When you board a plane, the flight attendants are there to greet you, and as you deplane, they wave you off as you arrive at your destination. Think of a provider’s contact center as creating this same warm welcome followed by a gracious goodbye. You want every patient’s interaction to result in a valuable experience.
Why is creating this welcoming environment so imperative? Because there is a direct connection to the success of your financial and marketing operations.
A contact center that provides a great experience aligns with having positive conversion rates, intake rates, and ultimately, the attribution modeling to determine the marketing and revenue you will generate.
A provider’s contact center is often leveraged for financial and revenue cycle management. Agents can cover everything from patients’ questions about billing to financial counseling, case management, and even collections.
But a provider can take it a step further and better capitalize on these patient interactions by exploring additional financial areas that can lead to overall cost savings. Here are four to consider:
A provider’s contact center is better able to handle your incoming referral volume because of its ability to drive higher outreach and contact with patients. This capability minimizes referral leakage while simultaneously meeting the expectations of both the patient and referring provider. You will help close the care gaps, reduce risks, and drive down the cost of care. A bonus of closing care gaps is that providers create favorable outcomes for the payers that can improve a provider’s status in terms of their network hierarchy, as well as with reimbursement rates or turnaround times on insurance verification cycling.
The contact center can help mitigate cancellation or no-show rates by reaching out to those patients, recapturing them, and identifying a reason code for why they may have canceled or not shown up. This initiative reduces the overarching cancellation and no-show rate and helps remediate the revenue that otherwise might have fallen through the cracks.
If a patient is scheduled for surgery, the contact center can reach out to the patient and explain what they must do and not do prior to the procedure. This outreach ensures that on the day of the surgery, the procedure will not be canceled and result in a loss of revenue for the provider.
After an inpatient stay, the contact center can arrange discharge calls that can help with reducing the readmission rate of patients, resulting in less financial risk. The agent makes sure there is a continuity of care visit scheduled within a few days after the discharge, and any subsequent visits to retain a continuous revenue stream.
All of these areas are facilitated by the contact center’s capability to look at the entirety of each patient’s electronic health records (EHR) within Salesforce. This 360 component bolsters the agent’s ability to act on services that otherwise might have been missed. For example, if a patient calls to schedule a primary care visit, the agent may notice in the medical record that the patient is due for a flu shot. The agent can offer to take care of the flu shot during the same visit.
Salesforce saves the patient time and delivers a better experience with the provider by driving first-call resolution, because the ultimate goal is to reduce call volume in order to increase revenue efficiently. An administrator at a clinic will not have the bandwidth to work at lowering call volume, whereas a contact center can manage the patient lifecycle from the front to back ends.
Providers can use marketing campaigns to acquire new patients, drive attendance at an enrollment event, or provide general education around preventive health or disease management.
You want your marketing outreach messaging to trigger conversions in order to drive attribution effectively. But the only way to reduce your marketing costs per gross new patient acquisition is to ensure that the marketing campaign allows for some type of intake model.
This is where the opportunity for your contact center comes in. It can act as a centralized intake mechanism for specific marketing, outreach, and education campaigns during a patient’s episodic care journey. Expand your contact center’s functionality for centralized intake by giving agents visibility into your active marketing campaigns that have targeted your patients, and provide them with the Salesforce tools to capture information on the intake calls for those campaigns.
A provider wants to ensure that they are consistently getting feedback straight from the patient on how to improve their marketing, or identify where there may be a need for new service opportunities within the healthcare platform to expand upon. The contact center is the optimal way to learn the preferences of a provider’s patient population.
Since contact centers are capturing the voice of your patients, a recommendation is to hold focus groups with your center’s agents. Gather agents’ perceptions of patients’ feedback around the marketing campaigns and what they feel is working or not working, and suggest tweaks that could be made. Lead the discussion with agents by asking:
Salesforce Health Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud make up the trio of Salesforce products to support your contact center’s financial and marketing operations. Silverline can help you leverage these tools to create that warm welcome and gracious goodbye that are essential to your financial and marketing gains. Learn how our healthcare experts can help you implement a solution that meets your unique needs.
The original version of this page was published at: https://silverlinecrm.com/blog/healthcare/driving-financial-and-marketing-success-with-your-contact-center/
With real-world expertise in the Healthcare industry, including sub-segments such as Provider, Payer, Medical Device, and Life Sciences, Silverline helps clients realize continuous value on the Sal... Read more
