Improving Contact Center Quality for the Healthcare Industry

The Houston Methodist Hospital is an internationally recognized, private, adult teaching hospital affiliated with Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Offering the latest innovations in medical, surgical, and diagnostic techniques, the hospital, one of only a handful in Texas recognized by The Best Hospitals in America, is among the country’s largest non-profit health care providers. Its medical staff include dozens of physicians listed in The Best Doctors in America.

When it came time to evaluate the hospital’s busy call center, The Houston Methodist Hospital System turned to another team of highly experienced and dedicated professionals: ARC.

Jeff Wu, Contact Center Manager at The Houston Methodist Hospital System, oversees five contact center agents who handle about 200 calls a day. Wu’s agents handle doctor appointments, referrals, and class and seminar registrations. The statistics for these agents, who average fourteen years of experience, are stellar:

• 10 second average speed of answer less than 5% abandon rate.
• 3-minute average call length.

Wu explains that “our agents are top notch and work really hard to provide great service to our patients, but we needed an independent third-party firm to help us measure the quality of service that we were delivering.” Somewhat surprisingly, Wu had a difficult time finding a vendor that could help: “It seemed that every firm that we talked to said that they could not handle evaluating a medical call center or said that our call volume was too low to justify working with us.”

Wu recalls that “ARC was very receptive to our needs from the very beginning, and I could tell that they were going to be a pleasure to work with.” After checking ARC’s references, Wu asked for a proposal: “Their references were excellent, and their pricing was exceptional!” Cheryl Thibault, ARC’s founder, worked closely with Wu on the feedback survey questions, agent scorecards and every detail of how the call center was going to be evaluated. According to Wu, “Cheryl and her team are open to new ideas and very creative – they really go the extra mile to help.”

After four years of ARC providing mystery shopping and detailed call analysis services to the hospital, Wu is happy to report that “we have never had one issue with ARC’s services or support.” Having leveraged ARC’s services and robust reporting capabilities into solid metrics, Wu says that “they really know their product line. It is refreshing to deal with such an honest and flexible company. I highly recommend them to any call center looking to improve their overall operations and customer service levels.”