From Start to Finish: A Simple Way to Improve Customer Call Experiences

Better visibility into customer call paths can significantly impact service quality

 

A healthcare setting, and the circuitous routes some callers were taking as they traversed hospital departments and staff, offers a window into how one medical facility employed advanced cradle-to-grave call reporting to improve patient happiness and well-being, increase return visits, and elevate staff productivity and morale.

The patient experience manager at a large urban hospital wondered if having a better understanding of what was happening to inbound calls to her facility – where the calls were coming from, where they were going, and who was attending to them – could impact patient care and workforce efficiency.

To get answers, she started asking questions:

“What happens to a patient’s call once it is received by the hospital?”

“Is the call answered immediately? Is it transferred? Does it ever wind up in voice mail? How often?”

“Can we determine how many other patient calls were received at the same time as the first patient call?”

“Is the facility able to appropriately staff itself based on call volume or other factors such as time of day?”

“Do patients typically receive hospital staff calls prior to admittance? Are they supposed to?”

“After a patient’s visit, are follow-up calls made to them? And if so, by whom? When?”

In some cases, the manager was able to secure the answers she needed. But in many instances, she found a black hole.

Simply put, the Cisco Unified Communications system that was in place had significant gaps in its ability to identify important communications touchpoints and measure ongoing staff performance. And ultimately, no way to link improvements in patient communications with desired patient and business outcomes.

Enter Infortel Select CDR and cradle-to-grave reporting

By adding Infortel Select’s powerful cradle-to-grave call tracking visibility, the hospital gained an effective tool to optimize patient experience. Now the patient experience manager is armed with call progression metrics and the ability to identify such touchpoint issues as excessive or unnecessary call transfers, forwards, and re-directs from her desktop.

Each time Cisco produces a call record, if there are related calls, the platform provides a unique call ID that can be used to link related call events. Infortel Select’s end-to-end reports provide a view of these related calls in chronological order, which is extremely beneficial for a manager looking to ensure efficient and effective call handling.

With cradle-to-grave reporting, managers can explore call activity at the dashboard level, drill down to see calls that have related call segments, and review how the call was addressed within the organization. In addition, criteria-based transferred call path reports can be accessed to further illuminate customer journeys.

Validate customer complaints with a clear view of activity

Now when the patient experience manager sees multiple inbound calls, she has the start-to-finish reporting tools needed to determine what happened to each one – such as whether the person was transferred more than once or sent to the wrong department altogether.

With cradle-to-grave call flow analysis, organizations can:

  • Understand forwards, transfers, overflow, and other call redirection events
  • Use this information to optimize caller experience, increase first call resolution (FCR), and improve the efficiency of call handling within the organization
  • Identify inefficient call routing such as excess steps
  • Aid routing design through a better understanding of common call patterns
  • Identify the sources of calls sent to voice mail
  • Identify employees that might be excessively or inappropriately transferring callers
  • Identify problematic automated attendant applications

Cradle-to-grave call flow analysis and call progression metrics also provide the visibility hunt group supervisors and customer service managers need to identify employee training and coaching needs.

Transferred call path reports offer the ability to search by date, time, caller ID, department, or by initiating extension, participating extension, or terminating extension, to find the related call path, disclosing how employees interact with callers. This is an especially valuable tool for HR departments seeking to better understand employee performance levels.

Infortel Select also provides drill-down capabilities for identifying call segments from within call exploration or behind dashboard widgets. This allows for ad-hoc searching of related call segments by various constraints, including caller ID, involved extension numbers, number of related legs, etc. Taken together, this drill down functionality and the transferred call path reporting capabilities help call centers improve FCR rates.

Interested in learning more about the cradle-to-grave visibility that Infortel Select provides in a Cisco UC environment? Connect with us for a demonstration and let our team show you the power of Infortel Select.