Average handle time (AHT) is one of the most important metrics used to determine patient satisfaction and service delivery in a healthcare call center. The goal is timely intervention when patients call in through the IVR or directly connect with the agents. What exactly is AHT in a call center, and how is it important for patient experience?

What Is Average Handle Time?

To put it simply, the average handle time in a healthcare call center is the total amount of time it takes for the agents to handle the patients or callers. You count it from the moment the phone rings to the hold time, talk time, and wrap-up, where the call is documented after the patient hangs up. This is a direct indicator of how great your call center-patient communication is because the faster the agents are able to solve the clients’ concerns, the better it is for the patient experience.

Why Is AHT Important?

AHT may be a simple metric, but it goes a really long way to improve the level of service to your clients. If you are wondering what AHT means in a call center, here are the main reasons why you should measure it.

Agent Productivity

Call managers can use the AHT to check how efficient the call center agents are when it comes to receiving calls from patients and solving their problems. The higher the volume of calls and the lower the AHT, the better their performance.

Patient Experience

You know that your healthcare call center is doing well if it is receiving high volumes of calls within a certain timeframe. When the AHTs are low, the calls flow faster and the staff handle more clients and their requests.

Improvement Areas

When you are able to track AHT metrics over time, it gets easier to monitor patterns. You can tell when agents need more training and what aspects of the call need work.

Cost Analysis

A lot of money is spent on handling incoming calls from patients, and AHT can be a great measure to ensure the center is more cost-effective. The more you reduce the AHT, the more you save on costs down the line. Read more: Tips to Reduce AHT in a Call Center

Contact the Experts

Medical centers are always looking for ways to improve the patient-provider relationship, and what better way than by improving AHT? Patients can rely on your services if you work with Guideway Care to better manage your health call center. Contact us today to learn how our expert team can improve the average handle time for better patient communication.

The average speed of answer (ASA) is a metric used in a medical assistance call center to measure how much time the agents take to receive incoming calls. It is one of the most important metrics for any healthcare center. The following are reasons why your call center should have a low average speed of answer.

Low Abandonment Rate

Abandonment rate in a healthcare call center means how many times calls are dropped before the patients get the chance to talk to an agent. For the best patient experience, you will be going for the lowest call abandonment rate. Luckily, when the ASA is low, it means that the agents take very little time to answer the calls, so fewer will be abandoned.

Cost-effectiveness

If you are wondering why a low ASA benefits your call center, know that it is an indication of how many hands you have on deck. The lower the ASA score, the better because then, the patient can tell that there are enough agents available. When the call stays in queue for a long time, t the facility will have to pay more to handle it.

Patient Satisfaction

Nothing makes current and prospective clients happier than knowing that they can get in touch with you within the shortest time. The overall patient satisfaction rate increases because they don’t have to wait long in line for someone to solve their problems. They will find it easy to call whenever they need anything. Read more: Call Center Customer Satisfaction: A Comprehensive Guide for Healthcare Providers

Higher Lead Generation

Another reason why your call center needs a low ASA is because it is good for business. If you can prove to potential clients that your healthcare center runs efficiently, they will easily trust your services, which further facilitates conversion rates. The more satisfied they are with your service delivery when it comes to receiving and handling their calls, the more they can trust you and are willing to do business with you.

Agent Satisfaction

Every healthcare call center wants to improve its call center retention rate, which reflects how long the company can retain its agents. When the ASA is low, the agents rarely deal with disgruntled patients and clients, so they stay happy and are able to focus on their job, which is listening and attending to the concerns of the callers.

Talk to Medical Call Center Professionals

If, for any reason, your call center is constantly dealing with high ASA, contact Guideway Care, a professional medical call center service provider, to help reduce the rates. By engaging the services of a professional to manage your medical call center, you will finally enjoy the benefits of low ASA, like low abandonment rate, customer satisfaction, and improved healthcare lead generation.

Have you ever thought you had the right digital marketing strategy for your healthcare services, only for it to fail because it did not align with your brand? The audience should see your campaign and relate to it, understanding what you do and what your values are. That is why you need the following tips on how to develop an excellent healthcare brand strategy.

Build the Foundation of the Brand

You need a solid marketing team—from the content writers to the designers. You will all work together to come up with the foundation of the brand, finding your identity, voice, vision, and mission. Who are your target clients? What can they expect from you?

Develop Brand Guidelines

The marketing team is a crucial part of the process, and you want everyone on the same team, especially when you are planning to rebrand. Thanks to open communication and great teamwork in general, you can come up with a strong branding and digital marketing strategy together using guidelines like brand identity, visual style, messaging, and more.

Find the Right Digital Channels

Being in an industry like healthcare means that you must be very careful with the digital media that you use. You want to create an online presence, making sure that it is consistent and credible, with the goal being to come up with creative marketing campaigns with the highest client reach. For instance, large healthcare facilities benefit from channels like local SEO, websites, social media, and email campaigns, so find the right media and maximize it.

