Now Is the Time to Invest in Your Call Center’s Future
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.
Long gone are the days when all you needed was a telephone and a message pad to process calls. For decades call centers have relied on technology to increase efficiency and optimize results. And never has that been truer than right now.
Consider these four reasons to invest in technology for your medical call center.
1. Save Time and Increase Efficiency
Advanced technology can offer time-saving processes that will increase the efficiency of your staff. This means they can do more work in the same time or the same work in less time.
If this is the case, you can perform an analysis to calculate your payback period. This is a great approach to cost justify a technology investment.
2. Provide Additional Services
Older equipment can limit the scope of services you provide, but an upgrade may allow you to increase the scope of what you offer to your patients or callers. Again, you can calculate the payback period of your investment.
3. Go Online
Many older systems are premise based, making it difficult to have a distributed workforce or to establish remote work sessions. The present need for people to work at home may never go away, and this development has accelerated the trend toward work-at-home scenarios.
Your future may depend on having this flexibility, so make the move today to prepare for tomorrow.
4. Avoid Obsolescence
A final consideration is platform age. Sometimes you take a system as far as it will let you, and then it limits the service you provide to callers.
If you’re trying to operate using out-of-date technology, you may not be able to cost justify the investment by calculating the payback period or present it as a strategic move to prepare for the future.
But that doesn’t remove the fact that replacing an obsolete system is an essential move if you want to be a viable resource for your organization and callers.
Conclusion
Your call center may already have the best technology available. But remember that systems are always changing, and what’s best today won’t be the best tomorrow. Most call centers, however, have a platform with at least a few areas that need improving.
Now is the time to plan to make that happen.
Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Read his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.