Call Center Agents Need Updates on Healthcare Issues: Report

December 16, 2014

If you run a contact center in the healthcare field, don’t skimp on education. That’s the findings of a recent industry survey.

Healthcare contact centers can ill afford to operate with undertrained staff because the Internet has made every healthcare consumer a lot savvier.

With consumers now more informed about medical issues, healthcare contact centers also must step up their game to help these callers through information that is not readily available online.

That’s the finding of a recent survey by Cutting Edge Information, a pharmaceutical business intelligence provider.

The survey, which talked with medical information directors, revealed that healthcare contact centers now need to fill in the data gaps that callers have from their Internet searches. Often this means information pertaining to real-world outcomes, information that is in higher demand within the shifting healthcare environment.

“To help build responses to more complicated questions, medical information groups spend more time communicating with teams in other countries than they have in the past,” said Jacob Presson, senior research analyst with Cutting Edge Information, in a statement.

He added that information sharing among different teams can help facilitate this response to increasingly complex questions.

“The groups share questions, responses and data sources to better serve customers,” he noted. “While each team still concentrates on their own region and operates their pharmaceutical call centers independently, sharing information is beneficial to everyone involved.”

The findings of the study also point to the need for better contact center knowledge-base solutions, so agents have better access to the information they need to answer these questions.

It is further important for healthcare contact centers to have software solutions that can properly route calls to the proper agents best able to handle questions, and for agents to consult each other during a call to draw information from specialists on staff.

The Internet has made for a more informed consumer, so the contact center needs to keep up. This is true for just about every industry, but specifically for the healthcare field.