(This article was originally published in Healthcare Call Center Times in January 2021.)
Many contact centers were already working on their transformation strategies when 2020 took an unexpected turn and created new challenges and uncertainty. Healthcare providers were impacted more profoundly than other kinds of organizations, of course, creating an especially urgent need for communications processes to adapt.
But looking more closely at the pressure on healthcare contact centers, in particular, it’s clear that the sudden need to adapt caused by the COVID-19 pandemic did not divert them from their logical course. On the contrary, it invited them to continue the trajectory they were already on, albeit at a far faster pace.
COVID-19 has accelerated the definition of a new kind of healthcare contact center by supercharging existing drivers for transformational change. These include:
• The growth of contactless care interactions and consultations. Few would have predicted the importance of healthcare contact centers to provide such services in the absence of physical, face-to-face alternatives being available because of a global pandemic. Regardless, customers and patients will most likely continue adopting these services with increased confidence, given the public’s prolonged and universally positive mass exposure to video calling and related tools in recent months.
• Other digital shifts in customer behavior. While digital adoption is widespread across age groups, it is particularly acute among younger generations who, with each passing year, occupy a more significant proportion of the population. The ubiquity of smartphones and ultrafast Wi-Fi/4G (increasingly 5G) connectivity underpins this, as does the development of experiential applications and services, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and self-service automation. These behavior shifts and tech advancements come with increased expectations for high service quality and a seamless customer experience.
• Increased remote agent working preferences. Traveling to a workplace adds time, expense, and inconvenience to contact center agents’ working days. But, concerns over productivity and accountability have historically prevented call centers from addressing the pent-up demand amongst agents to work from home. However, COVID-19 has forced many healthcare providers to confront these challenges and implement long-term solutions from the foundation provided by shorter-term quick fixes first enacted when agents were sent home at the start of the pandemic. Contact center managers in healthcare will be very familiar with the need to attract and retain the best agent talent, particularly among those with medical qualifications looking to step away from front-line clinical roles or those with caring or other responsibilities at home. Offering remote and flexible working arrangements can be game-changing for their recruitment and retention efforts.
• Renewed cost pressures. Contact centers are also ‘cost centers’. With competitive pressures encouraging many to attempt to differentiate themselves while simultaneously reducing overhead, it seems inevitable that capital-intensive ‘brick-and-mortar’ contact center facilities will rapidly lose their dominance as virtual team models become even more attractive and sustainable.
As the above change drivers continue to impact healthcare call centers, and as the future surely holds additional as-yet-unforeseen factors, what tools are available to help organizations flexibly adjust to them and chart the right course into the future? Savvy call center managers are exploring the numerous capabilities that today’s advanced Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) technologies offer and are working to see how integrating them into existing contact center systems can provide a range of business and operational benefits and enable new business cases and compelling customer services and experiences.
How New UCC Capabilities Can Extend the Value of Legacy Contact Center Systems
Given the economic impacts that the pandemic has had on many industries, it is understandable that while organizations want to implement new capabilities that allow them to cope with changing situations, many healthcare providers want to be extra prudent when it comes to technology expenditures.
Fortunately, modern UCC softphones that can interact with existing healthcare call centers’ systems are introducing new capabilities for agents while allowing them to continue working securely in a way that is familiar to them and while also preventing call centers from having to deploy expensive new infrastructures. New UCC solutions are enabling agents to deliver greater experiences for patients, increase productivity, and streamline workflows across applications and databases—whether they are working from home, back in the call center, or from a hybrid arrangement.
The question healthcare call centers must ask themselves is: Do I go the cloud route or stick with my legacy infrastructure?
Organizations that want to maximize their existing legacy infrastructure can do so as a long-term asset-sweating measure or a stopgap ahead of a later cloud migration. They just need to ensure the UCC softphones they implement are able to be smoothly integrated into existing contact center IP-PBXs, CTI servers and other call platforms.
Going the cloud route is also an option, as a logical continuation of more comprehensive cloud strategies that are already migrating related infrastructure and processes to the cloud. This approach is especially attractive to smaller contact centers as it provides affordable access to the same advanced features as everyone else, even the largest competitors. And, it extends the virtues of OpEx-based models with zero-touch roadmap upgrades rolled into the subscription licenses.
