Open enrollment is one of the busiest and most stressful times of the year for healthcare insurance providers and consumers alike. In fact, many healthcare insurers start planning for open enrollment the minute the last season has come to a close. This is good thinking, as no company wants to find themselves getting ready only a few weeks before November 1st. Regardless, one of the main challenges during this time period is communication, with the cumulative call center volume in the federal marketplace totaling more than 14,569,000 in 2016 alone, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medical Services.
It makes sense: Customers are likely to be overwhelmed by the information they need to sift through in order to make serious decisions about their healthcare coverage. They are bound to have questions for call center agents. This, compounded by their desire to obtain the same level of customer service as they would from their favorite retail and tech brands, leads to massive spikes in call volume for most healthcare call centers. And while it might be tempting to forgo quality customer interactions and neglect the customer experience during this extremely stressful time of year, it’s of the utmost importance that call centers aim to please. After all, this is how customer relationships are made or broken.
How can your call center improve customer interactions during the most important time of year for consumers’ healthcare choices? That’s easy. In our latest tip sheet, you will learn the most important steps to take to get your call center into gear.
(Get the full tip sheet here!)
Everyone knows how important it is to monitor metrics, but do you know how to pick the right ones, and implement an effective strategy? The trick to successfully manage metrics is to specifically identify which data points are relevant to you, and to analyze what that data means to your organization. What makes this task so daunting for contact centers is the sheer number of metrics to choose from: Service Level, Customer Satisfaction Score, Abandon Rate, First Call Resolution, Average Speed to Answer, and the list goes on.
Conference season is upon us! This year you can catch up with 
First Call Resolution is one of the most commonly watched call center metrics. There’s good reason for this attention: When done properly, FCR captures both efficiency and effectiveness of a call center. Many other metrics fall into trap of sacrificing one for the other. For example, if you focus on reducing handle time, you can end up with shorter calls (and a superficial improvement in efficiency), but a less effective customer service operation overall.
Picture it: Your customer service is being inundated with calls, emails, and messages through every channel – perhaps you’re facing a product recall or a Black Friday sale, or it’s just one of “those” days – how do you effectively prepare for times like these? To successfully dodge any customer experience disaster it’s important to be proactive and have preventative measures in place. When you have a reliable back-up plan, preventing disaster can be accomplished in 5 minutes or less.![[Video] One Contact – One Channel and Why it Matters](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Video-One-Contact-–-One-Channel-and-Why-it-Matters.jpg "[Video] One Contact – One Channel and Why it Matters")
OCR is defined as the percentage of customers who successfully resolve an inquiry or problem during their first contact using only one channel. A simple way to think about this is ‘one contact – one channel’.![[Webinar] 5 Ways to Master “One Contact Resolution”](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Webinar-5-Ways-to-Master-“One-Contact-Resolution”.jpg "[Webinar] 5 Ways to Master “One Contact Resolution”")