Align the Content With the Message

One of the main benefits of brand strategy in healthcare marketing is gaining an audience and increasing conversion rates. This is only possible if you can create content that matches the message. Over time, you want to create stories that relate to potential clients, focusing on aspects like trust or creating a memorable experience for everyone who walks into your offices.

Consistent Branding

The reason why voice and vision are important in brand marketing is that the audience can easily identify who you are and what you do because you have created a solid identity. To maintain this, it is important to stay consistent in all your campaigns. The message should be the same as it runs through all your websites, email marketing, and social media.

Work on Your Brand Strategy

There is a strong relationship between branding and successful digital marketing, and Guideway Care professionals ensure that this connection is leveraged effectively. Reach out to Guideway Care for all your marketing needs, including healthcare SEO services.

You want to offer your patients and clients the best service, and it all starts with using the right tone when answering incoming calls. Knowing how to improve your tone of voice in a call center makes your patients feel welcomed and comfortable seeking your services. So, how do you do that?

Show a Positive Attitude

People can easily read attitudes during conversations. Patients don’t want to call in and hear a robotic voice on the other end of the line. They want to feel positivity when communicating with someone who also shows empathy, especially during nurse triage service interactions. That’s why it is advisable to use phrases like “I understand” to make them feel connected.

Read the Mood and Adjust the Tone

Another trick when it comes to improving the tone of voice in a call center is to know how to approach different scenarios with the right tone. Know how to read the emotional state of the caller and approach them properly in order to help them. For instance, if the patient is calling to make a complaint and sounds frustrated, it will only get worse if they are approached in a casual tone.

Stay Calm

Staff who have worked in customer service for a long time know the ups and downs of their daily tasks. They meet all kinds of people, including rude and angry customers, and the only way to handle such cases is by staying calm. Being angry will show in your voice and tone, and patients will feel attacked and may escalate the situation.

Stay Professional

One challenge when learning how to improve tone of voice in customer service is finding the balance between being formal and casual. While you want to be friendly and understanding, also remember to maintain a high level of professionalism. When you have the right approach, it becomes easier to interact with patients and help them find solutions to their problems. This balance is key to delivering an effective solution for healthcare.

Show Respect

When you are operating a call center, including a multilingual one, patients can also detect respect in your tone. Therefore, make sure that you use the right words to show that you understand, and assure them that you will help them out. Remember to approach every client the same, even when they are rude and frustrated. Read more: What You Should Know About Multilingual Call Center Services

Perfect Your Medical Call Center With Professional Help

One of the most important aspects of operating a healthcare call center is to address the patient’s needs. Reach out to Guideway Care if you need a team with the right skill sets to handle all your patients and clients when they call in.

Your healthcare call center should have a smooth-flowing system with high customer satisfaction rates and impressive feedback. That can only happen when there is proper call queue management. Take a look at how important the system is for your call flow.

Reduced Hold Times

What if you are dealing with an emergency and there is a patient waiting on the other end of the line? Having to deal with a long queue is the last thing you want your clients to go through, and chances are high that they hang up or consider changing practices. Make sure that patients are handled better when they call in and directed to the right responders who can help as soon as possible.

Workload Distribution

Another advantage of excellent call center queue management is that it also favors the staff. When you come up with a distribution system for all the agents, you effortlessly spread out the workload, so you never have to worry about a few staff members being overworked. In addition, you make sure that each call goes through to the right person so that there is no waiting for call transfers.

Low Call Abandonment Rate

Imagine callers hanging up because they are frustrated that they cannot go through to the right staff member or have to wait in a long queue. It means they are not getting the assistance they want. Better queueing management is needed, as the faster they are connected to the right person, the lower the chances of them abandoning the call, which is a win for your CSAT scores.

Improved FCR Rates

Your FCR (First Call Resolution) rates significantly improve when you learn how to manage your call queue. When patients reach out and have the staff pick up their calls, listen to them, and offer effective solutions on the first try, it earns you an excellent reputation among current and prospective clients. This also goes a long way to increase your revenue because customers are willing to work with facilities that prove to care about their needs. Read more: How to Improve Medical Call Center CSAT Scores

Outsource Your Call Center Services From the Best

There is a lot of solutions for healthcare to show customers that you care about them and their needs. With medical call center services, you have excellent call queue management, patients won’t have to wait long in line which helps reduce call abandonment rates and improve the FCR. Reach out to Guideway Care for more information.

There are ways to know that your healthcare call center is running smoothly, and it starts with the state of your call flow. When it comes to the call flow, the entire process involves the patients’ calls coming in and how the staff interacts with them to ensure that their issues are resolved. Considering how important the metric is, it helps to know how to improve the call flow.

