According to the article by Charlotte Woolard, the report, “Email Marketing: An Established Channel Evolves,” found that “respondents expected email to help businesses engage with existing customers, nurture leads and acquire new customers. Its success hinges on investments in content and data, rapidly evolving areas that marketers cited as top concerns for their programs.“

In addition to these findings, the report also found that marketers prefer to use lists they compile, rather than those compiled by a third-party.

The article said that the study was based on:

• “on an online poll completed by 424 sales and marketing professionals in February and March.

• Representatives of companies with less than $100 million in annual revenue made up about two-thirds of respondents.

• About a quarter of respondents represented technology companies.”

The results of the study show that there is a lot to be learned about email marketing, which is one means of communication used by call center industries, including technical support call centers.

Special thanks to BtoBonline.com and Charlotte Woolard.

As a doctor or surgeon you have your hands full with daily tasks around the hospital. You never know when something is going to come up and you often don’t have the time to get to every patient’s call while working. Still, you want your patient to be heard and you want to provide the ordinary services that your patient expects such as appointment setting, acquisition, crisis management, interactive voice response, and round-the-clock patient support. Below is one solution to this problem.

The Solution

One solution to not having enough time to field every patient call is by using a medical call center. Using a customizable script, Medical call centers will help retain more calls and ensure fewer dropped calls for your practice. By partnering with a medical call center you can spend your time doing what is most important: caring and conversing with the patient in front of you.

The Purposes

There are many different reasons why a healthcare company or hospital could benefit from a partnership with a healthcare call center. Appointment setting, health and wellness, member services, enrollment, life insurance, dental and vision plans, are just a few of the tasks that agents are capable of handling. Agents may also handle more than one task for your company. For example, if you partner with a health insurance call center, the agents may handle both health insurance sales and life insurance sales depending on your needs.

According to the TMCnet article written by Goodwin, the report covers six key areas: “strategy and development, operations, customer interaction management, self-service, workforce optimization and technology.”

Findings from the report could benefit many different industries, including call center services. Goodwin explains the major themes from the 2012 report:

-Mobility and Agility: Goodwin said this is the most dominant theme from the report. “…That puts the other edge of the sword on agent-assisted service, which is now more complex than ever. And with that increase in complexity, the implication is that standard measures of agent performance, such as average call handle time, are no longer as useful as they once were.”

- Customer Collaboration and Convenience: “The good news is that over 63 percent of the respondents acknowledged that their contact center and customer care is viewed as a competitive differentiator. On the other hand, analysis and fine-tuning of the most used channel of customer care – self-service – is largely absent.”

-Self-Service: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: “The good news is that for almost 90 percent of the organizations surveyed, self-service is considered a critical tool for the company and its customers…On the bad side of the equation, over half of the organizations surveyed don’t pass any information collected in the IVR on to agents. … Are you ready for the ugly? Most organizations aren’t even attempting to analyze their emerging technology self-service capabilities, including speech-driven IVR, nor are they seeking to measure customer satisfaction with self-service channels.”

Special thanks to Dan Goodwin and TMCnet

Still, you want to make sure you and your partner are on the same page.  Read below on some common questions people have about call centers.

Call Center Information

People often want to know if call center employees are trained thoroughly. If you are concerned about your partner, definitely express these concerns verbally. Communication can only help the problem. Otherwise, monitor your call center services by asking for frequent performance reports. You could even consider calling one day to experience the average customer’s interaction with your call center.

Another question people ask is about sales: can call centers make sales for your company? The answer is yes, if you specify that service. Call center services include customer service, sales, IT assistance and plenty of others

There are so many technological devices available today, and many of them make an error at some point. If your business delivers a technological service or product to your customers, then you should be delivering round-the-clock technical help for whenever it’s needed; it’s simply the industry standard today.

Handling a large volume of technical support can be overwhelming, especially if your company is dealing with a recall. You can consider outsourcing with a technical support call center to help handle a high volume. Curious about technical support call centers? Read on.

Advantages of Tech Support

As said previously, your customers will expect service to be available 24/7. Luckily, call centers can offer this kind of support. Whenever your customer has some technical need, a friendly voice will be there to help over the phone. Or, if your customer prefers, he or she can talk to support via email or web chat.

One of the most-talked about advantages of tech support is that it cuts costs. It costs much more to hire in-house tech support than it does to partner with a technical support call center. Later, you can invest that money back into your company, encouraging growth.

Schwedelson has several helpful tips:

• First, don’t be afraid to send the same offer several times. “Three to five sends to the same group of recipients promoting the same offer is going to yield the best results,“ Schwedelson says.

• Next, Schwedelson recommends viewing preheaders as ”extensions of subject lines rather than just a throwaway portion of the email message.” The article says that using preheaders in an informative way could increase email open rates by 17 percent.

• Last, consider adjusting your email send times by the time zones they are going to. Schwedelson says it’s critical to send emails at peak times in each time zones. “To focus on just one time zone is doing your campaign a massive disservice,” he says in the article.

It goes to show, whether you are using call center services, email marketing, or social media marketing, you have to focus in on your specific customer base. Use these tips and watch your email performance improve.

Special thanks to BtoB.com and Jay Schwedelson.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

How to Save

If your place of business is dealing with a high volume of calls, it can be hard to handle regular business in addition to the influx. You might turn to solutions such as bringing in temporary employees or buying expensive software to help get a handle on all the extra business.

By partnering with a medical call center, you are choosing a more cost-efficient method of dealing with the extra volume. A call center will have the staff and organization you need to adequately handle existing and new patients. Also, you can maintain a higher standard of care because call center employees can give extra attention to patients that your in-house staff simply wouldn’t have the time to give.

The Know-How

Make sure your healthcare call center trains its employees in HIPAA and CMS compliance. Patient confidentiality should still be the number one priority for your employees. When talking with your call center partner, you should stress that sensitivity to patient information comes first.

On the end of your call center partner, they should actively seek to learn about your business, as well as your customer base. Health insurance call centers should increase your patient satisfaction because its employees can devote more time to individual cases. With increased patient satisfaction, you should see an increase in sales as well.

The first practice in monitoring social media during your conference is to look by creating a hashtag for Twitter and talking about this hashtag during the conference. Remember that people don’t always use the same hashtag, so look at similar keywords as well.

• “Look for mentions of your brand and speaker’s names, as well as variations of spellings of your company and your company’s products to get the full picture of your social buzz. Don’t just look for total volume, however. Run a sentiment analysis to figure out whether people are speaking positively or negatively about your presence.”

Next, you should definitely check out your competitor’s conferences. The article stresses that you look at some key factors:

• “Total social volume: Look for the same types of conversation as you are listening for your own brand

• Share of voice: How much of the conversation is about your competitors compared to your own brand?

• Competitive sentiment: If people are overwhelmingly positive or negative about a competitor, look at the types of things people are saying, and find out why. This will help you at future conferences.”

Special thanks to salesforcemarketingcloud.com and Andrew Gothelf