Call Center of the Future

By Kevin Beale 


I think it’s human nature to find things to keep ourselves busy. I certainly am no exception to that rule. I always have a million things I need to be doing for work or at home. One of the hardest things to do is to take a step back from our daily regimen to plan for the future.

Occasionally, looking into the future is a good exercise. So here goes.
Predicting the future of a business segment such as call centers is not magic, it is simply a process of paying attention to trends and making calculated guesses on how those trends will continue or change in the future.

One of the constants of our industry is change. We are constantly being pushed by clients to offer enhanced services to meet their unique business objectives. Clients don’t care about the technology utilized to run our call centers as long as they feel we’ll be there when they need us. They’re focused more on the services we provide for them. That’s where each call center has the opportunity to distinguish itself from the competition.

Call scripting
 
Call centers have always guided agents through call flows. In the past, this was done by reading instructions and forcing our agents to make on-the-fly decisions. The new model for call flow guidance tends more to sophisticated scripting engines. Scripting shifts the burden of making decisions away from the frontline agents and puts it in the hands of supervisors and managers who can work with clients to determine and agree on the optimum call flow. The role of scripting will continue to expand and grow to include scripting of the dispatch process and Web-connectivity to client systems.

Virtualization

Virtual call centers will become more prevalent in the coming years, especially as an element of the consolidation that is taking place in the call center industry. Virtual call centers will be much more flexible than traditional call centers which are constrained by their locations, floor space, and physical agent positions. Virtual call centers will utilize collocated call center solutions and remote agents. Use of a collocated call center solution breaks the call center away from the physical constraints and overhead costs of a building, equipment room, and back-up power. The use of remote agents eliminates physical floor space requirements, heating and cooling, break rooms, agent computers, and, more importantly, allows much more flexible hour-by-hour staffing, greatly minimizing the biggest non-essential expense a call center faces, the overhead of idle labor.

Shared services

Many call centers are forming partnerships with other call centers with the goal of sharing client calls to form one large borderless call center. Sharing client calls can greatly expand the call volume capacity of participating call centers, allowing each call center to market to larger clients with the assurance they will have the capacity to meet the client’s traffic requirements. There are two aspects to client sharing: redirecting or overflowing of calls, which can be accomplished through arrangements with telephone carriers and can be enhanced through use of VoIP-based SIP trunking, and the sharing of client scripts and data. The use of Web scripting and client sharing tools, such as those available with AMTELCO’s Intelligent Series, can assist call centers in implementing this business expansion strategy.

Call forwarding

One-number call forwarding has been gaining popularity for several years. This trend will continue and will pick up steam in the years ahead. The driving factor for this shift is cost savings, both in terms of telephone carrier costs and potential tax savings if proposed surcharges (new taxes) on phone numbers are enacted. One-number call forwarding allows call centers to eliminate the vast majority of DID numbers by keying on the calling number, called number or forwarded number of each call. Call center systems that can read any of these call fields on a client-by-client basis, provide big benefits to their owners.

Disaster planning

Disaster recovery has become a major focus of the call center industry across all vertical markets. This trend will continue. Disaster recovery solutions may be put in place by call centers within their infrastructure to provide redundancy of essential call center components. It may also be implemented by partnering with their vendor on hosted disaster recovery solutions. A recent example of the power of partnering with a call center vendor for disaster recovery is the situation that occurred at a Midwest call center that lost all telephone connectivity for several days when a major cable was cut by a construction crew. The call center worked with its phone carrier to quickly redirect calls to an emergency backup system at AMTELCO’s corporate headquarters in McFarland, Wisconsin. This kept the call center in business during a situation that stretched into days and could have been catastrophic. Every call center should be making such disaster recovery plans.

VoIP technology

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will continue to become more prevalent in the call center industry. The growth of VoIP will benefit call centers looking to expand on their use of remote agents, by providing low-cost audio connectivity that is available virtually anywhere. Over the next few years, we’ll start to see VoIP take hold on the trunking side of the business. Call centers will begin replacing their existing PRI ISDN spans with VoIP-based SIP trunks and will find them to be cost effective and reliable. SIP trunks provide many benefits to call centers, including cost savings, nationwide local numbers, and more flexibility in overflowing calls to partner call centers and rerouting calls for disaster recovery situations.

