A major Healthcare provider engaged Pointel to develop a collections voice self-service solution to interact efficiently and effectively with their customers regarding past due amounts. Pointel voice self-service solution helped to lower the operational costs, increase efficiency and increase collections. This solution freed up agents to focus on additional accounts which in turn increased collections.

Business Challenge

Collections Organizations within enterprises and collections agencies are constantly under pressure to collect more with less staff. In this case, the Healthcare Provider was looking at various ways to improve the operational efficiency of the collections contact center and enable agents to work on more accounts. Upon analysis, the following business challenges were identified:

• Agents spend about 25 to 40 seconds leaving messages on customer’s answering machines.
• Customers did not have 24×7 access to the collections system. They were forced to call during business hours.
• A significant number of the inbound calls were from customers whose accounts were closed for various business reasons.
• Agents spent a good percentage of the talk-time validating the customer information for HIPAA regulations.

Pointel Solution

Pointel, with its many years of experience in implementing Genesys Healthcare solutions, built a voice self-service solution which addressed all of the above business challenges. The solution was built to leverage the existing legacy collections system and preserve all of the existing business rules. This solution was scalable so that additional voice self-service applications could be added with zero impact to the existing applications and infrastructure. “Pointel has been the only vendor who has met and exceeded our expectations. They delivered exactly what we wanted and what they promised to deliver. Pointel solution enabled us to get ROI sooner than our original estimation. The project was delivered on time and on budget.”

Key Features

• Intuitive, user-friendly and easy to use self-service solution
• Automatically left personalized messages on customer’s answering machines, freeing up agents to focus on live customers and collect more dollars
• Savings on this feature alone was estimated to be over 3 FTE per year
• Solution was built on standard Java based tools to leverage the existing web and legacy infrastructure
• Solution supported multiple languages (English and Spanish)
• Solution automated HIPAA verification and enabled agents to focus on collection. This also reduced the average handle time.
• Closed accounts were handled automatically through self-service.
• The following were some of the highlights of the self-service solution:
  • Ability to listen to account balance, next installment due date and hospital visit details
  • Ability to pay the balance by credit card
  • Ability to pay the balance by check
  • Ability to promise payment
  • Ability to get mailing address
• A survey revealed that customers were more comfortable using the self-service feature for making a payment using a credit card or cheque
• Ability to transfer the caller information with the call, so that the agent has all the information to handle the call most efficiently
• Ability to see detailed reports by division, date and individual activity
• Robust architecture to leverage existing infrastructure and guarantee maximum high availability
• Flexible application design to handle exceptions and route the call to the most appropriate agent
• Ability to audit self-service activities for each call

Flexible Customer Access

Customers were able to access the system 24×7 from anywhere and at anytime. The number of calls answered by self-service during non-business hours resulted in decreased incoming calls during business hours. This directly improved agent and contact center productivity by enabling them to focus on more accounts during peak collection times.

Reduced Operational Expenses

• Reduced transaction costs by leveraging self-service to provide customers with the ability to listen and make payments. Roughly 30% of the incoming calls were completed in the self-service system and to the satisfaction of the customer
• Reduced average handle time by performing HIPAA verification on the self-service system
• Reduced service times by routing the call intelligently to the most informed agent
• Improved operational efficiency by automatically playing a customized message on customer’s answering machines
• Improved efficiency by filtering calls for closed accounts and informational calls (inquiries for mailing address, due date & amount due). These calls are automatically handled by the system.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

• Increased customer satisfaction by processing payments using the highest level of security
• Enhanced customer satisfaction by transferring the call with the data entered into the system so that the caller does not have to repeat all of the information