Be Intentional About What You Do So You Can Do It Better and Faster By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Running a telephone answering service is a labor-intensive endeavor. It takes staff to offer the personal service your clients expect. And staffing costs money, emerging as your greatest expense. It may be tempting to automate your […]
Care for Your Staff and They’re More Likely to Care for You and Your Callers Staffing a call center is hard. Keeping it staffed is getting harder. With finding new staff becoming increasingly challenging, retaining existing staff is even more critical. Here are five tips to create a positive call center work environment and boost […]
Top Metrics for Evaluating Performance and Efficacy By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Call centers have been around for decades, and the industry has an established set of proven metrics to measure overall performance and outcomes. Let’s take a moment to review some of these top call center metrics to use in measuring success. Then consider […]
A Decentralized Call Center Is an Oxymoron By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD In the early days of our industry, the label call center fit perfectly. We handled calls from a central location. This was necessitated by the platform we used, which we installed in our office. It consisted of physical hardware to switch calls and […]
Address These Critical Items to Better Retain Staff and Serve Callers By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Operating a successful call center in the healthcare industry is hard. There is a never-ending tension to balance the expectations of patients and callers with the needs of operational staff, all the while remaining fiscally viable. Here are six […]
3 Responses to Using AI to Serve Customers By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Predictions about the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) have been with us for decades. But until recently they only showed up in science fiction books and movies—usually with dire results. Such is the basis for good fiction. Yet in recent months, advances […]
Pursue Agent Cross Training to Produce Better Outcomes and Improve Efficacy By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. In my post “Integrate Your Call Center” I discussed various integration strategies to pursue. Now I’ll dive into each one of them with more intentionality. First up is to integrate call center staff. The key requirement to staffing integration […]
Effectively Handle Communication Channels in a Medical Contact Center By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. In the last issue of AnswerStat we looked at the need for multichannel integration in your healthcare contact center to better serve patients and produce superior outcomes. We considered this from a systems standpoint. Now let’s look at multichannel from an […]
Let Your Call Center Employees Know You Appreciate Their Work By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. We just celebrated Thanksgiving in the United States, which is a time where we typically reflect on what we’re thankful for—when we’re not scarfing down a holiday feast. Do you let your staff know you appreciate them? I’m sure you’ll […]
Give Staff Opportunities to Make an Impact through Their Work By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. We’ve been considering five strategies to retain call center staff. The first four are through agent compensation, agent benefits, learning situations, and growth potential. Now we’ll address the fifth one. It’s showing staff how they can make a difference in […]