Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Welcome To AnswerStat Magazine!

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Let me be the first to welcome you to the premier issue of AnswerStat magazine. AnswerStat is dedicated to providing you, our readers with practical, relevant, and useful information about healthcare and medical related call centers.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

We are an advertiser-supported publication, which allows us to send this magazine to you, free of charge. Here is some more information:

Who Receives AnswerStat?: AnswerStat is sent free to:

  • Hospital call centers and phone centers
  • Medical answering services
  • Other healthcare related call centers.

What You Do: Readers of AnswerStat are involved in:

  • Switchboard / PBX Console
  • Medical Answering Service
  • Nurse Triage
  • Physician Referral
  • Event Registration
  • Scheduling
  • Data Collection / Verification
  • Insurance
  • Other Medical Related Call Center Functions
  • Consultants

You Can Help: As I mentioned, AnswerStat is an advertiser-supported magazine. This means that advertising revenue pays to have the magazine designed, printed, and mailed to you. You do not need to pay for your subscription. The more advertisers we have, the more useful content we can provide to you. If your call center vendors are not advertising in AnswerStat, please encourage them to do so. We will all benefit as a result.

Free Subscription: Let your colleagues and associates know about AnswerStat. The on-line form is quick and easy to fill out, asking only for information directly related to your subscription. Because your time is valuable, we won’t make you to fill out pages of irrelevant information or ask you to justify why you should receive our magazine. That is just who we are, straightforward and no-nonsense.

Calling all Authors: AnswerStat is looking for articles from our readers, those who work every day in medical related call centers and have real-world experience and knowledge that they are willing to share. Regardless of your level of writing ability or skill, we can work with you to turn your article into a quality piece of which we will all be proud. To get started, download our article guidelines from our website. If you have an article already done, you may email it to me directly. We will take it from there.

Our Website: The AnswerStat website is designed to be a useful resource for you, our readers, whom we serve. Here are some of the resources available:

  • A glossary of call center terms.
  • Area code listings, sorted by area code and by state. We also list codes that are being changed, as well as those that could be changed in the future.
  • An on-line version of our Buyer’s Guide.
  • An article archive, including relevant articles from our sister publication, Connections Magazine.
  • A subscription form. It is free and takes less than a minute to fill out.

About the Publisher: I, have over 20 years of experience in the call center and teleservice industry. Most of that time was spent working in a call center in various technical and management capacities. I also spent three years in the vendor side of the industry in customer support, programming, and documentation.

For the last three years, I have been working as a consultant, focusing on the needs of call centers. Two years ago I became a magazine publisher with the purchase of Connections Magazine, which focuses on the needs of outsource call centers.

The combined experience of consulting for hospital and medical call centers and publishing a call center magazine has brought me to this point – launching a magazine specifically for medical related call centers.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D., is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Get his book, Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Benchmarking Your Call Center

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

What is benchmarking? At its simplest, benchmarking is objectively comparing your call center with others. Brad Cleveland of Incoming Calls Management Institute states that “Benchmarking is comparing products, services, and processes with those of other organizations, to identify new ideas and improvement opportunities.” Whereas Dr. Jon Anton of Purdue University defines benchmarking as “A structured, analytical approach to identify, deploy, and review best practices to gain and maintain competitive advantage.”

Peter DeHaan, Publisher and Editor of AnswerStat

Benchmarking is a safe, anonymous, and effective way to obtain input from peers which can be used to compare and contrast your call center operation to others. This feedback provides a baseline for determining areas of deficiency, as well as success. Benchmarking produces quantifiable results, real numbers from real businesses, thereby offering real solutions. Also, once a benchmarking process has been implemented, it can be easily repeated and updated on a periodic basis. This provides a time line of successive snapshots of your business. In essence, benchmarking makes it possible to create a report card showing your successes, your shortcomings, your improvements, and your relapses – all with respect to your peers, but done so privately and confidentiality.

Therefore, call center benchmarking is the comparison of your operation with statistical results from the norm of industry peers. These numeric measurements are called metrics. Metrics can be in the form of financial data, sales numbers, operational quality and efficiency, human resource efficacy, or whatever is deemed to be the most valuable to the participants, though typically and primarily they are operational in nature.