Soft Switching

There is an emerging trend towards software-based switching in the telecom industry. Software-based switching utilizes a computer’s central processor to manage switching functions rather than CTI board-based processors and DSP resources. One of the challenges of software-based switching has been to match the scalability and reliability of hardware-based switching. This is still a work in progress with open-source PBX’s such as Asterisk leading the way. While we may not see mainstream call centers banking their entire business on soft switching for quite some time, we will see call centers utilizing soft switching for specialized functions and applications. These software-based switching solutions will continue to advance and become more prevalent in the call center industry.

Soft Agents

One soft switch-related opportunity for our industry will be the emergence of switch independent soft agents, such as AMTELCO’s Infinity Soft Agent, that are capable of integrating with any third-party PBX or ACD system. This will give call center owners much more flexibility in selecting their switching platforms and will open up the opportunity to connect directly to client PBX’s and ACD’s.
Change is inevitable and not to be feared. It’s one of the exciting things about the call center industry. We are constantly forced to reshape our businesses to meet ever changing client demands. I guess that’s why we like what we do so much.

(Kevin Beale is director of software research and development for AMTELCO and 1Call)

Pro Show Provides an Easy Way to Remind Patients About Upcoming Appointments and Eliminate “No Shows!”

Healthcare organizations must constantly contend with patients who miss their scheduled appointments without notifying the physician’s office. These “no show” appointments cost thousands of dollars in wasted resources and staff. 1Call’s Pro Show Automated Appointment Reminder application helps healthcare organizations be proactive by reminding patients in advance, saving time, saving money, and increasing staff productivity. Pro Show is available as an on-site or remotely hosted solution.

1Call’s Pro Show can remind patients via home phone, mobile phone, e-mail, and text messages. Pro Show can send reminders instantly when the information is received, or they can be scheduled to be sent 72 hours, 48 hours, 24 hours, or any amount of time prior to the appointments. In addition to reminders for patients, Pro Show can also be used to remind physicians and staff members about upcoming meetings, events, classes, and for virtually any type of notification service needed. Pro Show offers multilingual capabilities, helping healthcare organizations ensure they can use it for even more patients, physicians, and staff members. Since Pro Show is automated, staff members that were assigned to call patients to remind them of their upcoming appointments can now work on other needed tasks in the organization.

Pro Show features built-in flexibility, efficiency and convenience, ensuring that it meets the specific needs of each healthcare organization. The types of notification, and number of attempts can be customized for each recipient. The time of day, and the days of the week that Pro Show can send reminders can also be customized for each recipient, eliminating late night, early morning, weekend and holiday reminders. For children’s appointments, Pro Show adjusts the prompts to be geared towards the patient’s parent or guardian. Pro Show keeps track of the outcomes of each notification attempt, giving healthcare organizations the data needed for accurate reports and statistics.
Healthcare organizations are currently using Pro Show to make thousands of automated appointment reminder calls, text message reminders, and e-mail reminders each month. These organizations have reported a significant reduction of patient no shows. Since patients who miss their appointments typically need to reschedule their appointments, an added benefit of Pro Show in these organizations is a considerable reduction in the number of people being placed on waiting lists.

1Call President Tom Curtin said, “Pro Show helps healthcare organizations keep their waiting rooms full, keeping their employees more productive while also increasing revenue for their organizations. Because of this, using Pro Show keeps both administrators and physicians happy.”

Technorati Tags: appointment reminders,medical appointments,medical appointment reminders,doctor appointment reminders,sms appointment reminders,text message appointment reminders,hospital appointment reminders,physician appointment reminder,automated appointment reminders,automatic appointment reminders

Advanced call center models measure more than just talk time - Combine inputs from various sources - Managed Healthcare Executive

Advanced call center models measure more than just talk time - Combine inputs from various sources - Managed Healthcare Executive



This blog is sponsored by 1Call, a Division of AMTELCO

AMTELCO Soft Agent Passes Cisco IVT Certification

AMTELCO Soft Agent Passes Cisco IVT Certification



This blog is sponsored by 1Call, a Division of AMTELCO

Ten predictions for the mobile health market

Ten predictions for the mobile health market



This blog is sponsored by 1Call, a Division of AMTELCO

The Future of Paging “miSecureMessages”

For decades our 1Call hospital and healthcare customers have used pagers almost exclusively as a means to alert doctors and nurses for emergency and some non-emergency issues. However, the expanding popularity of smartphones in the medical field is changing the need for pagers in the future.

