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 Case
study sample # 1
Case
study sample # 2
Case Study Sample #1
The
client: ClearScope Solutions
Their
product: IT Relay Board (ITRB), contact management
software
Their
customer: Courier Information Services, the IT division
of Brothers of Mount Zion Health Services
ClearScope Solutions—A Case Study
Medical Center
improves help desk services without adding staff: Call
abandon rates drop; agents process more calls
Efficient help desk services promote productivity in any industry. But in the healthcare industry, the help desk is a lifeline for physicians and other staff. Effective responses are critical for a hospital’s general operation and management—and support quality, timely patient care.
At Brothers of Mount Zion Health Services, Inc. in Utah and Nevada, this means handling 9,000 calls a month from 25,000 end users.
“Each customer we assist is tending to a patient, or helping someone else who's tending to a patient” said Sharon Silver, director of the IT division at Brothers of Mount Zion Health Services, Courier Information Services. “That means that our top priority is to resolve each call as quickly as possible so our customers can do what they need to do.”
In this busy, high-pressure industry, help desk callers range from patient care providers to support staff to administrators and executives. Callers’ needs range from straightforward password resets to navigating errors in retrieving critical patient information.
While other IT centers may have the option of hiring more help desk attendants to meet the demands of rising call volumes—Courier Information Services, a nonprofit, must meet their customers’ needs without increasing staff.
DCT Software integrates flawlessly with speech recognition.
To increase their service capacity without increasing employees, Courier Information Services implemented DCT service and support from ClearScope Solutions. In addition, the IT organization had gradually enhanced its automation with DCT, and lightened the load on call analysts by incorporating DCT Self Help and DCT Info Plus. But Courier had yet to improve its results on service-level agreement, or SLA, metrics, meaning they still needed to increase the number of calls a single dispatcher could manage.
“Our goal was to shorten calls any way we could, but without sacrificing the quality of our service,” Silver said. “We wanted to cut call durations so our current staff could handle more calls, more effectively. It was a tough order. In the end, we decided we needed to increase our technology.”
Courier started investigating integrated voice systems. Their search soon led them to ClearScope’s IT Relay Board (ITRB)—contact management software that works seamlessly with DCT. ITRB not only offered unbeatable functionality, but, “The cost was simply unbeatable,” Silver said. “We were amazed.”
Courier Information then opted to use ClearScope’s Professional Services Organization to integrate ITRB and build the base system. When they completed the process in less than seven weeks, and launched the system in a single day, the staff at Courier was pleasantly surprised.
“I can’t think of an instance in which something’s gone out in less time than we expected,” said Silver.
Handling calls with more brains than brawn.
The broad functionality of ITRB enhanced customer service at Courier and measurably boosted call handling efficiency.
Callers now enter their unique employee ID numbers when they call the help desk, thus triggering a DCT screen-pop containing their vital information. The feature works even if employees access the system from different units, so the help analyst always knows the caller’s exact location.
Integration with the department’s asset tracking capabilities gives analysts the caller’s work station asset tag information. Before, analysts took up to a minute to collect a caller’s asset tag numbers. Now, integration with asset tracking technology and immediate identification of the caller, their location and work station, has shorted call times and enhanced efficiency.
ITRB plays “forced first announcement” messages, so callers in a widespread problem area automatically hear the announcement when they call. Physicians and top administrators now spend less time on hold and more time serving their patients, due to the system’s ability to recognize high-priority ID numbers. By telling callers their wait times, the new technology has also reduced Courier’s call abandon rates overall.
Cutting call times, exceeding expectations
After only 90 days with ITRB, Courier Information Services has seen measurable improvements in customer service performance. First, analysts now spend less time assembling caller information and more time attending to callers needs, thanks to ITRB’s asset tracking. This feature alone has dropped average call times from 7.8 minutes to 5.6 minutes—and surpassed Courier’s initial goal.
Shorter call times also enables analysts to answer incoming calls faster. Call answer times are down to 5 seconds. And while, before ITRB, it was common to have four to six calls in waiting, today callers almost always reach an analyst immediately.
“What we are most impressed with is the abandon rate,” said Silver. In just a short time, call abandon rates went from 10-20 percent down to 5-6 percent. “We’re simply not dropping callers,” she said, “and that has had such a positive effect on all our staff.”
As for Courier’s ultimate goal, Silver feels ITRB’s call handling technology has increased the number of calls each analyst can handle by as much as 30 percent. “With shorter call durations, our help staff can resolve more problems in a single shift,” Silver said. “Call times decreased by almost one-third, and as we continue to enhance our abilities with additional ClearScope technology we expect even greater improvements. Now that we can handle bigger call volumes with our current level of staffing, and, most importantly, help our customers do their jobs.” [End]
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