At last month’s 29th Annual Healthcare Call Center Conference in Salt Lake City, Kathy Divis, President, Greystone.Net, presented “On the Web: Self-Scheduling, the Patient Portal and Finding a Doctor – What This Trend Means for You.” The primary theme permeating this presentation was the shift from MarCom to MarTech and its affect on marketing, in general, and call centers in specific.

Customers expect to engage with brands and organizations anytime, anywhere and on their own terms. Healthcare call centers need to be fully integrated with their organizations’ websites, social channels and other digital properties.

Key points from the presentation included:

• DIY is coming to call centers and it’s not a bad thing. It allows them to innovate, expand their services and have time to serve the more complicated cases. The main place DIY is impacting call centers is in self-scheduling, find-a-doctor functions and the patient portal.
• Call centers need to take lessons from their competitors, peers and partners to create an experience in all three areas that is as good as a caller could expect to get from a for-profit company.
• Call centers need to begin evolving into engagement centers—as opposed to just considering themselves a call center or a contact center—and really look at how they can expand their relationships with callers/patients and create a relationship that engages the callers with the health system.

It’s time for call center managers/directors to innovate, experiment and take some risks.

If you would like more information on this topic, or would like to see Kathy's slide deck for this presentation, please contact us at info@greystone.net.