Without Proper Technology in Place, Call Center Leadership 'Managing Blind'

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We just installed new technology to help our clients manage their calls. Here's an interesting article published in Hospital Access Management that gets to the core benefits of having the right technology in a call center.

You can't manage in the absence of information'

Health care organizations that are operating a call center or centralized scheduling department without the appropriate technology as a foundation might as well put blindfolds on their managers, suggests Judith Brown, president of Brown Healthcare Consulting in Chicago.

"If you don't know how many calls are coming in, how many people are holding, and how long you're making those customers wait, you're managing blind," says Brown. In such situations, she adds, there's no way to know how many potential customers are hanging up and going somewhere else for care.....More

No more "One Ringy Dingy"

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A colleague of ours Marcy Hewlett in Arizona authored an article for a regional medical magazine called Medical Industry Technology. The article is in the June 2007 issue. It is about the answering service industry and how it has changed.  She captured the essence of how we work in today's world.

Some of the points made by Marcy in the article:

1. Switchboards Are Replaced With State-of-the-Art Telecommunication Centers
2. How your phones are answered during normal office hours and after hours can make or break patient relations.
3. All client information and caller information appear on their computer monitor when they answer a call.
4. It's simple for your office to modify call-handling instructions as often as you like, even within a given day as doctors move from one location to another.
5. It also gives your office the flexibility to utilize the service whenever it is needed, 24/7.
6. You may find it beneficial for the answering service to handle over-flow calls during office hours

And there are many more facts and suggestions. Here's a link to a pdf file of the complete article. It's an easy read.

Marcy's web site is www.abetterconnection.net

Making Sure our Service is Always Available

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Always is a long time ... and a strong statement. Lots can happen with power, with phone lines, with fiber connections and all. To do our best to always be available for our clients, we need redundant systems. With our new system we decided the best way to provide that redundancy is to outsource the responsibility to people whose business is providing companies with computer reliability. We chose to place our key equipment in a "co-location".

What is a co-location?  Here's how our provider Another 9  describes their co-location they call the Bunker: 

"The Bunker is ready for almost anything. Reinforced underground location. 24-hour security. Mandatory visitor registration with photo ID. Remote video monitoring. Pre-action fire suppression systems. Redundant power feeders."

"Our facility was built with some of the best data center-specific equipment available to ensure that our systems are stable, reliable, and thoroughly protected from bottlenecks, system failures, data loss, and downtime. The Bunker is directly connected to redundant private network access points through diverse Ethernet fiber-optic feeds. Another9 maintains direct connections to eight of the top Tier-1 backbones including UUNet, Sprint, AT&T, Qwest, Level3, GlobalCrossing, Intermedia, and Verio. By laminating the biggest backbones into a massive supernet, we  ensure your servers always have a quick, efficient route to whoever is visiting your site."

It's quite a facility. We have two PRI's (T1 phone lines that also provide a lot of data about callers) connected to our Pinnacle equipment. We will have a direct connection through a T1 to our office in Great Neck. The connection with provide both data and voice paths for our operators. They will directly connect to our server in Great Neck to all of our operator stations.

All of this is happening next week. Then we can start to convert all of our accounts to the new system. It may  take us three months to be able to  connect all of our accounts.  We'll see.  We're all anxious to be able to convert all of our accounts as quickly as possible. That will allow us to focus on all the new processes we can help our Long Island and Queens clients with.

Ultimately, it's all about helping our clients solve their inbound communication problems. It's not about the equipment. It's not about our operators ... although they are first rate. All we a doing is to help our clients solve their problems.  As we start the programming process, I'll describe some of the things we are doing and some of the things that we can do.

Proper Messaging is Complex

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One of the raps on the Pinnacle system is that it is hard to program. After participating in a week long beginning class to learn how to program the system, I have a different take. It's not hard.

What's hard is understanding exactly how our clients gather information. It's our client's decision tree we need to understand. Once we clearly know the details our clients use to make their initial triage decisions, programming becomes easy. It's simply codifying the decision making process.

An example:  The first question some of our clients want us to ask is: "How may I help you?"  The answer to that question can lead to a number of options such as:

• I have a pain in (name the part)
• My (name the part) really hurts
• I need to reschedule an appointment for (Name the day)
• Can I speak to the Doctor?
• What are the office hours?
• Where is the office located?
• I think I'm in labor
• I had an accident and I'm bleeding from (name the part)

Each of these questions leads to other questions. We need to know what the follow up questions are and how our client wants us to respond. Then we need to know the message our client wants from each of these conversations plus when and how they would like it delivered.

