The COVID-19 pandemic has badly affected every part of our life. Millions of people throughout the world are facing disastrous challenges including financial, health, emotional, and more related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This outbreak has affected almost all the industries and healthcare is among one of them. The way people used to access healthcare facilities has changed drastically. While following social distancing norms, healthcare providers are trying hard to keep a balance between offering critical services and care to the patients and at the same time protecting themselves as well as front-line workers from getting contaminated.
The pandemic situation has changed the whole working system in this industry. As per a survey it was found that before the emergence of this deadly pandemic, about 11% of patients were using telehealth services. However, in the present time, this number has grown to 76%. Now, communication has become an essential part of healthcare services, especially in large, multi-department healthcare facilities. To make communication a seamless process, many hospitals in the healthcare industry are implementing contact center software. Since the software is a cloud-based system, it has also made Work From Home (WFH) possible for contact center agents in the healthcare sector. Moreover, with the help of omnichannel contact center software patients and doctors can connect with each other on various platforms including voice, video, chat, etc. for remote consultation and primary checkup. Even doctors can interact with each other to discuss a patient’s condition, share patient records, and consult each other about the right treatment for the patient’s situation.
Features of Contact Center Solution for Healthcare Sector
Some of the key features of contact center solution that can benefit the healthcare sector include:
- Unified Communication: Allows patients to use social media, website, smartphone, email, or SMS for interaction.
- Recording and Displaying of Interactions: The recording and displaying of all interactions helps healthcare contact centers to reduce call abandon rates and allow agents to deliver quick assistance to the patients regarding their queries or complaints.
- IVR: As contact center solutions implement IVR for appointment booking and scheduling, waiting time for patients can be reduced to a great extent.
- Skill Based Routing: Based on the type of query, the software can easily route calls to the right department or agent who can handle the patient’s query in the best possible manner.
- WebRTC phones: With WebRTC technology in the form of WebRTC phones, agents can easily communicate with the patients without the need to install any complex devices.
- Real-time monitoring and analytics: With real-time monitoring and analytics features, the hospital management can easily monitor and measure the employee’s performance, response times and analyze caller’s satisfaction level that will help them to implement better strategies for superior customer service.
Benefits of Contact Center Software for Healthcare Industry
With contact center solution, patients are no longer required to wait in hospitals for their turn. They can now have a virtual healthcare experience with the help of this solution that allows them to communicate effectively with the doctors to discuss any health-related concern. Some of the key benefits of contact center solution include:
- Easy Online Appointments: Integrating the contact center solution with the centralized database can make online appointments quite easy for both the patients and doctors. The software can automatically book appointments, send reminders, handle cancellations, and much more. With this facility, patients can easily book a convenient time slot for online consultation and doctors can easily manage their schedule with full access to patient’s records. In all, starting from the registration to post treatment, everything can be managed easily and smoothly with the help of a contact center solution.
- Easy Access to Reports: With the help of an omnichannel contact center software solution, patients can easily access their medical reports on various channels including Email, WhatsApp, and SMS. This eliminates the need to go personally to collect the reports. With a contact center solution, patients can receive their reports quickly and that too at the comfort of their home. Based on the report, patients can quickly connect to their doctors on chat, phone, or video for further assistance or virtual support.
- Maintenance of Patient’s Records: By integrating the software with CRM, hospitals can easily keep and maintain patient’s records in a secure manner without worrying about data theft. Moreover, they can access the data or patient’s history easily as and when required.
- After Treatment Service: With the help of a contact center solution, hospitals can maintain a strong relationship with their patients by creating a patient-centric platform. They can send health related tips, reminders for check-ups through Email, SMS, and various other channels.
Conclusion:
In this tough situation where COVID Pandemic has disturbed everything, healthcare and various other industries can still serve their customers safely with the help of contact center software solution. With telemedicine and virtual healthcare assistance, healthcare service providers can save a lot of their time, effort, and money while delivering a superior patient experience.
Sourced from: Hodusoft. View the original article here.
