How Do You Improve Customer Service in Healthcare?

How did you choose to book an appointment with a cardiologist or an orthopedist?

I am very sure you spoke to one of your friends or relatives and took their opinion before deciding to book an appointment with a specialist.

Because healthcare is a very critical area, you want to be doubly sure about who you approach for consulting or treatment.

That’s why you speak to people you trust the most and seek their opinion before choosing an expert.

How did your friends or relatives suggest a specialist?

They definitely had a good experience consulting them or getting treated by them, and that’s the reason why they are referring you to them.

This makes it very clear that customer service in healthcare is critical so that your patients become the advocates of your practice.

Here are some statistics that prove the importance of customer service in the healthcare sector:

• Online reviews are a deciding factor among 94% of patients when assessing healthcare services.
• 84% of patients trust online reviews just as much as personal advice.
• One-third of callers hang up within five minutes of being put on hold while trying to book an appointment.
• Personalized experiences make 49% of patients feel that a healthcare provider cares about earning their business.
• It takes about 26 days for a new patient to schedule an appointment with a specialist.
• The wait times at the healthcare facility, despite having an appointment with the physician, are one of the most frustrating aspects when you are not informed in advance.
• Most patients spend less than 10 minutes in conversation with their physicians or specialists.

This not only states the importance of patient services but also points out the challenges that healthcare facilities need to address in enhancing the patient experience.

How Do You Address the Challenges Healthcare Facilities Face in Enhancing Customer Service?

1. Booking an Appointment

How do patients book appointments with your facility?

They either go to your website and access the appointment app or call your board number to seek an appointment.

Have you made it easy to access the appointment app on your website?

When they call your board number, do you ensure that it gets attended, and how about those calls that don’t get answered?

What do you do about them?

Do you have the means to return their calls and help them book an appointment?

The biggest challenge that healthcare facilities face today is no-shows after booking an appointment. That’s like leaving a lot of money on the table and piling up as lost revenues besides not being able to accommodate patients in queue.

What do you do about this?

Do you have the means to send a reminder to your patients about their impending appointment?

Do you confirm, reschedule, or cancel appointments in advance so that you can move your patients who are on the wait list up the roster?

2. Personalize Care

A few years ago, I visited a physician in a hospital for my hypertension issues. I met with him, and the physician counseled me on lifestyle dos and don’ts and also prescribed a few medications. He also asked me to check my blood pressure at regular intervals for a couple of days.

After a couple of days, I received a call from his hospital inquiring how I was doing. I felt really good, and I have been consulting him ever since.

I have also referred a bunch of my friends and relatives to this physician after that.

How often do healthcare facilities check back with you on how you are doing?

Forget about personalization. How many healthcare facilities actually seek your feedback on how well they cared for you?

The fact that the healthcare facility is asking for your opinion on the overall experience itself will make you feel good. Besides, you would love the fact that they care about your opinion and are willing to act on your opinion to improve their experience.

3. Don’t Miss a Patient Request

I have called the board number of hospitals multiple times only to hear the busy dial tone. I have never received a call back from them to check on what I wanted.

It is a lost opportunity for hospitals and a loss of patients.

Imagine receiving a call back from the healthcare facility as soon as a customer experience agent gets free. You would be pleased to request them for their services and book an appointment for that.

The same goes for interactions on other channels – websites, chatbots, mobile apps, social media, and email.

If only you respond to requests and missed requests, the perception of your healthcare facility would completely change and the patients would love that experience.

4. Make It Easy for Your Patients

You have had a knee replacement surgery, and you need to consult your surgeon every 15 days for six months.

Does this require a physical visit by the patient every 15 days?

Maybe, the first couple of times, you may have to come physically. After that, the consultation can be done virtually, making it easy for the patient as well as the surgeon.

Do you have options to provide virtual consultations to your patients?

5. Access to Health Records

You are consulting a physician in your hometown, and for surgery, he refers you to a surgeon in the city.

Now, you have to share the case history of your complication before the surgeon can take a call on the treatment procedure.

There are two options available: You can travel all the way to the city to check with the surgeon about the procedure or share access to your health records online.

For that, your healthcare facility needs to have a provision to store EHRs on a hosted software system?

As a healthcare facility, do you have an EHR system in place, and do you provide access to your patients?

This makes it easy for you to work with partner hospitals across the country, and this would make it easy for your patients as well.

Besides, you can get expert consultations over the phone with easy access to health records.

Case Examples

Here are a few healthcare customers for whom we have helped enhance their patient experience while maximizing their engagement and revenues.

Appointment Reminders and Voice of the Customer (VoC)

The hospital chain had thousands of pre-booked walk-ins at each of their hospitals. They had a massive challenge of no-shows, resulting in not being able to address patients effectively and losing revenue.

We implemented our VocalRx solution that sent appointment reminders to patients so they could reconfirm, reschedule, or cancel their appointments. Our solution would automatically consider the canceled appointments and make them available for patients in the queue. We also extended our service to seek feedback from the patients.

To do all this, the hospital had to tweak the data in the format that we needed, which was getting cumbersome.

We automated the entire workflow by integrating with all their appointment booking applications and CRM using APIs. Now, we are able to fetch the data from these applications to send out appointment reminders and seek patient feedback.

Teleconsulting During the Pandemic

One of the largest ophthalmology units wanted to do teleconsulting for its patients. When the pandemic in 2020 struck, they had 3000 patients whose surgeries needed follow-ups with their surgeons.

The patients couldn’t physically come, and they wanted their teleconsulting infrastructure to be up and running within 48 hours.

We helped the ophthalmology facility with cloud telephony infrastructure that allowed them to connect the patients to the consultants automatically.

Besides, we used our VocalRx platform to schedule, confirm, and reconfirm appointments for teleconsulting. We helped them collect patient feedback to check how well the teleconsulting platform is working for the patients so that the hospital can improve the experience.

We also provided recordings of the consultations, which were added as a part of the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR).

In ten days, we helped them consult more than 1200 patients on this platform.

Check out our case study on : How ClearTouch helps to automate appointment reminders and voc for over half-a-million patients

No Patient Left Behind

One of Asia’s largest diabetes treatment facilities was missing out on most of its patient inquiries as it did not have the necessary system to handle the volumes. About 60% of the inquiries resulted in patient leakage.

They wanted to address this.

With our VocalRx solution, we forwarded the calls to the call center automatically if the front office agents were busy.

We initially covered 22 branches of this facility, and later, we extended it to all their 50 branches. Within four months, we grew the call volumes by 400%, resulting in a much better customer experience and a massive revenue increase.

We also provided a call-back option for the patients, resulting in near-zero call abandonment.

We also started sending medication reminders and sought feedback from patients in an automated manner using VocalRx.

Overall, we helped the facility improve its customer service and their loyalty. It is very important as we are talking about a lifestyle disease that has to be managed throughout someone’s life.

The challenges in a healthcare facility are not generic, and they are very specific to the size of the hospital and the specialties they address.

It is imperative for a technology service provider to understand the specific challenges and customize the approach to improve customer service.

Happy patients mean the world to any healthcare facility, and by embracing technology, you can reach that stage very easily and conveniently.