Male Nurse Smiling With Contact Center Headset On |How the Pandemic Changed Healthcare Contact Centers & Video Redaction Services | Authority Software

How the Pandemic Changed Healthcare Contact Centers & Video Redaction Services

The pandemic prompted a significant shift in how individuals sought healthcare, with surging numbers of patients utilizing modern technology to communicate with healthcare providers. As a result, healthcare contact centers have come to play a foundational role in healthcare customer service, which impacts their quality management of video redaction. 

Healthcare contact centers are critical for delivering timely and appropriate patient support, including helping patients with scheduling appointments, prescription refills, and care questions to improve the patient experience. With rising demand, contact center leaders may struggle with outdated systems that force customers to repeat information and lead to a slow and frustrating experience. 

To improve the customer experience, contact center leaders need to evaluate agent performance with stored video and audio recordings while ensuring the security of sensitive and personal information protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Healthcare contact centers need redaction services that allow them to record, access, and protect audio and video.

Why does your healthcare contact center need video redaction services?

Manually removing personal or protected information from video recordings can be time-consuming, complicated, and leaves the possibility for error. Video redaction services can automatically remove private details to comply with security regulations, ensuring security and confidentiality.

Patients’ Expectations are Increasing

As patients become more comfortable with digital healthcare communications, their expectations for those interactions rise. Patients will expect a seamless omnichannel experience across their journey, regardless of how they communicate with healthcare representatives. 

For healthcare contact centers to ensure that individuals have a positive experience across channels, contact centers must easily access patient information and history without patients having to repeatedly provide their health history or repeat the same information constantly. 

The combination of increased demand and increased customer expectations may leave contact center agents, and their leaders feeling stressed, frustrated, and overwhelmed by inhibitors to an exceptional customer experience. To pinpoint where an agent is experiencing difficulty, such as struggling with finding the correct information or dealing with a slow system, healthcare contact centers must review quality recordings for both audio and video, redacting personal information to achieve regulatory compliance. 

Doing this manually can be tedious, wasting both time and resources. Instead, healthcare contact centers need an efficient HIPAA-compliant redaction tool that can crypto shared original recordings containing sensitive audio and video. This will make it so that any personal info typed into the field on the screen wouldn’t be shown in the video when reviewed for quality purposes.

Digital Healthcare Requires Increased Data Security 

While digital healthcare communication allows for ease, and convenience for patients, they also pose a range of privacy and security concerns that healthcare contact centers must address. Removing sensitive, personal, or protected information from contact center records is a precise and complicated task. 

Healthcare contact centers must ensure that while reviewing audio and video records for quality management, patient data is protected in a manner that meets HIPAA requirements to ensure privacy. In addition, the digital nature of this medical information has also created concerns surrounding the vulnerability to hacking or other breaches of security. Through audio and video redaction, healthcare contact centers can store recordings either perpetually or for a predefined period of time without any concern that sensitive data is accessible by users.

The Need for Audio and Video Redaction

Healthcare contact centers are responsible for adequately handling protected information under HIPAA, most commonly done through redaction. Audio and video redaction remove personal or protected information from medical records. This assists healthcare contact centers with security, compliance, and data access.  

  • Security – Using 256-bit (AES) encryption for security and regulatory compliance, healthcare contact centers can prevent unauthorized users from accessing recordings and reduce the risk of fraud. 
  • Compliance – Automatically track the location of private information flagged to be removed from your final audio and video recordings to comply with security regulations, including HIPAA.
  • Data Access – Cryptoshred original recording containing sensitive audio. Store recordings either perpetually or for a predefined period of time without any concern that sensitive data is accessible by users.

Patented Redacting Capabilities Improve Security and Overall Satisfaction at Your Healthcare Contact Center

Custom workforce optimization tools from Authority Software allow you to record, access, and protect audio and video recordings for quality assurance and search easily and quickly by customer data fields. Enable your team’s effectiveness and improve retention with a modern WFO solution that supports the customer success journey. 

Learn what’s possible with AI-enabled workforce management.

Key Takeaways

  • Healthcare contact centers have come to play a foundational role in healthcare customer service. 
  • Patients expect a seamless omnichannel experience across their healthcare journey.  
  • Healthcare contact centers must ensure that while reviewing audio and video records for quality management, patient data is protected in a manner that meets HIPAA requirements.
  • Patented video redaction capabilities from Authority Software can improve security and overall satisfaction at your healthcare contact center.
Authority Software 3 Ways Your Contact Center Costs You

3 Ways Your Contact Center CRM Integration is Costing You Time & Money

Inaccurate or lost customer data can result in losing the customer

When your contact center CRM integration system is separated from your contact center solution, customer data can easily get lost or compromised. This can result in incomplete information on the customer, which in turn affects their experience. Lost customer data results in a frustrating experience for both the customer and agent, losing time with redundancies and possibly losing the customer altogether.

