Engagement Partners vs Call Center Services

Whether you are looking to augment your patient access center, offload a percentage of call volumes, or fully hand over your call management to a third party, there are two primary types of service providers: call center services and engagement partnerships. It’s important to understand the difference in order to best serve the needs of your practice and ensure satisfaction with service delivery. This post will offer a simple breakdown of Engagement Partnerships versus Call Center Services.

Call Center Solutions

Call center services are best for basic answering or outreach needs. These services are simplified in order to offer an out-of-the-box solution. The upside to this is that implementation and onboarding can be quick. The downside, particularly for healthcare, is a lack of personalization or industry experience. In standard call center environments, agent performance is typically rated by speed. In healthcare, the speed of patient interactions doesn’t usually translate well to the patient experience. There are other performance metrics that are more attuned to the patient access experience, like first-call resolution, that may be neglected with this model.

• Canned service model
• Focus on basic call metrics
• Transactional patient interactions
• Rudimentary operations covering a variety of industry needs

Engagement Partnerships

This vendor model is more comprehensive due to being built on customized service solutions. The downside of customization is that implementation and onboarding can take longer than with a stereotypical call center service, however, the result is tailored to the specific needs of your organization and patient community. This can minimize misunderstandings around scopes of service as well as ensure you are only paying for what you really need. These vendors can also be industry specific so you can enlist a partner organization that has experience with “care culture.” Additionally, engagement partnerships usually focus on more than simply phones and include a broad range of communication channels, such as SMS messaging.

• Customized service solutions
• Personalized metrics for quality assurance
• Multi-channel approach to engagement
• Operational expertise paired with extensive industry knowledge

Want to learn more about finding and implementing contact center support? In our new white paper, we provide a step-by-step guide from defining and identifying the services available to what you can expect during the implementation process.

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