December 16, 2014
If you run a contact center in the healthcare industry, don’t skimp on training. That’s the finding of a recent industry survey.
Healthcare contact centers cannot afford to operate with undertrained staff because the Internet has made every healthcare consumer much more savvy.
With consumers now better informed about medical issues, healthcare contact centers must also step up their efforts to assist these callers by providing information that is not readily available online.
That is the finding of a recent survey by Cutting Edge Information, a provider of pharmaceutical business intelligence.
The survey, which interviewed medical information directors, revealed that healthcare contact centers now need to fill in the gaps in the information that callers have gathered from their Internet searches. Often, this means information regarding real-world outcomes—information that is in greater demand within the evolving healthcare landscape.
“To help develop responses to more complex questions, medical information groups are spending more time communicating with teams in other countries than they have in the past,” said Jacob Presson, a senior research analyst at 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 focuses on its own region and operates its pharmaceutical call centers independently, sharing information benefits everyone involved.”
The study's findings also highlight the need for better contact center knowledge base solutions, so that agents have better access to the information they need to answer these questions.
It is also important for healthcare contact centers to have software solutions that can properly route calls to the agents best equipped to handle inquiries, and for agents to consult with one another during a call to obtain information from specialists on staff.
The Internet has led to more informed consumers, so contact centers need to keep up. This is true for just about every industry, but especially for the healthcare sector.
