Your overall experience with your healthcare provider encompasses more than just the time you spend with your physician or nurse (which is usually just a few minutes); it includes the time you spend in the waiting room, on the phone with staff, and interacting with employees in the patient portal. In fact, an article from Deloitte revealed that 50 to 75 percent of patient interactions happen virtually. As a healthcare institution, investing in the people and platforms behind the screens can significantly improve your patients’ experiences and satisfaction.

Patients Interact in Many Ways, But Their Experiences Vary

Patients interact with healthcare providers for many reasons: they may need to schedule an appointment, get test results, renew their prescriptions, pay their invoices, etc. In order to get what they need, patients use a variety of communication channels, including phone calls, emails, chats, and messages in the patient portal. Unfortunately, patient experiences across these channels are often inconsistent. Here are a few reasons for the inconsistency:

• Staff training on each channel can vary.
• Scripting tools aren’t always available for agents, causing misinformation and possibly a delayed resolution.
• Communication channels may be answered with varying urgency (i.e. some offices may prioritize calls over chats).
• Most channels don’t offer a complete view of the patient’s history or previous interactions.

Given the variety of communication channels and the different ways to interact with the healthcare office, it’s easy to understand why the patient experience is so fragmented. Using a contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution like GoContact allows your practice to fully integrate the patient experience. Employees in every position and role throughout your facility can view all communication channels and track patient conversations from one channel to the next using a single platform.

This omnichannel functionality coordinates your communications and provides a centralized platform for all transactions, interactions, records, and notes. Consolidating patient information in one place means your practice can better serve patients and offer a more pleasant experience.

Proper Training and Tools Improve Experiences for Agents

Unifying communications channels and interactions onto one CCaaS platform is useful for patients, but it also benefits your agents, whether they’re front-office administrators, physician assistants, or dedicated patient support specialists. Providing contact center agents with the proper training and tools enables them to be more efficient, improves employee satisfaction, and decreases the cost of attrition. In fact, a study from McKinsey & Company estimates that recruiting, onboarding, and training a new contact center agent can cost between $10,000–20,000, making a front-end investment in a CCaaS platform worth it.

Selecting a CCaaS platform that helps train your agents is a simple way to boost productivity and retention in your healthcare organization. GoContact offers an Agent Assist scripting tool that enables you to create dynamic scripts to help guide agents through calls, leading them to the correct response more efficiently while training them on properly handling calls and resolving problems.

An Omnichannel CCaaS Solution Improves Overall Patient Satisfaction

Investing in an omnichannel customer service platform can lead to consistent experiences for your patients, call center agents, and employees in your healthcare office. Choosing a platform with built-in agent training and assistance is guaranteed to improve your patient experiences. Selecting the right CCaaS platform for your medical practice is a prescription for improving patient and employee satisfaction.

Contact us to learn how Broadvoice can help you provide exceptional patient experiences with GoContact.