Compelling Business Cases Driving the Integration of UCC Into the Contact Center
What’s more important to your contact center business case right now—cost efficiency or value enhancement? Value enhancement naturally demands a flexible solution that can facilitate integration with existing platforms and workflows while enabling innovative new approaches to customer engagement—for example, more collaborative screen-sharing interactions with patients regarding prescriptions and treatment plans. If cost reduction is the goal, then you need features proven to result in greater efficiency and productivity for less cost.
UCC promises to do both, equipping agents with tools necessary to achieve performance metrics and KPIs regardless of location and enabling the reduction of the size of—or even eliminating—the physical contact center, which will drive down costs. As noted above, leveraging existing infrastructure until a time when it makes more economic and operational sense to migrate to the cloud is a prudent measure.
Reliability and business continuity are also more prominent in operational planning now than at the start of 2020, and with UCC softphones, they are eminently achievable in cloud, legacy, and hybrid configurations.
UCC’s Impact on Enhancing Agent Performance Regardless of Work Style and Location
Agents empowered to use multiple locations as their places of work are more connected and capable, and more accessible for extended periods. According to Frost & Sullivan, the retention rate for at-home agents is 80 percent compared to just 25 percent for those coming to site. Remote agents also make it far easier to scale resources up to serve seasonal or peak demand, allowing contact center employers to be more responsive to dynamic customer needs.
Given the disruption 2020 has seen with the COVID-19 pandemic shifting agents from call centers to home, and the need for an increased number of agents to manage call volumes, UCC offers ultimate flexibility and adaptability to ensure employers can staff their workplaces effectively. And with UCC tools like user presence, instant messaging, and video calling, agents can see when others are online to connect, send messages to quickly share information or ask for help, and see each other face to face via video to feel connected even when working remotely.
Increased Customer/Agent Collaboration and Other Innovative Practices
We all recognize that contact centers are more than ‘cost centers’. Indeed, they represent a significant opportunity for healthcare providers to create even more valuable interactions and service levels that encourage customer loyalty and elevate the healthcare brand.
UCC is being used to create richer interactions and even to deliver premium services that would otherwise require a face-to-face session of some kind. Health providers have widely offered ‘virtual’ medical consultations during the COVID-19 lockdown. There are many examples of professional services companies using the technology to mimic this approach by conferencing and screen-sharing with clients in a shared environment. This trend was already underway before the pandemic, but now that the possibilities are better understood, we could be on the brink of far greater innovation.
In essence, healthcare contact centers are in the vanguard of innovating beyond ‘communications’ and into ‘collaborations’—harnessing UCC features to make interactions more productive, personalized, and collaborative. These range from appointment setting where a visual calendar is shared, to video-based interactions where treatment programs are explained and medical devices demonstrated, thereby negating patient risk. Sessions like these could be arranged in advance or dynamically enabled on the fly. Outcomes could transcend ‘customer satisfaction’ to tangible improvements in customer health and recovery.
UCC Tools Make for Simpler and More Secure Management of Distributed Contact Center Resources
UCC tools and their associated admin portals can greatly simplify IT administrative complexity. Architectural models such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), bring your own device (BYOD), or issuing locked-down Chromebooks with a restricted set of apps are all viable and actively deployed in healthcare organizations. UCC softphones enable the most flexible deployment and management, with the UCC application and all its users under the control of a single administrative console that can provision calls and assure optimal voice quality.
Data protection related compliance concerns can also be alleviated with centralized controls that ensure softphone endpoints are security patched and login credentials updated remotely. Choosing UCC tools that facilitate open integration with applications and databases is unquestionably favorable to those that restrict interoperability to predefined vendor choices, but this never has to be at the expense of data integrity. The good news is you can ensure you embrace the best of both worlds by maximizing innovation in a way that enables a flexible and engaging way of collaborating with customers while ensuring that data privacy is strictly controlled.
Conclusion
UCC is helping contact centers in the healthcare industry deal both with the next phases of COVID-19 and beyond to a more digitally-driven future. Nobody could have predicted how 2020 turned out, so what chance does anyone have for planning for what challenges might come next? Contact center managers would do well to consider measures that equip them to do more than hit their performance metrics. UCC not only empowers agents to new levels of productivity and retention, it makes contact center services more resilient and creates a platform for innovation that drives loyalty, quality and differentiation from other providers.