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Interactive Communications and the CRM Puzzle: The Last Mile of CRM

by Kael Kelly on October 10, 2011 in Call Centers, CRM, Kael Kelly, Mobile/Telcom with No comments
last_mile

In the 1990s and 2000s, as broadband networks proliferated, telecommunications service providers struggled with what the industry coined as “the last mile problem.” High bandwidth networks crisscrossed the country, yet mostly narrowband copper wire ran from the Telco central office to the customer’s home. The last mile problem was how to get the customer access to these new, bold, high-speed networks. For the consumer, the situation was like gazing through a store window and seeing the perfect gifts, yet the store was never open.

With customer relationship management (CRM), companies spend billions of dollars each year in CRM software, contact center infrastructure, websites, analytics, and customer service representatives to support customers. They also invest heavily in systems to capture, store and analyze customer data for support and selling activities. Yet, when it comes to customer service, too much of the burden is placed on customers to engage with the companies they do business with. They have to find the information they need, get support, and determine the appropriate course of action. In that sense, CRM has a “last mile” problem, too—how to get relevant, timely information to customers so they engage with the company to solve problems and build tight relationships.

To effectively manage their business relationships, customers must comb through information and support from websites, streams of email and postal mail, inbound contact centers, and retail centers. These customer communication tools are expensive for businesses and often don’t provide an easy way for customers to take action. That is, companies don’t have a way to fully leverage on the information and systems they have where it really matters: communicating with customers in a timely way via their preferred medium. Instead, organizations put the burden of managing the relationship on the customer.

The name of the game in this decade is customer engagement. Companies have to solve this “last mile” problem with smart, effective customer interaction. The great thing about our company is the power of Varolii Interact gives businesses the ability to better engage customers through multi-channel interactions. Not messages, not “blasts,” not spam, not information overload. Rather, highly personalized communications that inform customers and let them take action, including connecting them to an expert or support staff to engage at a different level.

Medical Therapy Should Include Treatment Adherence

by Mary Cook on July 19, 2011 in Healthcare, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

Being ill is hard. In order for a patient to feel better, he or she must follow the treatment suggested by his or her physician. This willingness to cooperate ensures that the patient is healthier, experiences a higher quality of life, has greater symptomatic relief, and requires less interventional care from unscheduled ER visits and nursing assistance.

What Does Effective Adherence Management Involve?
Effective adherence management involves educating and engaging the patient. By making them an active participant in the therapy process, physicians can help their patients improve their health as well as clinical outcomes. Although this may appear to be an easy task, it is not due to the sheer number of patients requiring care.

Sadly, it is difficult for healthcare providers to administer effective adherence management because they are either:

a) forced to scale back to efficiently deal with current workloads

b) hire additional care support specialists to meet needs, or

c) find a more effective way to generate reports than surveys administered by care support specialists or sent through the mail.

How Does It Benefit Organizations?
Improved and demonstrable patient adherence ensures better care and lower medical cost. Unnecessary hospitalizations, ER visits, nursing home admissions, and excess consumption of interventional treatments become fewer and less expensive.  This is good news for both patient and physician.

Enrollment and Maintenance, an Effective Approach
Engaging plan participants involves three steps. This is an effective way to promote compliance. Here they are:

  1. Awareness of programs - Patients should know that wellness and disease management programs exist. Without this knowledge, they are not able to take part of treatments.
  2. Enrollment of patients and members - Patients or members can be enrolled quickly and without the hassle of long forms or impatient call center employees.  This opens up the arena for questioning. Patients are at ease and can obtain the information that they are looking for.
  3. Ongoing engagement - Once the patient or member is engaged and adherent, the physician will want to keep them this way. They will want to continue to take an interest in their health and the maintenance of it.

Why Patients Fail to Take Their Prescribed Medications
Although it can be a variety of factors, here are a few of the reasons why patients state they do not take their prescribed medications:

patients medication1 Medical Therapy Should Include Treatment Adherence

  • Forgetfulness (30 percent)
  • Other priorities (16 percent)
  • Decision to omit doses (11 percent)
  • Lack of information (9 percent)
  • Emotional factors (7 percent)
  • No reason (27 percent)

Based on these answers, the four common areas to improve adherence include patient education, revised dosing schedules, increased hours when the clinic is open along with shorter waiting times, and improved communications between physicians and patients.

Three Secondary but Crucial Criteria
Three secondary but crucial criteria include:

  • Multi-lingual capabilities - Being able to effectively communication in a number of different languages is beneficial.
  • Multi-channel capabilities - Different channels such as cell phones, emails, and text messages improve communication because it appeals to other people.
  • Decisioning capabilities - Intervention strategy can be catered to the patient's needs as well as actual patient response data.

