By Jessica Levco
It’s time for your hospital's C-suite to change their tune about the hospital contact center. Instead of seeing it as a cost center, they need to see it as an investment center.
And that’s something you can help facilitate. How? You’ll need to create an integrated ad campaign, a dashboard for metrics and call agents who know how to ask the right questions.
At the Contact Experience Conference, Mitch Holdwick, director of consumer engagement at Saint Joseph Mercy Health System, and Scott Conrad, product manager for contact centers at Healthgrades, spoke about the partnership between the two organizations when it comes to the hospital's call center.
Healthgrades’ contact center brands itself on behalf of any health system it works with. The Healthgrades team handles about 1.2 million calls a year at hospitals across the U.S.
“Our agents actively listen to each patient and let them know how they're going to help and what steps are going to happen next,” Conrad says.
First, a call agent will figure out why a patient is calling. Next, they'll collect key demographic information, provide a referral and wrap up the call. Building trust and inspiring confidence in a conversational, friendly style are how call agents can gather demographic data they need from a patient.
By working together with Healthgrades, Holdwick discussed how the hospital's lung cancer screening campaign was the “holy grail” of the call center, CRM, digital media and marketing automation integration all working together in harmony. The reason why the team wanted to do a lung cancer call campaign was that there are specific clinical criteria that someone must meet, to be scheduled for a lung screening.
Holdwick and his team created two paths for patients to answer screening questions:
- Online form: Patients were directed to the campaign through Google or Facebook.
- Phone: There was a dedicated “vanity” phone number associated with the campaign that goes directly to the hospital's contact center in Michigan. Their customer care representatives know the call is attributed to the campaign, based on the messaging that pops on their console when receiving a call. That initiated the workflow they set up with scripting and the assessment module that is built on the Engagement Center platform within the CRM.
“The takeaway here is that consumers will have the same experience online or over the phone with a customer care representative walking them through the assessment, step by step,” Holdwick says. The lung cancer screening campaign garnered more than a thousand leads. About 60 percent of those came directly from the assessment. The campaign achieved a 23 percent “lead to patient” conversion rate, which is slightly above industry standard. The ROI for the campaign is about 4:1.
“As we continue to evolve from a marketing and contact center perspective, this notion of consumer engagement and truly consumer-focused strategies forces us to think differently,” Holdwick says. “It’s a lot of work and we've had dozens of workflow iterations. But our focus has always been on listening and making it easier for our patients to get the care they need.”