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Call Center

A Different Perspective on Health Insurance

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD It happened again. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does. In fact, it has been said so often that most people believe it to be true and accept it as fact. What am I talking about? Once again, a politician has stood up and impassionedly, emphatically, and convincingly asserted that […]

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Healthcare Call Centers

Reputation, Referrals, and Credentials

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Your call center may be an in-house operation or an outsourcer processing calls and contacts for other organizations. If you are an internal call center, you will be viewed either as a profit center or as a cost center (outsource call centers are always profit centers); also you could be […]

Categories
Call Center

Are You In or Out?

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Since you are reading this column, it is highly likely that in some way or manner, you are in the call center industry. However, the question, “Are you in or out?” does not query your connection to the industry, but rather your participation within it. Those who operate call centers, […]

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Healthcare Call Centers

Call Center Credentials

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD You say and believe that your call center is good, but can you prove it? What you need is a credential. A credential is the verifiable recognition from an independent third party that you have earned and met a standard level of performance. Credentials fall under three, sometimes overlapping, classifications: […]

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Healthcare Call Centers

Call Center Benchmarking

A Path to Self-Improvement By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Benchmarking is the comparison of your call center with statistical results from the norm of industry peers. These numeric measurements are called metrics. Metrics can be in the form of financial figures, operational quality and efficiency, human resource efficacy, or whatever is deemed the most valuable […]

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Call Center

Beam Me Up Scotty

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD It was a lazy summer afternoon, a Friday. Things were a bit slow at the office and upper management had all left to get an early jump on their weekend. I, being a front-line manager, did not have that luxury. Besides, I had work that I wanted to complete before […]

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Call Center

My Response to Spam

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Do you like spam? Does anyone? I’m not talking about the luncheon meat product SPAM, which is produced by Hormel Foods Corporation, but rather the inundation of unwanted messages that increasingly plagues us. Unless you happen to be one of those who delight in propagating spam messages, I am confident […]

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Healthcare Call Centers

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. This fall, the thoughts of school age children everywhere are focused on returning to school. Some approach the new school year with dread and trepidation, a few with excitement and high expectation, and others with inevitable acquiescence and acceptance. Regardless of their personal perspective, many will be faced with the […]

Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Telephone Answering Service Systems

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Telephone answering services are by definition a subset of the call center industry. However, while the greater call center industry has a history spanning more than 30 years, telephone answering service has an 80-year history. In the 1920s, and the decades that followed, enterprising entrepreneurs began opening localized telephone answering […]

Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Achieving Clinical Excellence in Telephone Triage

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. The first annual Reach for the Stars Pediatric Telehealth Conference was held April 30 through May 1 in Bloomington, MN. The conference, organized by Children’s Physician Network of Minneapolis-St Paul, MN, focused on Achieving Clinical Excellence in Telephone Triage. With nearly 300 participants and a dozen vendors represented, attendance exceeded […]