Successful benchmarking follows a progressive path towards a desired outcome. First and foremost, there must be a desire to obtain and use the information. Next, you need to determine who will be invited to participate. It is essential for participants to have an interest in the results and a commitment to contribute. Beyond that, it is imperative that all participants have sufficiently similar businesses. In many cases, it is wise to select those using common equipment or software platforms, since operational metrics are hard to reliably compare when their sources employ dissimilar statistical paradigms.

The third step is to determine which numbers to measure. It is recommended to start small, obtaining only a few key numbers (as participants become engaged in the process and realize the value of it, then other metrics can be added). It will then be necessary to develop a standard determination of how the information will be gathered or the calculations will be made. For without a standard methodology, each participant will make the calculations as they see fit, rendering any results unreliable. These two steps can be both time-consuming and contentious. Assistance from someone with experience in benchmarking or a background in statistical analysis is most beneficial at this point. This outside assistance serves to greatly simplify the process and save valuable time. Also, if this person does not have a direct vested interest in the results, they are better able to objectively guide the process.

The fifth step is a critical one. It is to develop the survey form, which includes documenting the source or calculation of the data. Although this seems like a simple and straightforward process, it is one fraught with peril, as a less than ideal survey form will doom the process to misanalysis or failure. Again, someone with experience in benchmarking or developing survey forms will be most helpful. Then, regardless of the quality of the survey form – or its developer – it is of paramount importance to test it. What may seem perfectly clear to those who developed and reviewed the form, could cause confusion or misinterpretation to those completing it. Therefore, a small field test should be conducted. Any problems uncovered in the test will need to be corrected before the benchmark survey is distributed to all participants.

The next two steps are the most important, as concerns in these areas can cause otherwise willing participants to decide not to complete the survey or to color their responses. Quite simply these steps are to gather the completed surveys and then to compile the results. Concerns reside in who performs these two steps. It is imperative that this person or group be trusted and respected by all participants and that there not be any perception of impropriety or a conflict of interest. As such, it is recommended that someone who is not participating in, and will not benefit from, the benchmarking results be assigned the task of both collecting and tabulating the responses.

The results of the benchmarking survey are only presented in aggregate form and then only to those who responded. All individual answers must be fully protected. In some cases, such as providing cross-sectional or demographic analysis, certain sections may need to be eliminated due to a small number of responses which would effectively expose one or two participants. The results, often along with an analysis and commentary, are distributed to all who submitted data.

Although conducting a benchmarking study once is valuable, the real benefit comes from repeated studies over the course of time. Therefore, it is important to follow-up with those who participated to determine any problem areas needing correction or additional data to be collected. These changes must be made before the survey is repeated. Depending on the nature of the information, the survey should be repeated at least annually, possibly quarterly, or even monthly.

Some examples of benchmarking metrics:

Operational

  • Percent of calls answered
  • Average time to answer
  • Percent of calls placed on hold
  • Average hold time
  • Occupancy (percent of time spent working)
  • Average call duration
  • Average wrap up time
  • Number of calls answered per month
  • Amount of time spent on calls per month
  • Schedule adherence

Sales and Marketing

  • Number of sales made
  • Sales per hour
  • Average revenue per sale
  • Number of inquiries
  • Closing ratios
  • Source of leads

Human Resource

  • Annual turnover rate
  • Average employee (CSR) tenure
  • Cost to hire one new employee
  • Cost to train one new employee
  • Starting pay per hour
  • Average hourly rate

Financial

  • Percent of revenue spent on labor
  • Percent of revenue spent on marketing promotions
  • Percent of revenue spent on all sales and marketing efforts
  • Number of clients
  • Average revenue per client
  • Cost per sale
  • Profit margin

Conclusion: Benchmarking is a valuable mechanism to bring outside experience, information, and knowledge into a business. With this input, business goals become more defined and realistic; direction, clearer; and focus, sharper. It is an opportunity for improvement that should be seized.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D., is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Get his book, Sticky Customer Service.