A large clinic suffered an enviable problem of ‘too many inbound calls’. Globe Centrix helped with innovative outsourced staffing solutions to eliminate the problem while delivering measurable success.

Problem

A large cardiology clinic with 12 locations in Florida received too many calls at its call center. This resulted in multiple problems on many fronts. The patients were frustrated with the inability to talk to someone when they called. The call center and clinic staff were overwhelmed with the sheer volume they weren’t staffed to handle. The owners were very worried about increasing leakage, loss of revenue to competition, and a bad social reputation. Due to space constraints, simply adding additional staff to the call center was not an option. To add to the problem, the labor shortages in the industry exacerbated the problem when the call center lost an experienced employee. The clinic also suffered from a lack of Spanish-speaking staff that can serve their patient demographics effectively.

Objectives

Quantify the staffing needs as a function of inbound call volume. Offer an outsourced staffing solution that addressed the issue of employee turnover while meeting the budgeting guidelines.

Solution

With our industry-leading position, Globe Centrix created quantified metrics for various specialties for a variety of front office tasks. Globe Centrix’s ongoing recruitment process for the best talent in India and Nicaragua results in a pool of experienced and junior front office staff that can be readily interviewed by our clients.

Our consultants worked with the call center leaders to re-configure inbound call routing strategies. The team came up with measurable objectives to measure the success. We devised a patient feedback system to measure patient sentiment before and after our corrective measures were implemented. We worked with the clinic’s accounting team to measure revenue impact as a measure of cost increase (to hire additional outsourced staff). Working as a team to establish success criteria brought personnel at Globe Centrix and the clinic together as partners rather than a customer/service provider relationship.

Globe Centrix created a staffing hierarchy of experienced and junior call center agents in India and Nicaragua that helped keep the costs within budget while allowing for employee turnover. Our bilingual staff in Nicaragua also started better serving the needs of Spanish-speaking patients.

Results

The clinic improved the number of appointments by 9%. The number of unanswered calls reduced by 29%. The number of returned calls improved by 35%. The patient sentiment improved from 3 stars to 4 stars out of 5. The cost versus revenue benefit improved by 12%.