Should I have a built-in contact center CRM integration for my workforce optimization solution?

To better support your customers and provide a best-in-class experience for them, your contact center solution should be fully integrated with your CRM. This provides a higher level of service and can increase CSAT scores and profitability.

1. A limited view of your customer means limited support for them.

When customer data is incomplete or compromised, a contact center agent doesn’t have a full view of the customer’s needs or history. This can result in frustration for the customer, as they have already explained this. The process of customer engagement with a contact center can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience for customers. Therefore a contact center must make every effort to retain customer records and serve them efficiently. Better customer insight translates to better customer service, which is key in contact center profitability and efficiency. With CRM integration, a contact center can have a full view of the customer and provide exceptional service.

2. Without CRM integration, customer privacy can be at risk.

When a contact center is unable to integrate its CRM system with its operating solution, customer data can have exposure to risk. Especially when a contact center has responsibilities such as fundraising or payment processing, this secure data can be compromised when it is not managed properly. A security risk such as this not only has serious implications for the customer but also for your contact center’s compliance. Being out of compliance when it comes to secure data can cost your contact center its ability to operate.

3. Inaccurate Data can result in customer loss.

Customer retention and satisfaction are key for your contact center. When your CRM system isn’t fully integrated, call logs, photos, and information can be lost, overwritten, or incomplete. An incomplete customer record results in duplicating efforts, which is inefficient, time-consuming, and frustrating for all. In order to drive profitability and customer retention, a CRM system should be fully integrated with your contact center solutions. The loss of customers isn’t an option in today’s competitive environment, which is why CRM integration is key to your contact center’s success.

Contact Center CRM Integration is Imperative.

Today’s contact centers cannot afford wasted time or effort. Efficiency is key to productivity, which is why your contact center’s solution should seamlessly integrate with your CRM system. When these systems are not integrated, it can result in incomplete or lost customer data, costing your contact center time, money, and customers. An integrated CRM system is crucial for bottom-line results.

TLDR: 

Contact center CRM integration is necessary to ensure customer retention, satisfaction, and data privacy.

Call to Action:

Find out if one of our CX Application Packs is right for your organization. Request a demo today.

Authority Software Empower Your Workforce in 2022 with automated contact center solutions

Empower Your Workforce: Automated Contact Center Solutions Can Simplify Operations in 2022

It’s almost 2022, and with the change of the year, it’s time to evaluate 2021 performance and set goals for the new year. As a contact center manager, your goals are to increase operational efficiency, profitability, and customer experience. This is why it might be time to consider automated contact center solutions as the next step to making your operations run smoothly, efficiently, and profitably.

How can automated contact center solutions improve my organization’s operational efficiency?

A modern automated contact center solution is easy to navigate and saves valuable time and resources. Customizable tools can drive efficiency and increase CSAT scores while automating day-to-day operations.

Efficiency, Profitability, Productivity

Without an automated contact center solution, you are losing valuable time and resources every minute of the day as your employees navigate difficult and siloed systems. Between scheduling, scripting, and managing call volume, these systems can not only cause frustration but cost time and money in the long run.

An automated contact center solution increases productivity across the board, cutting resource waste spent navigating outdated and complex systems. With a simple and easy-to-deploy solution, employees and customers have a higher satisfaction rate, and your contact center saves time and money.

Quality Management

When quality management solutions use multiple bolted-on systems, it limits the capability to manage quality assurance easily or efficiently. This can be counterproductive as you work toward increased operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

An automated contact center solution will have integrated quality assurance forms, with easy and quick access to metrics in real-time, as well as audio/video reporting tools that make finding quality recordings a cinch.

Workforce Management

With outdated contact center solutions, scheduling is a constant challenge. You may know the ebb and flow of call volume as an experienced workforce manager, but there are times when a guess results in over or under scheduling, which costs your contact center and your valuable client resources.

In 2022, it’s time to upgrade your contact center software to an automated solution with workforce management built-in. This ensures suitable agents are scheduled at the right time with no more guessing. An automated solution makes workforce management simpler and performance-based.

Designer

Have you ever experienced this scenario? Your script verbiage needs updating immediately but you know it’s going to take days to roll out. When you have siloed and bolted-on solutions, you don’t have the time or capacity to disseminate information, build new scripts and manage deployment to an entire contact center.

