(This article was originally published in Healthcare Call Center Times in January 2021.)
HOUSTON, TX—When Martin Wortley moved over from managing ambulatory clinics to the Customer Care Contact Center at Texas Children’s Hospital about two years ago, one of his areas of responsibility was call quality. Wortley, who is an Assistant Director in the contact center, knew that there needed to be improvement to call quality. Each of the 60-65 agents in the contact center had 10 random calls every month evaluated on a number of items.
Among the items included were: call opening, call validation, discovery, insurance verification, service behavior, recap and call closing. The goal was 90 percent completion and the contact center was averaging 80 percent. Bringing that percentage up to the goal involved taking a variety of steps. One was Wortley and his assistant director counterpart in the contact center meeting with all managers and supervisors. Another step was one-on-one meetings between supervisors and each agent under their supervision and one on one meetings between supervisors and managers. These meetings tightened up the communications around the standards that each member of the team was expected to achieve. “We also did accountability guidelines,” he says. “We needed to do that for consistency. We could not have a supervisor write up one of their employees for something that another supervisor didn’t feel needed to be written up.”
An electronic dashboard was also constructed for the contact center. This tighter attention to call quality paid off. As of spring 2020, the contact center had met the 90 percent goal eight out of the prior nine months. Two other initiatives have been undertaken that impact the quality of service within the contact center. One was to improve adherence to breaks and lunch schedules. The goal was 90 percent, the reality was 80 percent. As of spring 2020, the contact center had improved this metric to exceed 90 percent for each of the prior nine months.
Another quality goal was to decrease the number of times that a caller had to be put on hold while the agent gathered the relevant information. The contact center’s goal was 10 percent. In reality, the percentage was closer to 8 percent, but with a consistent effort for agents to have what they needed within their grasp they were able to reduce this to 5-6 percent of callers having to be put on hold.
Scheduling Templates
One of Wortley’s responsibilities is to build the algorithms for contact center agents who handle scheduling and registration for outpatient appointments at the hospital’s medical group and also ancillary services. He also builds them for families to use in online scheduling. One of the intricacies of the algorithms he’s designed is related to the nature of much of the subspecialty care that happens. Because the focus of subspecialty work can be quite specific, there are slots created for these appointments, but if not used the slots can go back to general visits.
A perfect example of this, Wortley says, “is a neurologist who specializes in seizures. The algorithms will schedule an appointment with him as a seizure visit type. If a visit is not used within three to five business days out, then it can be flipped to a general visit type.” This is done because, after all, the neurologist is trained to handle all different types within this specialty.
However, the decision to flip from a subspecialist visit to a general visit can become intricate within each area, with some wanting to do it in the three day window while others might want to do it with a five day window.
In his work with the online scheduling application, the difference from the traditional contact center is “that we do not want to ask too many questions,” he says. “We have our sweet spot, limited to no more than five questions online. More than that, they might just pick up the phone to call.”
The contact center has been working to put the five questions limit in place for the live agents as well. One way they are doing this is through integrating with the patient’s medical record. So, for example, instead of having to ask the parent if the child had been seen in their office in the last three years, that information automatically comes up—one less question to ask.