(Originally published in
Healthcare Call Center Times in October 2020.)
Fall is right around the corner, and with COVID-19 cases on the rise in more than half of states, hospitals and health systems have neither the staff nor the resources to trace the contacts of every new case.
Contact tracing typically involves human call center agents who work with COVID-19 patients to identify anyone with whom they had close contact so the agent can call them. Now think about it, when was the last time you answered a call from unknown caller?
Whether it’s a recording in an unknown language, or a promise to get rich, or an offer for free solar panels, the volume of useless, intrusive noise has trained everyone to scrutinize every inbound call because phone calls that matter have increasingly become the minority.
According to some estimates, US mobile phone users were exposed to 48 billion robocalls in 2018, which means that every time the phone rings, there’s a 50 percent chance it’s a spam robocall.
Silence Unknown Callers
There are few viable solutions available for blocking 100% of these annoying intrusions, so the best option when that unknown phone number shows on the caller ID is to simply hit the decline button and move on with whatever you were doing.
Robocalls are essentially creating “anti-call center muscle memory” across the entire mobile phone user population. And that’s a problem for the healthcare industry.
Call centers have always been a big part of the healthcare patient experience. Challenges with being on hold, ineffective agents, and general customer dissatisfaction with call centers are well documented. But what about the outbound side?
Scale Up Digital Agents
The healthcare industry is investing heavily in engaging patients, and call centers are a big piece of that strategy. Outbound calling campaigns that are designed to help patients navigate their care, set appointments, take medicines, or check in after a visit are potentially important touch points. If people stop answering their phones, what happens? Email outreach is frequently intercepted by spam filters, secure messaging is clunky, and most patients don’t know how to log into their healthcare portals.
And, as contact tracing programs ramp up to avoid the spread of COVID-19, the challenges in reaching people by phone will likely render most of those programs ineffective.
Call centers have always been constrained by human capacity. When it comes to dealing with health care situations, historically there have not been a lot of viable automation options that blend a quality, well designed engagement experience with a high-scale system. Anybody that has received a robocall doctor’s appointment reminder knows how DIS-engaging that is.
Heavy investment in call center technology that’s focused on intelligent patient information and agent enablement is still key. But in cases where a call center is chartered with reaching out to patients as part of a multitude of patient engagement efforts, is there a new opportunity at hand?
Conversational Chatbots Role in Improving the Patient Experience
Conversational chatbots that communicate with people in an interactive way, such as text messaging, are finding their way into several industries. As we see more and more healthcare organizations adopting this type of technology, we’ll soon be able to see chatbots woven into the outbound call center approach. The bot could completely handle simple tasks, such as reminders and information gathering. Or, it could start on some of the more advanced workflows, such as monitoring care progression or providing drug background information in advance of a human to human interaction.
As they stand today, call center agents are premium level expenses when compared to a well-designed chatbot that can run 24x7x365. Imagine a call center not constrained by human capacity.
If an organization is tasked with contacting 30,000 individuals as part of a COVID-19 contact tracing program, is the answer really to hire an army of human agents to do that?
If the virtual dimension of a modern patient engagement strategy requires outreach and interaction with vast populations of patients, the answer isn’t to double the number of agents. Rather, you must find a way to make the ten agents you already have handle a 5x volume increase, with conversational chatbots conversing and engaging patients across a spectrum of workflows. And, the entire process would be in the medium that consumers increasingly prefer—text messaging on their phones.
The odds of reaching someone and helping them with their care can only increase.