Workforce Management Featured Article
Optimizing Workforce Management for Medical Contact Centers
Most contact centers are in the business of dealing with people, whether it’s customers of retail goods, insurance or financial services customers, or business-to-business representatives. In medical contact centers, agents make it their business to deal with people about people: the transactions are often more personalized and urgent than in any other kind of support industry. Medical contact centers are often handling higher-stakes crises than support centers that handle retail or b-to-b interests. Emotions run high among callers, and complex matters may arise at any time of day.
Workforce management is extra-critical in such an environment. Customer service at medical contact centers is often determined by forecasting, and forecasting is often determined by data, according to Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert). Today, the way medical care is provided is changing. As a result, medical contact center business needs to change, as well.
“Sometimes in medicine a holistic approach is favored in patient care,” wrote Ciarlo. “The same can be said for a healthier medical contact center. Numbers, whether they are good or bad, do not happen in a vacuum. While it can be helpful to analyze different KPIs individually, it is better to review them in tandem as well, while also taking a closer look at the conditions under which they are generated.”
While all key performance indicators (KPIs) are interdependent and related in some way, this is doubly true for healthcare. It’s therefore important to examine how your metrics are related and consider what the quality implications might be. Common KPIs such as average handle time (AHT) may be revealing deeper insight into operations, according to Ciarlo.
“Is AHT better in the morning than overnight? Is that just a result of less calls coming in? Perhaps, but you may also have fewer agents working in the wee hours as well, so the answer may not be that simple,” he wrote. “Maybe your night-shifters are dealing with lonely folks looking for someone to talk to after midnight – or maybe they need a little more training.”
Getting a handle on metrics for your healthcare contact center can also help you understand when being out of adherence is the contact center’s fault, and when the blame can be laid elsewhere.
“Sometimes the reasons your forecasts miss the mark have nothing to do with internal operations,” wrote Ciarlo. “You can adjust your staffing and shift numbers, but in a larger organization you have no control over when marketing announces a 24-hour sale, or how customer-billing cycles (that trigger billing inquiries) are structured.”
In these cases, a workforce management and scheduling solution that promotes cross-department collaboration can help improve adherence regardless of whether the troubles are inside the call center or outside. It can also help managers better understand what their metrics are telling them, allowing them to make adjustments that are ineffective, at best, or harmful to more relevant metrics in a worst-case scenario. Ideally, a great workforce management solution can do most of the footwork for you, leaving managers to do what they’re supposed to do: manage workers.
Edited by Alicia Young