1. Leverage automation for efficiency

Given increasing demand and ongoing recruitment and retention difficulties, more healthcare organizations are evaluating artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and provide a better overall experience for patients.

To effectively implement automated/AI tools, organizations should:

Tasks that are lower in complexity but require more time from workers are often well suited for automation. Ideally, automation/AI should be used to filter out routine requests, such as appointment reminders, prescription refills, portal password resets, and language translations. This allows staff to focus on more complex or sensitive needs like financial counseling, payment plans, and care concerns.

Contact centers could use AI tools to:

• Complete routine interactions, such as quickly summarizing patient notes or answering frequently asked questions.
• Assist with remote patient monitoring, including helping patients activate their wearable devices and answering technical questions.
• Support data security and protect patient information.
• Triage calls to identify those that require human attention, preventing costly misrouting, and ensuring timely escalation.

Successful adoption of AI tools in contact centers requires more than just implementation. It depends on thoughtful change management, clear communication, and ongoing support for employees.

For example, when SCAN Health Plan introduced an AI tool at its contact center, the organization provided education about the tool to help employees learn how it worked and how to adopt it into their daily operations.

SCAN encouraged adoption by reaching out to teams who were not using the tool as much and provided them with necessary support. They also collected feedback from employees about where the tool could be improved and offered a channel for troubleshooting help and live support.

When implementing AI tools, organizations should track key metrics to assess performance, drive continuous improvement, and ensure strategic alignment.

To evaluate the performance of automated tools, leaders can collect data on patient satisfaction, first call resolution, call volume, agent time saved, average handling time, and abandonment rate. This information can help organizations determine ROI, understand patient sentiment during calls, and quickly resolve any potential bottlenecks and pain points.

2. Foster employees' skills and advancement

Although organizations are investing in automation and self-service technologies, the human element of a contact center is still critically important. To meet consumer needs and retain employees, organizations need to find ways to enhance the employee experience.

To recruit and retain a strong workforce, organizations should upskill agents, commit to quality, and offer flexible working arrangements.

Comprehensive training that continues throughout a job will help employees tackle a variety of complex issues and broaden their skill sets.

For example, an employee may start in a contact center with simple office scheduling, but over time, they can learn skills to handle specialty scheduling, referral management, and more. Organizations should clearly define career ladders for people who complete more complex tasks. This will allow the employees to enhance their current role with new skills that can help build their career path.

Upskilling allows employees to have work variety and opportunities to apply their new skills. It also promotes retention and reduces the risk of burnout.

Having a robust quality assurance (QA) process sets expectations for different protocols and creates opportunities to train employees. QA should be transparent, frequent, and provide employees with actionable changes to make if they're not fully meeting expectations.

QA efforts should leverage technology capabilities paired with human oversight and intervention as needed. For example, a manager listening to a minimum of two calls per quarter per agent can help ensure consistent quality.

Organizations must respond to the ever-growing remote labor pool and increasing candidate preferences for work-from-home flexibility. Providing employees with remote work options will not only help organizations grow their applicant pool but also increase retention of their current workforce.

However, a "remote and done" approach should be avoided since it can leave employees feeling isolated and disconnected from the rest of the organization. Leaders should proactively foster a team spirit and find creative ways to ensure a positive, inclusive culture.

Some ways to help employees connect with each other while working remotely include live chat channels, daily or weekly team huddles with cameras on, virtual team events, and sharing weekly team and individual achievements.

3. Make patients a priority

Because contact centers are often the first and last point of contact for patients, it's important to make a good impression. A positive interaction can shape a patient's overall experience, as well as their trust in an organization.

To enhance the patient experience, organizations should expand contact center capabilities, integrate feedback loops, and provide personalized service.

Progressive organizations have expanded contact center functions beyond managing inbound calls and scheduling activities.

For example, some organizations offer outbound scheduling capabilities to help patients stay on top of follow-up care and increase adherence to recommended preventive care. This can help optimize productivity for clinical teams, as well as promote healthier communities.

By expanding your contact center capabilities, patients can get help on a variety of topics in one place. Integrating patients' clinical, financial, and scheduling data allows employees to provide proactive support. Centralization will also reduce unnecessary touchpoints and handoffs.

Omni-channel feedback enables organizations to gather insights from patients through multiple sources and gain deeper insights into patient behaviors and needs.

Connecting all potential touchpoints, such as SMS, email, portal, or phone, ensures that patients can access the same information in each channel, leading to a more seamless experience. Organizations should also encourage patients to use available patient portals for self-service tools through hold music advertising for faster issue resolution.

Patients have diverse needs that can vary by region, age, and socioeconomic status. For example, older adults may prefer phone support from an agent while younger adults may prefer to access their healthcare needs via a smart app.

To better understand patients' preferences and pain points, organizations can conduct market-specific consumer surveys. This can be done via real-time surveying, biannual net promoter score surveying, or a combination of the two. These surveys can also help determine where automation or AI is appropriate and where a human experience is more necessary.

To better understand patients' preferences and pain points, organizations can conduct market-specific consumer surveys. This can be done via real-time surveying, biannual net promoter score surveying, or a combination of the two. These surveys can also help determine where automation or AI is appropriate and where a human experience is more necessary.

Optimization in action

Through a recent collaboration with Optum Advisory,² a rural health system serving communities in the Northeast with over 85 locations and 5,000 employees implemented several changes to improve its contact center, including:

• Centralizing functions for patient access: This change streamlined processes to enhance efficiency and reduce patient wait time.
• Providing omni-channel scheduling: Multiple scheduling options helped accommodate diverse patient preferences.
• Optimizing phone call routing: By simplifying call pathways, agents were able to improve their response times and first call resolution rates.

Following these changes, health system leaders saw measurable improvements in several key performance measures, including service levels, hold times, and abandonment rates.

Overall, contact centers play an integral role in healthcare organizations. By enhancing contact center operations, organizations can increase work efficiencies, improve the patient experience, and streamline access to care.