not seeing many financial decisions that are not tied to a budget year, whether it is January, July, October or some other month. In rare cases there are pieces of technology that are end of life and must be replaced. That can often happen outside of a budget cycle mandate.
Delaney says that one of the big changes she’s seen in her years with the company has been the focus on integration. “Eighteen years ago, the EMR was secondary to the needs of the call center,” she says. “You did not hear that the phone system needed to be tied to the software or the EMR tied into that.” Today there is a bigger focus on the ability of the contact center to integrate with other applications, to share information across platforms such as the EMR, lab and answering service, Zeek says.
What Delaney sees now is that IT is more involved in the call center than ever before and is driving a lot of the decisions and requirements (e.g. cloud versus server). And that means that today’s call center director must be fluent in conversations about the technology needed to operate call centers in a way that, in the past, they might not have had to be.
And, indeed they are rising to the challenge. Zeek says that up until a few years ago, 90 percent of her conversations were with call center managers and directors who were operating call centers that had a limited series of functions such as call to action for the marketing department and nurse triage. Today, she is still talking to many managers and directors but there has been a change. Now they are in charge of something that is so much bigger,” she says. “The call center director is (among other things) over the switchboard, triage, outbound calls, and care coordination in some cases.” That means a whole new layer of sophistication that comes into the conversation.
Zeek also talks to chief marketing officers and chief nursing officers, in recognition of the growing scope of the call center. Zeek is also having more conversations with chief medical officers than she used to have. They are primarily interested in the content of the nurse triage software and such things as how often it is updated. Many of them, though, already have some familiarity with Dr. Barton Schmitt and Dr. David Thompson, authors of the Schmitt-Thompson triage guidelines that the company uses.
Pat Reetz, SVP of Products and Markets at the Minneapolis-based Revation Systems came into the healthcare contact center world last year from the banking industry. In his time with Revation he has developed five principal points aimed at helping contact center professionals as they investigate vendors to serve their needs. One of his points is for contact center professionals to look at the vendor’s security first mindset to protect personal health information. Moving through a certification through HITRUST can be important. HITRUST is a leading data protection standards development and certification organization. Another area of importance is to look for vendors that can address all channels, something that five years ago would probably not have been the case.
Thirdly, he suggests that contact center leaders ask vendors “for complex use cases,” he says. Vendors may have cases that reveal their client’s name or they may withhold the client’s name at the client’s request. Reetz believes that both case study formats are equally valuable. Complex cases make the best sense because a contact center needs a solution that can move beyond the simple to one that can handle detailed scenarios if it is called on to do so.
His last two suggestions are to look for partners that are innovative and to understand the vendor’s customer success track. The latter includes understanding how happy their clients are and perhaps asking for the Net Promoter® score. This is a methodology that only asks one question and from the responses much can be learned. The question focuses on likelihood to recommend on a scale from 0 to 10. On this scale, a nine or 10 means the individual is a promoter, seven or eight is passive and 0-6 is a detractor. The score is generated by taking the percent of promoters minus the percent of detractors.
Additionally, he suggests asking for the renewal rate of those vendors that service their clients year in and year out (e.g. this would apply to software vendors but not vendors selling furniture to the contact center).