Key Metrics for Evaluating Agent Performance in a Medical Call Center
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
The impetus for call centers was to increase efficiency and save money. This was an admirable goal, and call centers did exactly that. The result is a model that most call centers operate under today. They use this in measuring call center success.
Yet efficiency often conflicts with effectiveness. This means that doing things faster and doing more of it may not be the right model for today’s callers and patients.
The Old Model
With the multitude of statistics that call center platforms generate, it’s easy to build a production-centric mindset based on efficiency statistics. Two common stats that call centers look at for agents is the number of calls answered and average call length.
These numbers get reported to agents. Staff quickly realize that the more calls they answer, the more they’ll be rewarded, be it in praise or bonuses. They soon comprehend that the shorter they make their calls, the more calls they can answer.
The result is that agents drive themselves to do more and to do it faster. Management then perpetuates it by rewarding that behavior.
When this happens, the call center is efficient and keeps costs low. The agents are happy because they’re rewarded for accomplishing these results.
But callers and patients loose in this scenario. It’s no wonder that most all healthcare consumers dread calling their providers and the organizations that support them, such as insurance companies.
The New Model
Instead of letting efficiency dictate everything that happens to the call center, let’s adopt a quality-first mindset. Address caller pain points. Put the patient first.
To do this, stop fixating on call center metrics such as number of calls answered and average call length. That doesn’t mean to stop looking at them. It simply means to start deprioritizing them.
Instead, look at other metrics that indicate quality. But standard call center platform statistics can’t do that. This means we need post call surveys or some sort of patient feedback.
This isn’t as easy to gather and requires more effort to process, but it’s what’s essential to move past the negative reputation that medical call centers face.
The key indicator to look at is caller satisfaction, sometimes called CSAT, for customer satisfaction score. It indicates how happy callers are with the responses they received from call center agents.
Relating to this is FCR or First Call Resolution. Quite simply, did they accomplish the purpose of their call on one try?
Yes, there are times when two or more calls are required, such as when the caller needs to provide more information that they don’t have in front of them on their first call. But for the most part, one call should be all it takes.
Measuring Call Center Success
To move from the old model to the new model for viewing medical call center performance, stop focusing on speed and start focusing on quality. This is the best way of measuring call center success.
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.