An automated contact center solution increases efficiency with drag-and-drop tools that makes scripting easier than ever. You should have easy-to-use tools to customize and deploy simply, quickly, and efficiently to ensure all employees are delivering the highest caliber experience for customers.

Advanced Outbound List Management

In 2022, it’s time to deploy data-driven campaigns. Call the right customers with the right products to avoid wasting valuable time on a high-volume approach. Without first analyzing who the ideal customer is and what products and services they may respond to, you can waste resources across operations.

An advanced outbound list management tool is a great way to make your automated contact center solution work for your strategy. Outbound list optimization tools can provide advanced management of complex campaign strategies, which drives results for any campaign, no matter how complex. This type of tool prioritizes contacts based on real-time data and increases your contact center’s success rate with campaigns.

Talk to your current solutions provider about Authority Software or Contact Us

Authority Software has a fully integrated, easy-to-deploy automated contact center solution that will boost productivity and profitability in the new year. In 2022, set a goal to increase your operational efficiency with a customizable, efficient tool. 

TLDR: 

An automated contact center solution can increase operational efficiency and productivity using an integrated and data-driven approach. This customizable tool can help you better serve your customers and increase CSAT scores and the overall profitability of your contact center. 

Where We Gather, Amazing Things Happen

Join us at the upcoming Five9 CX Summit in Las Vegas September 17-19

What things will we get to explore this year at Five9’s CX Summit in Las Vegas September 17-19? The big focus – how AI can transform the contact center – and we couldn’t be more excited to join in as a Gold Sponsor for 2019. Tracks and sessions include the future of the contact center, creating extraordinary experiences, and maximizing the contact center.

Not only will you hear from industry experts and leaders, but Authority Software CEO, Lou Mandic, will be talking about the world of Workforce Optimization (without Excel!). In this session, we will cover the real-world possibilities and practices for seamless WFO, look closely at the impact of AI on workforce management, and unpack how it all fits together.

If you haven’t registered yet, don’t miss out. If you register by August 24th, you’ll even save $100.

Will You Win at Contact Center Week 2019?

Join us at booth #628 for your chance to win a pair of Apple® watches or a $500 Amazon® gift card

It’s a big week for the contact center industry as we all gather for the upcoming Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas – and it’s a big week for us too! We are launching our newest offering for workforce management and we will be offering previews of this exciting new module. This application, built from the ground up, is fully integrated with the Authority Center solution and will be generally available in early fall.

Will you be at Customer Contact Week too? If so, don’t forget to join us at booth #628. There you can also enter to win a pair of Apple® watches as part of the CCW Demo Drive or a $500 Amazon® gift card co-sponsored by Five9.

Authority Software Showcase at the ICMI Contact Center Expo

We recently had the pleasure of showcasing Authority Software at the ICMI Contact Center Expo show in Florida. It was a busy few days packed with great conversations and networking with contact center leaders across many industries. One of the many exciting things that took place at the event was that CRMXchange, a long-time leader in covering the contact center technology market, interviewed Authority President & CEO Lou Mandic and featured Authority Software in a new eBook as part of their event coverage.  Take a look to see what you can learn about improving decision-making, monitoring agent performance, redacting protected audio, single relationship records and more — all in the name of a better customer experience!   

Customer Journey

Optimize the Customer Journey as a Whole, Not Touchpoints

Customer Journey

The first step towards improving the ease of your customer’s experience, becoming more customer focused and improving relationships is taking a comprehensive look at your customer’s journey. Customer experience should be at the very center of your business strategy. That said, recent research has shown that your customer can have positive experiences at each touchpoint along the customer journey but still have an overall negative experience. This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s important to consider the journey as a whole and not as a series of individual events.


What is a  Customer “Touchpoint”

A customer touch point occurs any time a customer comes in to contact with your organization. This can include a visit to social media, contacting sales, visiting the website, or receiving print materials. It can also include indirect contact such as an online review that could still influence a person’s opinion of a brand.

 

How is it Possible for Individual Touchpoints to Go Well but Fail as a Complete Customer Experience?

There are many factors that can influence the customer journey as a whole that are not related to each individual interaction. For example, the sequence of interactions could impact the end results. Or each interaction could be positive, but not be aligned to result in the optimal outcome for the customer.  Improving the customer journey means paying attention to the experience as a whole.

 

Getting Started

In recent times, the number of touchpoints possible along the customer journey has grown exponentially. New technology is constantly adding touchpoints, from chatbots to smart speakers to even smart watches. The challenge is how to control the ever increasing number of channels, and how to obtain a complete view of the customer journey when it is always changing.   

