Webinar: Building Call Centers in Digital Health
We invited three experts for a panel discussion on building and scaling contact centers from the perspective of a digital health.
If you’re building out your first contact center or trying to figure out your strategy, this webinar is for you!
Top takeaways from the webinar
On Technology 🛠
CRM selection advice: Tools like AirTable, Google Sheets, (or any other modern, workaround CRM solutions) can seem attractive in the short-term for their ease-of-setup, but they are a nightmare to transition out of when it comes time to scale. You’re much better off starting out with the simplest tier of more traditional CRM solutions like Hubspot, Zendesk, or Zoho (many of which also happen to be free).
CRM selection advice: Tools like AirTable, Google Sheets, (or any other modern, workaround CRM solutions) can seem attractive in the short-term for their ease-of-setup, but they are a nightmare to transition out of when it comes time to scale. You’re much better off starting out with the simplest tier of more traditional CRM solutions like Hubspot, Zendesk, or Zoho (many of which also happen to be free).
Prioritize measurement: In the early days, a key focus of your technology strategy should be collecting structured data on your contact center operations. This helps you build a strong baseline understanding of your customer and their needs, and ultimately is critical to defining your technology requirements as you scale.
Don’t overlook intake solutions: You can drive huge efficiency gains and improve customer satisfaction by being smart about how you configure your inquiry intake (including your customer-facing forms and IVR systems). Consider investing in more advanced intake solutions relatively early in the build out of your tech stack.
Our panelists’ favorite call center technologies: Kustomer (note: they are recently no longer HIPAA compliant!), Form Assembly, Zendesk, and Talkdesk.
On Teams 🤝
Encourage culture building: High-performing contact centers require strong team culture (especially in remote setups), so it’s important to ensure your managers are as focused on team-building and people management as they are on data and process. Make this a clear expectation and ensure they have the time and space to dedicate to it.
Build a standardized hiring process from day 1: Even if your contact center team is small to start, it is beneficial to create a highly standardized interview process from the get go. It allows you to utilize less experienced interviewers, ensures consistent candidate evaluations, and prepares you to scale quickly when that day comes.
Outsourcing advice: When considering working with business process outsourcing firm (BPO), here are some tactical tips to keep in mind:
Ensure they work with companies like yours. Some BPOs are comfortable working with startups, while others are more focused on large enterprise companies.
Meet the team you’ll be working with as part of the evaluation process. You want to avoid situations where the A-team is part of the sales process, but you wind up working with the C-team.
Make explicit asks in your contract, e.g.
lower rates for agents during their training period
sign off authority on new agents before they go live, and
clear SLAs to manage performance and give you an out down the road if needed.
