Killing the Rampant Spread of the "Hold Virus"
The Connection® received a distress call from a hospital clinic that had an emergency. They were swamped with calls they couldn’t handle, people were holding on average of three hours--and these people needed to see a doctor! The Client’s first question: “How quickly can you be up and running?”
Quick Action
- We immediately flew two team members to the client site: a Curriculum Development Expert and an Implementation Expert.
- While that team was onsite working around the clock with the Client, our contact center was assembling a high quality team of personnel who would be capable of answering patient calls, performing triage, booking appointments, and forwarding to appropriate nursing or doctor resources, etc.
- Upon implementation, the calls were running through our voice platform and we immediately implemented virtual hold so that callers did not need to continuously hold for hours at a time.
Key to Success
- The Client was motivated to fix the crisis and provided all the support we needed.
- The Connection® was motivated to help the Client and we poured ourselves into the effort in each and every way necessary to ensure a well-trained team was on the phones ASAP.
- Due to the technical and medical nature of the calls, we met with the client for a minimum of twice a day for the first three weeks to ensure that all modifications were being accomplished in real time and as quickly as necessary to handle calls appropriately.
- Once we were live and handling calls, we were able to quickly add additional staff members to right-size the team to eliminate the hold virus.
- Within a few weeks, average hold time was reduced from 3 hours to 5 seconds. Abandons were reduced from 65% to 4%.
Summary
By developing a solid partnership between the Client and our organization and with both teams moving together in the same direction, we were able to turn around an unworkable and unsustainable situation in less than three weeks.