Paging as a service was in its heyday in the mid 1990s until its popularity peaked in 1999. Since then the paging industry has taken a back seat to mobile two-way technology like mobile phones and more recently, smartphones. iPhone ®, iPad™, BlackBerry ®, and Android™ technology has changed the lives of average people, and now it’s finding its way into the healthcare fields and starting to take hold with physicians. Most physicians are trading in their pagers for smartphones. According to a recent Manhattan Research study, 72 percent of U.S. physicians use smartphones, and the research firm predicts that 81 percent of physicians will use a smartphone by 2012.¹

So with such a high percentage of physicians already carrying smartphones, how do we send pages to smartphones

Image by Amtelco-Secure Smartphone Messaging

miSecureMessages is a product developed by AMTELCO/1Call as a pager replacement and two-way encrypted messaging application (app) for smartphones. miSecureMessages is used by 1Call customers in conjunction with their Infinity hospital call center/intelligent PBX console systems, as a stand-alone browser accessible messaging dispatch and monitoring product, or as a device-to-device messaging platform.

To send a message, the user simply selects the miSecureMessages smartphone icon, types the message, and clicks send. The physician receives an instant alert, and can view the secure message, and respond with a preprogrammed response, or their own custom message. The reply is securely sent back to the user. All of this activity is recorded, and can be viewed online real-time.

To find out more about miSecureMessages visit https://misecuremessages.com/

See for yourself how easy it is to send a secure message with miSecureMessages.

1. 72 percent of physicians use smartphones, by Brian Dolan, May 5, 2010, http://mobilehealthnews.com/7505/72-percent-of-us-physicians-use-smartphones/.

Matt Everly is the Marketing Director for Amtelco’s 1Call Healthcare Division and can be reached at maeverly@1call.com

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Technorati Tags: Paging,pagers,pager replacement,smartphone,application,app,AMTELCO,1Call,iPhone,iPad,Blackberry

1Call Ushers In The Next Generation Of Cloud-Based Scheduling Applications With miOnCall

Recently, we have worked with customers and prospects that manually keep track of oncall scheduling information using binders and spreadsheets to organize all types of schedules. This method works, but I think a few questions need to be asked when taking this approach: 1.) How many people-hours does it take to create and maintain schedules this way? 2.) Is there a more efficient way of creating, maintaining and sharing oncall schedules?

When speaking with healthcare customers and prospects we found out that it IS very time consuming to create and maintain ANY type of schedule. In many instances overnight hospital personnel create and assemble oncall binders with paper schedules, and guess what? As soon as these binders are distributed and starting to be used by  hospital personnel, they are rendered out of date. Changes to these schedules start immediately because of schedule swaps, weather emergencies or ill personnel that can’t cover their assigned schedules. Eventually, the out of date oncall scheduling information leads to errors like contacting the wrong doctor at the wrong time. It’s the nature of the beast when it comes to relying on paper schedules.

I think 1Call has come up with an answer for the second question: Is there a more efficient way of creating, maintaining and sharing oncall schedules? And that answer is Yes!

The answer is miOnCall.

The subscription-based miOnCall application is a powerful, flexible and completely secure cloud-based oncall scheduling application that makes it easy to assign schedule coverage, view schedule coverage, and dispatch messages. The miOnCall schedules are available to physicians and staff via Web access, can be synched with Outlook® calendars, and accessed with AMTELCO’s miOnCall App, available on the Apple® iTunes® store for the iPhone®, iPad™, and iPod touch®. miOnCall is perfect for small and large doctors groups, clinics and large healthcare organizations. Contact 1Call about miOnCall at info@miOnCall.com or visit www.miOnCall.com to subscribe for service.

Matt Everly is the Marketing Director for Amtelco’s 1Call Healthcare Division and can be reached at maeverly@1call.com

Technorati Tags: Oncall scheduling,web oncall,call scheduling,oncall app,iPhone,Blackberry,on-call,on call