Before you get started on your analysis, try and create a list of each touchpoint where a customer may have contact with the brand or could be influenced about the brand’s perception. Be sure to ask for input across departments, so no touchpoint is missed. Determine what the biggest pain points are and rank them.

 

Optimizing the Customer Journey as a Whole

After you have a complete view of your touchpoints, you can begin to step back and take a look at the big picture. How do these channels relate, or come together? How does one touchpoint impact the experience in future touchpoints?  

A Final thing to consider is that the last interaction you have is the most memorable. How can you make that a positive experience? Is there a way to rearrange the journey so the last experience is a positive one?

Call Center Agent

5 Ideas for Improving Quality Score in a Call Center

Call Center Agent

Customer experience management is essential for all call centers. A customer-first call center strategy begins with adopting best practices for measurable improvements of the quality of your customer interactions. Quality scoring is one of the most important methods used to ensure adherence tocall center standards and metrics, which not only improves customer service, but identifies opportunities for training and development. Here are some tips for improving the quality score at your call center.

1. Provide Consistent Feedback to Agents

Consistent feedback to agents helps them to continuously improve and increase their overall contributions to the organization. When providing feedback, it’s a good idea to tie this feedback back to established goals and expectations. It’s important to provide tangible, objective, feedback. This way, your agents aren’t taken by surprise. Some examples of measurable goals are customer satisfaction ratings, call handle time, and first call resolution. Authority Software’s Quality Recording Manager helps call center managers monitor this critical data through interactive dashboards and configurable reports so they can provide helpful feedback to agents.

2. Don’t just focus on agents with low performance stats

Improving the key performance indicators of your lowest performing agents is one of the quickest ways to see improvement in your overall scores and improve customer experience. But there is valuable data to be mined from your high performers, which can be used to identify coaching opportunities as well as to help create best practices for the team.

3. Don’t let technology drive your business processes

Technology solutions need to meet you where you are. In a new call center, technology can be a great tool to help guide you through the development of processes, providing you with some organization and capabilities you may not even have considered. A mature call center with experience and well-established quality processes needs flexibility and a solution that can be used to increase efficiencies. Having a solution that is scalable, can easily integrate into your existing environment and can be completely tailored to enhance your processes without interfering with your production environment is critical.

4. Listen to Your Customers – invest in feedback surveys

No system or process can drive customer experience better than first hand feedback provided directly by your customers. Your customers are the best resource for learning both where you need to improve and where you are succeeding. And a CSAT survey doesn’t have to break the bank. It can be as simple as having your agents ask the customer how they would rate their transaction. But whether the feedback comes through an internal survey, an IVR or a third party CSAT survey provider, owning and incorporating this valuable and relevant data directly into your customer’s record will prove to be a key component in using the voice of your customer to improve the customer experience and create brand loyalists.

5. Refer to External Benchmarks

When evaluating your call center’s performance, it is important to look outside the call center as well. External benchmarking is a way to ensure your company is meeting industry standards and best practices. By comparing your call center against others, especially to industry leaders, you can better evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and use that information to improve. Continuous improvement is driven by an understanding your call center’s paint points. Is your wait time much longer than the industry norm? Are your customers calling you back more frequently than your competitors because their issues are not being resolved efficiently? Regular monitoring of competitive data can help drive performance and increase efficiencies.

Final Thoughts

If you are ready to take the next step towards improving your call center’s performance and exceeding your quality metrics, Authority Software is here to help. We can help implement the right tools to assist you to achieve this goal and guide you along the way with our years of experience in the creation, deployment and use of call center quality solutions that let you focus on improving the experiences of both your agents and your customers.

Using Application

Signs That Your Business Needs to Implement CRM Software

Using Application

Not every business needs a CRM software solution, and the determination for whether or not you need one is not based on company size. It is dependent on a number of things, including the nature of the business, types and complexity of transactions, amount of available data and data sources, and others. For those businesses that do have a need for a CRM, not finding the right solution can be a barrier to continued growth and success.

Efficient CRM software allows you to work smarter by managing customer relationships and other key aspects of your business. If you think that your company may have grown to the point where a CRM would be beneficial, then you can go through the following checklist to decide whether it’s time to take the next step.

 

It’s Hard to Keep Track of Your Leads

If your business has reached a point where you have more leads than you can manage, then you’re going to need to implement a CRM software solution. Leads bring new revenue and will grow your customer base.

To convert these leads you’re going to need to keep track of who they are, even if you don’t have the time to contact them all at the same time. By using CRM software, you can keep track of potential future clients and perform actions like schedule follow up calls to guide the lead towards a final conversion.

