Workforce Management Featured Article
Complex Workforce Management for the Complex Healthcare Contact Center
The days when healthcare was simply a service one received in person from a physician are long over. (So are the days of being able to pay the fees out of pocket.) Today, healthcare is a complicated mix of professional services (from surgeons to nurse practitioners to physician assistants to phlebotomists), social services (patient advocates), administrative personnel (billing), insurance companies and even state and federal government entities. Some services are even offered virtually over the Internet, in the case of telemedicine. The days when a doctor’s secretary took care of all non-medical questions are also long over. Patients have to become their own advocates, and this often means dealing with contact centers.
Healthcare contact centers have some unique needs, and contact center managers need to understand this, particularly when choosing workforce management solutions to support them, according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert).
“One of the most important responsibilities of a healthcare call center manager is to accurately anticipate the types and volume of calls expected within a certain day, or even hour-to-hour,” he wrote. “This can be accomplished through the historical call center data collected and analyzed by an automated WFM solution. With precise predictions in hand, the manager thus creates a forecast and schedule to meet demand.”
Historical data is critical, but so too is call recording, which can also be used to review agent performance. With all agents performing to the right level, it becomes easier for the healthcare contact center manager to find the right mix of agents for each shift. Coaching and training also become easier. To choose the right workforce management solution for a healthcare contact center, it’s important to understand the needs of patients so your organization can be there at the right time and the right place to address callers’ (and emailers’ and chatters’) sometimes urgent concerns. Workforce management solutions designed for other industries may simply be too lax or devoid of features that will help support patients.
“The right choice will be one that delivers accurate call volume forecasting from historical data and ACD [automatic call distribution] integration, flexible schedule creation that incorporates foreseen and unforeseen variables, agent exceptions, intra-day changes to both forecasting and scheduling, and performance management reports. In other words, everything you need to keep your business running at optimal efficiency,” wrote Ciarlo.
Workforce management has always been about assigning the right employees with the right skills to the right job at the right time. But the complexity of healthcare today mandates that contact center employees be so much more than effective at a single transaction. They need to be patient advocates and help callers navigate the intensely complex U.S. healthcare industry right now. Errors or wrong information not only frustrates patients, but can create complicated problems that return to haunt contact centers with long call times, poor customer surveys and management turnover.
Edited by Alicia Young
