Contact Center and Operational Assessment: Suicide Hotline for a Healthcare Provider
Client Challenge
A healthcare provider was experiencing increased attrition, rising costs, and poor customer service on its suicide hotline. The hotline, which was understaffed, had a lack of goal clarity, leading staff to handle more than 30 work types. The organization also had cut its quality program and did not have traditional workforce management capabilities. It had minimal reporting capabilities and did not track most traditional call center key performance metrics (KPIs). Lack of data analysis limited continuous improvement efforts, resulting in poor performance in key areas.
Our Solution
As part of our engagement, we conducted side-by-side observations of the work., Based on these observations and our analysis, Voyage developed and implemented recommendations to:
Address staffing and scheduling issues to reduce abandons and increase call answer rate;
Develop volume and workload forecasts to understand demand patterns and staffing needs;
Create a new approach to scheduling, adhering to best practices, moving toward fixed shifts rather than rotational ones. We also used an activity summary to determine the staffing needs.
Fix technology issues that had been driving high abandon rates after calls were in queue for 21-30 seconds.
Finally, we worked with the client to develop protocols to address employee well-being after difficult calls. We designed and implemented hotline culture changes to reduce stress and create clearly defined job duties by role.
Key Results
We also defined the required metrics including average speed of answer, service level, customer satisfaction and quality and then improved the reporting capabilities to include interval level, daily and weekly. The project resulted in improved employee morale, reduced attrition, better customer access, fewer abandoned calls and a lower cost of service.
Interested in learning more? Let’s connect.
Email: hello@voyageadvisory.com | Call or text: 312.869.8000