BPO companies are where you call when you need medical help! That’s not some joke, it’s a fact. More healthcare units are hiring call center units to handle their customers. Medical emergencies call for prompt, immediate service. The agents handling such calls have to be careful about the information that they give out. Since it’s always a question of saving a life or providing relief to pain, the agents have to be precise and correct on every instance. A little error on their part can crack things open and can invite a law suit. Call centers taking on medical answering services have to be particularly careful about various other aspects of the job, other than providing the required services. Let’s take a look at the stakes in this mode of call center services.

Medical answering service is about data. Customers and callers are very particular about how much of their medical history is shared with BPO companies. The stakes go higher and the customers grow more paranoid when offshore call centers are involved. That is one area that call center units have to careful about. Their job is to protect the data from unscrupulous infiltrations. The agents and employees working on medical answering service have to be careful about the data that is shared with them. In medical and financial projects, data is sensitive and often involve deep emotions. You have to be subjective in cases so that your interaction with the customers is healthy and progressive.

The second concern in a healthcare project is license and certifications. The American medical firms and healthcare units are careful about handling over projects to call center units. You have to meet certain requirements before you can bag these projects. As a telemarketing unit, you will have to get the right kind of infrastructure. That will include knowledge banks and trained manpower. Because you will be dealing with lots of medical terms and jargons, you will need BPO agents who are familiar with those terms. You may need to conduct extensive training sessions in the call center itself. Before you kick start your project, you will have to make sure that you are not working with agents that are not trained. During the course of a project, it wouldn’t make sense to head back to the training room.

Other than training in medical jargon and knowledge, you will need to advise the call center agents on how they can improve their efficiency. If there is one aspect that describes a typical medical answering service desk, it’s how smooth-running it is. Your BPO agents will need the phone numbers of doctors, nurses and hospitals on their fingertips. You may need to send out messages, alerts and reminders to people in the loop. You may need to suggest or rectify doses that the callers need to take. Unless the agents are comfortable handling these questions, the immense responsibility will bear down heavily on them. They will feel intimidated and that is not good for medical answering services.

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