Simplify Call Rerouting

If your healthcare call center uses IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to prescreen calls before rerouting them to the representative, you want to make sure that the transfer is smooth. For the best call flow, avoid having to take patients through an endless loop as they are trying to find a respondent. Check that the menu is short and easy to understand so they can get help within the shortest time. Read more: What Does IVR Stand For In a Call Center?

Use Advanced Tech

If you want to improve the call flow in customer service, make sure that you utilize technology. Apart from IVR, you can also use queueing and other routing strategies to ensure you make the experience better for the patients when they need assistance. You can also make use of call monitoring and real-time call recordings to identify issues during calls and make adjustments.

Allow Flexibility to Go Off-Script

One of the main challenges clients complain about is that the representatives sound too similar or almost robotic when addressing them. This can happen when there are strict rules to follow when it comes to the script. However, when you leave room for flexibility, the staff can go off-script when needed. Trust that the callers can detect when they are being addressed with empathy and the response is personalized.

Provide Consistent Training and Mentorship

The call center call flow is determined by the nature of interaction between the patient and the staff. Technology may be a huge part of the process, but since the center is run by humans, you want to invest in their training and skill sets. They should know how to actively listen, effectively communicate, solve various problems, and conduct themselves properly the entire time. Handling different people every day requires special skill sets that you can only support through continuous training.

Optimize the Call Flow Process

Imagine patients and potential clients calling the healthcare call center to find the tech working perfectly and the staff very helpful. If you want this for your facility, consider reaching out to our professionals at Guideway Care for exceptional patient conversion solutions.

Some of the most important metrics to measure in a call center are the First Call Resolution (FCR) and Average Handle Time (AHT). The AHT refers to the total amount of time the patient and the respondent stay on the call, including the talk and hold time. You’ll want to keep it at less than 6 minutes, so if your analysis shows a higher rate, then these tips on how to reduce AHT should come in handy.

Use Call Routing Strategies

You don’t want to lose patients because they get frustrated trying to talk to multiple agents about the same problem. Imagine having an Interactive Voice Response, allowing them to receive immediate responses before being handed over to a representative. Thanks to such a system, it is easier to assign calls to agents with the skill sets needed to offer assistance. This will significantly reduce the AHT. Read more: Navigating the Maze: Overcoming 3 Key Challenges in Integrated Voice Response Systems

Use Call Recording and Monitoring

Thankfully, most medical centers record all incoming calls, which makes it easier for managers and supervisors to conduct assessments. This is effective in how you lower AHT because the medical center can analyze how a patient was handled and detect any issues that could be contributing to high AHT. Feedback guides the team in making the necessary corrections and improving service delivery.

Improve Training and Onboarding Strategies

Sometimes, the reason why AHT is so high is because the agents don’t have sufficient skills to help the patients when they call in. It is important for agents to have the necessary training in operating a medical call center.  Onboarding and continuous training methods should be thorough, including instruction in conflict resolution and effective communication.

Provide Well-Structured Scripts

Are you wondering why the customer satisfaction rate has been so low and are thinking about how to improve AHT in your call center? Why not try using scripts? These can work well for agents when used properly alongside thorough training when there is a need to go off-script. This way, the staff can provide accurate information to every caller. They’ll know how to phrase their questions for follow-ups and won’t have to spend a lot of time coming up with answers from scratch.

Streamline Your Call Center With the Help of a Professional

What happens when your staff is handling other matters and there is no one on the phones? You want to make sure your health call center is still running perfectly and at the best AHT rate. Contact Guideway Care to help you with providing comprehensive healthcare solutions.

Being in healthcare means you receive calls at any time of the day, so your call center must be secure and should run effectively. The only way to know that operations are running smoothly is by collecting and then analyzing call center data. The following are examples of data to collect and how to use them to improve the services your patients receive.

First Response Time (FRT)

The FRT refers to the amount of time it takes for the medical coordinators to respond to the patient. In most cases, healthcare facilities are expected to answer in the first 3 minutes, but you want to keep the FRT very low. If you are able to respond within the shortest time possible, it goes a long way to improve your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Read more: Navigating Improve Your First-Call Resolution Rate: 7 Best Practices

First Call Resolution (FCR)

The FCR, on the other hand, means how capable the team is in handling and solving the patient’s issues the very first time they reach out. What happens during the first interaction? The reason why this call center data analysis is important is because if your FCR rates are consistently low, you need to adjust your strategies. Maybe the team needs better training to help solve various patient issues. You don’t want a patient to have to call again due to the same issue.

Average Handle Time (AHT)

The AHT is a measure of the amount of time it takes between the patient’s calling and having their issues resolved. This includes the entire talk time and hold time, too. The healthcare industry standard usually stands at 6 minutes, so if your analysis shows that it generally takes longer, then it also means that you should find a better solution right away.

