Building Trust With a Healthcare Brand Through Compassionate Patient Support

How iQor Partnered With a Health Care Provider to Deliver Empathy in Patient Support

Background

This healthcare provider operates multiple locations in a diverse community in the United States. It is committed to providing excellent, culturally responsive, comprehensive primary care that is accessible to all of its members. Dedicated to patient-centered care, the provider strives to create excellent customer experiences.

The client has a gifted customer support team committed to providing responsive and empathetic customer care to their patients. But when the global pandemic increased the demand for healthcare services, the healthcare provider sought to make additional investments to achieve their objectives and take their CX journey to the next level. Although they had always provided their own internal customer care services, they now sought an outsourcing partner they could trust with their most important asset—their patients.

This client’s highly skilled leadership team had specific requirements to ensure their patients received the best customer experience. They conducted methodical due diligence to ensure they selected the right outsourcing partner for their healthcare brand and patients. Through a consultative approach, iQor’s teams maintained an open dialogue and worked closely with the healthcare provider to understand their needs, build trust, and address their objectives to best serve their patients.

The Challenge 

For the first time, this healthcare provider was looking for an external partner to boost the speed of response to inbound support calls and harness technology in their CX journey to gain efficiencies. In order for the partnership to be successful, they needed to select a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner that shared similar values and that they could trust. Throughout the selection process, iQor’s teams demonstrated the optimal environment to deliver the CX solution the client needed—details that were important to them were important to us.

These details included a capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence, characteristics of our iQorian Values that guide all that we do. From our first interactions with the healthcare provider, we built rapport through empathy and open dialogue. By cultivating human connections with the healthcare provider, we demonstrated that their patients would be in good hands.

To enhance their patients’ customer experience, this healthcare provider sought workforce management insights, advanced analytics, and a collaborative relationship to improve some of their key performance indicators (KPIs) such as average handle time (AHT). They wanted more than a typical outsourced customer service solution—they wanted a partner they could trust. They wanted a partner who could relate to their patients and sustain the trust this healthcare brand already established with its patients through human connections.

Given the nature of the calls, this needed to be done in response to a complexity of sensitive patient issues while also maintaining compliance standards. The healthcare provider selected iQor as their first and only BPO and iQor has worked closely with them every step of the way to elevate their customer service and build rewarding experiences for their patients.

The Solution 

From the outset, we listened intently to the healthcare provider’s needs and expectations and partnered with them through a consultative approach. We offered the trusting environment they sought, while also ensuring the capability to meet their outsourcing timelines with speed without sacrificing quality. This approach entailed collaborating with sales, operations, human resources, legal, project management, and IT to ensure a successful new customer program implementation.

Empathy permeated these interactions as well as all other aspects of the program, from recruiting to training to coaching, driving excellent experiences for the healthcare provider’s patients. Through transparent and responsive ongoing communication, we worked with the healthcare provider to partner the human element with technology. Utilizing workforce management solutions, speech and sentiment analytics, artificial intelligence, and intuitive digital platforms rooted in shared values, digital technology further enhanced the patient experience.

Throughout the process, we made doing business with us easy. We worked to understand the healthcare provider’s needs and expectations to develop effective customer care solutions. We offered a frictionless statement of work and contracting process, provided seamless compliance and security, and delivered excellent customer service as part of a holistic approach in line with the healthcare provider’s brand.

Learned the Client’s Culture and Earned Their Trust

Through open dialogue, frequent communication, and insightful data-backed recommendations, iQor earned the client’s trust as we embarked on this CX journey together. iQor teams learned the client’s culture and built human connections with patients while delivering consistent, reliable, and responsive customer experiences.

Designed Training and Coaching Programs to Build Empathy

iQor’s award-winning corporate training team and instructional designers worked with the client to provide innovative and creative learning solutions designed to address root behavioral needs aligned to specific outcomes.

In addition to cultivating deep program knowledge with agents, our team worked closely with the client to create a non-traditional approach to develop agents’ cognitive empathy as well. The training was designed to strengthen each agent’s ability to understand what the patient is feeling or thinking and then respond with a genuine sense of caring.

Instead of telling and showing agents how to speak clearly and demonstrate patience, iQor’s training team designed an immersive, real-world learning experience where agents could practice the various skills needed to build human connections, make mistakes along the way, receive feedback from peers and facilitators, and then try again. As a result, agents did not merely know how to establish an authentic human connection, they could actually do it.

Harnessing AI-powered digital technology and speech analytics, we consistently monitor agent interactions and provide ongoing real-time support to help agents refine specific skills as needs arise.

Developed Workforce Management Insights

Upon program launch, we used the client’s volume forecast and historical arrival patterns to schedule agents, subsequently using our own workforce management data as the program progressed. This continually improves forecasting and scheduling accuracy.

Our workforce management team follows standard processes and reviews them with the client on a weekly basis. Coaching sessions are scheduled in real-time to provide the most responsive feedback. Our team also follows the standard real-time adherence (RTA) process to efficiently coordinate requests with operations.

Enhanced Customer Care for Patients

The program scope began with inbound voice customer care for general healthcare services and later expanded to an additional line of business dedicated to voice customer care for dental patients.

We harness workforce management technology and speech analytics expertise to ensure consistent, easy, and enjoyable experiences for patients. Our operations and data analytics teams provide ongoing CX reporting to inform strategies with comprehensive insights and compliance monitoring. Open communication and follow-through have continued throughout our relationship with the client, highlighting areas of opportunity with related action plans. We work in close collaboration with the client to deliver customer experience solutions for patients at the intersection of effectiveness and empathy.

The Results 

iQor’s customer care solutions, ongoing collaboration, and transparent interactions with the healthcare provider built trust while adding value to their operation.

Agents are engaged as they interact with patients. Through open communication and partnership, the program celebrates human connections where patients benefit from compassionate support. The client knows they have a partner that truly cares about their greatest asset, their patients.