Inefficient spreadsheets or even a paper system of lead tracking can mean that you miss out on opportunities, and you may even lose lead details entirely. Implementing CRM software will reduce the overall effort that is required to keep track of leads, freeing up you and your team to focus on conversions and post-sales support.

 

You’re Not Capitalizing on Existing Customer Relationships

Do you find yourself unable track customer interactions in an effective way?

Nurturing customer relationships is critical for customer retention, repeat business, and developing customer loyalty. Relationships are formed through information and effective interactions. When your sales and support agents have all necessary information available to them, they’ll be able to have more meaningful interactions with your existing customers.

Implementing a CRM can also provide benefits when dealing with disputes or any other customer issues.

 

Your Sales Process is Complicated or Lengthy

This is a sign that you are likely very familiar with.

A lengthy sales process requires skillful management. If your sales staff doesn’t have details of the process at every stage, they risk losing opportunities during the conversion process. A CRM can provide a number of benefits, with a primary one being the ability to track every interaction. Consumers can become frustrated when they are given repeat information, asked for the same information multiple times, or when they communicate with staff who have no knowledge of the interaction history.

CRM software can ensure that any of your sales staff can pick up on the sales process, even if it’s their first personal interaction with a prospect.

 

You Want to Track Important Data to Make Future Business Decisions

Stagnation can lead to underperformance, decreased revenues and dissatisfied customers and staff. Continuous improvement and innovation are elements that the world’s largest and most successful businesses share. To make the right business decisions that allow you to succeed, it’s necessary to have a source of accurate data that is easily accessible. A CRM solution can help in this area.

A CRM will allow your business to record all customer interactions – sales, leads, trouble tickets – whatever is pertinent to your particular business. Information collected can be leveraged to determine areas where your organization can improve, and areas that require investment or changes in process. The data could even be used for developing future products or services.

 

Become More Efficient with CRM Software Implementation

CRM implementation will benefit businesses of every size, and when properly implemented, it can be a critical tool to help drive success and growth. The right software solution will ensure that your business can stay organized as it grows, and you’ll be able to work smarter while reducing unnecessary tasks.

Protect Customers and Your Business with PCI Redaction

The industry sectors that now receive and process credit card information go beyond those in the financial and retail sectors. If you are engaged in a business that requires your customers to provide credit card information to your agents, you are subject to regulations that protect your business and your customers from pervasive data breaches.

The most comprehensive set of regulations has been put into place by the PCI Security Standards Council, which dictates that for a call center to be PCI compliant, it may not store sensitive authentication data in audio recordings.  This means having a method to avoid recording the audio altogether during the call or establishing an efficient PCI redaction solution that is used for removing credit card information from voice recordings once they have been created. Authority’s patented audio redaction technology guarantees the removal of credit card information from audio recordings, ensuring PCI compliance.

How Authority Software Ensures PCI Redaction

Credit card validation codes should not be stored on call recordings, whether they are stored for a short period, or indefinitely. The storage of validation codes in addition to unique customer information and card numbers, would open up a significant amount of risk for both the company and the customer.

Authority Software offers a PCI redaction system where validation codes and other sensitive data can be redacted from a recording, before it is submitted for storage in accordance with PCI regulations and company policy.

The process is simple and requires no participation from call center agents, which removes the burden of additional training and eliminates the possibility of human error. You do not need to replace your existing call recording solution.  Authority’s PCI redactor can be implemented in conjunction with any call recording application capable of sending audio files, and works with any audio file format.  Sensitive information can be automatically flagged for removal during the call as it is actively being recorded. If this information is not removed from a call before storage for any reason, the relevant portion of the recording can still be removed after the recording has been made.

Audio segments containing sensitive authentication data are not simply deleted, but instead go through a crypto shredding process to ensure that the data cannot be recovered.

This system provides a significant layer of protection to business operators, call center agents, and to credit card holders. The implementation of Authority Software’s PCI Redactor must be a consideration by any business that wants to maintain call center compliance.

Authority Software is a Trusted Leader in Call Center Technology

With Authority Software, you can gain benefits that improve the overall customer experience and service delivery processes. You can lower your costs with a more efficient system, and can promote organic growth through a leaner and better organized workflow. Authority Software helps you to manage customer relationships so that you can create brand loyalty and ongoing goodwill towards your brand.

Protect Your Business Interests and Your Clients in a Digital World

Advancements in technology have undoubtedly made commerce simpler and faster than ever before, however, some of the technologies that make it easier for consumers to do business sometimes raise concerns regarding the privacy of financial and personal information.

Protecting your own business, your staff, and your customers is your responsibility as a business, and the use of Authority Software’s PCI Redactor is one way that you can ensure you are meeting all regulatory requirements.