Call Abandonment Rate

If you are wondering how to analyze call center data, the call abandonment rate is another important detail your healthcare facility must navigate. How many times do patients call but hang up before they speak to a representative? If the rate is significantly higher, maybe more than 10%, then it means you have many dissatisfied patients who cannot seem to get through to your lines. Read more: Tips to Reduce AHT in a Call Center

Seek the Services of an Expert

You know how crucial it is for your facility to run an effective medical call center. That’s where Guideway Care services come in. Our comprehensive patient conversion solutions  include well-trained coordinators who can expertly manage incoming and outgoing calls, so you never have to worry about low CSAT scores or losing potential clients. Contact us today to learn how our expert team can elevate your patient communication and help your healthcare facility thrive.

The healthcare industry is very competitive in the modern world. While traditional marketing methods like word-of-mouth are still effective marketing methods, they may not be enough to attract many patients to a facility. The best solution is to have a website and implement digital marketing with local SEO practices.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the digital marketing strategy that enables a medical practice to be found online by the right people. SEO mainly focuses on increasing the number of visitors to the website to get a higher ranking on the search engines. However, you must target the right people for your website to be noticed rather than just including any keyword in your SEO practices.

How Local SEO Differs From Organic SEO

Organic SEO doesn’t focus on any geographical area. Rather, searchers are focused on finding information or services regardless of location. This digital marketing strategy is used to obtain a high ranking on search engines by making the website search engine friendly. However, modern healthcare facilities should focus on local people because telemedicine is not widely embraced. Optimizing the healthcare website based on your location means your services will appear in local searches. That is the most crucial thing to win in modern healthcare marketing. In simple terms, local SEO improves rankings through its relevant and trusted location.

Why Is Local SEO Important for Medical Practices?

Many patients understand their conditions and will search for specific services on the internet. If your healthcare website is optimized to support the information these people search for, then you stand a higher chance of getting more patients to serve. Moreover, patients want a local healthcare provider for easier access and reduced costs. As such, the patient will search for certain services within their location. Local SEO helps medical practices grow in specific locations, and health professionals add more patients to their practice by displaying the information to the locals.

Ways to Attract More Patients With Local SEO

Combining these SEO services will even yield more results:

• Research the right keywords and include them in the website content. For example, if you offer dental services, find keywords related to dental services.
• Add testimonials from patients whom you’ve served before.
• Include your geographical location in the relevant keywords.
• Optimize your Google business profile.

It’s Time to Optimize Your Health Practice Website

Local SEO is an effective way to market your health practice to your location. Focusing on your specialty and targeting a certain area can increase your online searchability and visibility. If you’re aiming to grow your medical practice, contact Guideway Care. We always offer excellent healthcare SEO services through our advanced digital marketing.

When it comes to medical call center services, first-call and one-call resolution are important in ensuring excellent patient satisfaction. Although these two may sound similar and involve the agent’s efforts to resolve issues, they differ significantly.

What Is a First-Call Resolution?

First-call resolution (FCR) is the ability of the call center agent to resolve the patient’s issue without having to do the follow-ups. For instance, if a patient calls the center agent with questions regarding the offered services, the agent should be able to answer without having to call back to give more details. This first-call resolution can enhance patient satisfaction rather than create the need to contact other facilities.

What Is a One-Call Resolution?

One-call resolution (OCR) is based on patients resolving their inquiries on the first contact using only one touchpoint. OCR is not having to use another touchpoint before, during, or after calling the call center. With the OCR, there is higher satisfaction with the touchpoint experience because only one contact is needed to resolve the problem. The OCR is more effective in patient retention (they can stick to one facility to get all the services) because of its fast resolution and cost savings.

Difference Between FCR and OCR

FCR involves patients resolving their inquiries with the call center touchpoints on the first call. In other words, in FCR, you don’t have to figure out whether other touchpoints were used, provided the problem was resolved. On the other hand, OCR involves patients resolving their inquiries with one touchpoint at the first call center contact. In other words, OCR is very specific and involves only one touchpoint. OCR is generally more complex to achieve than FCR, which is why many people opt for FCR. The OCR calculation is very specific to one touchpoint.

Calculating One Contact Resolution Vs. First Contact Resolution

OCR calculation should be based on the percentage of customers who resolved their problems on the first contact with one touchpoint. OCR equals the total number of patients who resolved their issues on the first contact with one touchpoint divided by the total number of patients who contacted the call center. The FCR involves considering the number of patients who resolved their queries on the first contact and the total number of patients who called the center agent.

Advance Your Patient Services With Cloud Call Center Technology

Modern call center systems are more advanced and efficient for quality patient services. Implementing cloud software into your health practice call center will save operation costs and time. Guideway Care offers modern healthcare call center services with a seamless transition from traditional operations.