Treatment adherence results when patients and physicians feel comfortable in one another's presence. This allows them to forge a relationship that is built on trust. Once diagnosed with an illness, patients should be given the information that they need to maintain a healthier and happier lifestyle. Part of this education should include a lesson about how important treatments are and how adherence can improve the quality of their lives.

Varolii automates the patient outreach process, using any communication device, and personalizes messages that allow the patient to respond and take action. Our personalized messages to patients and members help efficiently monitor progress and manage care, effectively triage for intervention, and optimize care support resources. Keep in mind that the primary focus of all these efforts towards automating the engagement process are driving towards the goal of healthier patients, superior clinical outcomes, improved economic outcomes and better HEDIS scores. If you would like to learn more about of progressive engagement products, please visit our healthcare solutions.

You can also read the full whitepaper about Communications Therapy Improving Treatment Adherence.

Call Centers and Personality Mapping

by Mary Cook on July 14, 2011 in Call Centers, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

personality mapping1 Call Centers and Personality Mapping

One of the keys to success in delivering great customer service in the call center is matching a customer to the right agent. This is why skill based routing was born. In today’s digital world companies realize they can no longer take the approach of treating every customer the same. They want to provide personalized service to each customer as much as possible in an effort to build customer loyalty. There is much to say about the rapport between a customer and an agent. There is that something “special” that occurs during a conversation that goes beyond traditionally trained soft skills, and it has to do with personality types “clicking”. This chemistry is what many organizations are looking to utilize in an attempt to enhance their customer experience.

So how can companies match customers to agents based on skill as well as personality? Not surprisingly, it is all about the data. You need to have access to detailed data on your customers including their personality traits, which can then be used to route calls to the correct agent. Think of it as another layer of customer information that includes details about behaviors, habits, and traits, and details that go beyond just demographical information, preferred method of contact, or last item purchased. These personality details are then used to match a customer with the most suitable agent through enhanced intelligent call routing.

Personality mapping is facilitated by technology that matches your customers to your agents based on personality. It uses information that you understand about your customers and your call center agents and matches people who are more likely to have an optimal result. What an “optimal result” means to your organization should be determined while building your business requirements when you are considering personality routing. For example, an optimal result for a call center could be increased revenues. If this is the case, customers would be routed to agents who are more likely to get sales.

Optimally aligning agent and caller personalities can make a difference in your call center performance. In your call center, you most likely have a group of agents who always do well, another group that is in the middle, and another group that performs below standards. As customer service professionals, we know agents matters in transactions. If a customer calls and speaks to an agent and has a poor contact outcome, if they had arrived at a different agent, the call may have resulted differently.

I do recommend personality mapping be used in call centers with 100 agents or more. As a general rule bigger is better than smaller when executing personality mapping. More agents create more transactions and it is transactions that develop your model faster. If you have a hundred agents dispositioning 10 calls an hour, then you have thousands of transactions in a day and your system will learn faster.

Personality mapping puts the right people together. You can use personality mapping in an effort to increase the buying opportunity, reduce miscommunications, reduce callbacks, and improve levels of customer and agent satisfaction. And nothing pleases me more knowing that when my retired father who hates call center (yes, really…) reaches out to his providers there is the potential that he may get routed to an agent who fears no difficult customer and can speak “cranky” with ease…

Losing track of your customers?

by Brian Moore on March 31, 2011 in Banks/Finance, Brian Moore with No comments
Endless Labyrinth

Stop throwing their phone numbers away!

When the economy sours, creditors see the impact in a variety of ways. Delinquency and bad debt goes up; average payment size and frequency goes down. And when things get really bad, as they have for the past three years, customers go in to hiding.

Our clients tell us that throughout the recession and the current slow recovery, they have seen significantly higher numbers of “skip” accounts. This does not necessarily mean these customers have skipped town (hence the term), just that they can no longer be reached at the phone numbers they provided on their original credit application. In some cases, their home phone gets disconnected for non-payment; in others they change it to a non-published listing. Given the high unemployment rate, it’s also more likely they have Continue reading →

Is Your Call Center Damaging Your Brand?

by Mary Cook on March 16, 2011 in Call Centers, Mary Cook with No comments
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Show me the numbers! Those are words every contact center manager lives by. The challenge of effective customer communication has never been more difficult—or critical. But even in the best of times, it’s all about optimization.  Continue reading →

The future of mobile payment processing

by Varolii on January 21, 2011 in Industry News, Mobile/Telcom with No comments

Mobile credit card processing is no longer a sci-fi, technological dream. The future is now and the future is bright.

Near field communications will be a popular buzzword in 2011. NFC allows the exchange of information through compatible devices, such as smartphones, through a wireless transmission from a Continue reading →

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