Once we know all this information, with the scripting and dispatch management system incorporated in Pinnacle, we can script the specific client questions and the dispatch process. It's all about process. We automate all those things that can be automated and leave the conversation and messaging to the operators that are trained to handle each situation. It fits right into Pinnacle's philosophy.

Our process makes for efficient and accurate message taking and delivery. A live well trained operator interacts with all our clients callers.

Picking New Answering Service Equipment

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It's a tough decision. And an expensive one. We need new equipment deliver more services more consistently accurately to our medical client base. We do a good job now. But we can provide more and do it better with the next generation of equipment.  So my key decision on which equipment to buy was based on which products delivered the best services for our answering service and call center clients. A second factor was how it helped the operators do a better job in their job of triaging our client's callers. Third, for those detail activities that can be automated, have the equipment take care of them,

There are 5 major players that supply equipment to the answering service industry. Amtelco, Startel, Telescan, CadCom (or OnviSource) and Pinnacle. I looked seriously at all of these systems and at companies that used each of them. It was a tough choice. I eliminated Amtelco for being too expensive for the value they currently deliver, Startel for the current turmoil in the organization, and CadCom for the not being far enough along with their third generation equipment. That left Telescan and Pinnacle. Both  were excellent systems. Both have passionate users and excellent management.

So the decision rested on three major considerations. First was the scripting ability. Scripting, if it's done right, provides consistency to the questions to ask each caller. Our objective is to ask the questions in the same way that our clients would to triage the call and provide that information to our clients. Second, the decision also rested on the reliability and ease of controlling the dispatch process (delivering the messages from our client's callers). And, third, the opinion of Colleen and a couple of our operators on the ease of use played a major role.

With all three considerations, Pinnacle was, in our judgment, the better platform. Pinnacle was much more mature in the scripting process than any of the other platforms. Their experience with PI ... a scripting program designed for taking orders and other call center activities ... was the basis for the Pinnacle platform for the Answering Service industry.

Pinnacle's approach to the dispatch process also seemed more logical. It kept all the information about the on-call people in a specific database, then kept the rules separate yet linked to he people. And, finally co-ordinated the calendar and the time to each. All three are controlled by logical decision making processes that are consistent over time. It seems complicated. But what's really complicated is the decision making process to properly triage a call. If we understand our clients business process and can develop a decision tree of that process, we can develop the rules to make sure the messages are delivered correctly to the right people at the time they want them. Pinnacle's design makes managing the process easy.

Finally, Colleen and my operators really liked the system. They visualized how easy their jobs would be to get the messages right and deliver them correctly for our clients. That was important.

So, that's the reason we picked the Pinnacle platform. The other systems do a good job for other Answering Service companies as well. Maybe next year, one of the other platforms will be better than Pinnacle. But, at least right now, when i need to make a decision, Pinnacle seems to be the best platform for us to expand and deliver additional services to our client base.

Managing Communication Processes for Clients

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Answering services are all about managing communications. One of the major changes in the answering service industry in the last 20 years has been the automation of repetitive processes. The first iteration in the industry was to eliminate paper messages. This happened in the 80's and early 90's. The next iteration began to make some of the answering operations and the dispatch (delivery of messages) automatic. The second generation of automation happened in the 90's and early 2000's. It was largely driven by changes in telephony .... 800 numbers became affordable; long distance rates plummeted; call forwarding became widely available; voice mail technology began to improve etc.

Now there is a third generation of automation that revolves around business process management. It focuses on freeing the operators to maximize their interactive conversations with callers. The automation does much of the routine repetitive operations that are rules based. The technology is just now becoming widely available to answering service/call center companies.

All this background is simply an introduction to some of the changes the we are beginning to implement at Port Answer. I knew when I became involved with Port, that is was operating on very solid second generation answering service equipment. It had served the company well for almost fifteen years. Future growth needs third generation automation.

We have made our decision to invest in a system called Pinnacle. I'll explain my reasoning in another blog. For now, I think we are moving towards the future leader of the third generation of answering service automation equipment. Pinnacle has been a leader in call center rules based scripting for at least 10 years. Four years ago, they combined their rules based scripting to the job of managing the calls and the dispatch for typical answering service clients. In my mind, they got it right for the business of answering services and small call centers.

There are other good equipment providers to the industry. For our clients in Nassau, Suffolk and Queens counties of New York, what Pinnacle offers will allow us to partner with our clients to allow our operators to spend more time in their dialogs with our client's callers. The automated processes will help us make sure that the information our clients want from their callers is taken properly according to the rules our clients have. It helps make sure that the information is dispatched to the right person at the right time ... again rules based.

We are going to a training session this next week to learn how to set up and operate this third generation equipment.  As we learn how all of this works, I'll try to add some blog notes about some of the things we will be able to do efficiently for our clients.