The impact of positive patient experience during the patient’s customer service interactions with your facility or our customer service center cannot be underestimated! Survey scores measure patient satisfaction with various parts of the revenue cycle process, including, but not limited, to the patient’s overall billing experience. These surveys are predominately used to measure the patient’s reaction to their customer service experience during telephone conversations, face to face interactions, and about the value of the correspondence they receive.

Where there is an extreme issue we measure the compliance aspect of how the patient was handled, otherwise the compliance pieces of the patient interaction should never be a concern. That is why you have processes built to prevent compliance issues, right?

The State Collection Service team believes that compliance, although not directly measured in most patient satisfaction surveys, has a direct correlation that “goes without saying” – we should be compliant with HIPAA, FDCPA, TCPA, state laws and other regulations. With that said, how do we sleep well at night knowing compliance is being proactively monitored?

The CallMiner speech analytics tool we have employed is working whenever we are making calls. The tool analyzes 100% of all calls made at State Collection Service and scores each call. There are compliance components of a customer service representative’s quality assurance scorecard, including the proper identification of the consumer, compliance with call recording notification requirements, mini Miranda verbiage on third party collection calls, and individual client requirements, to name a few. Key features State Collection Service uses in the CallMiner Eureka! product include the following:

  • Presence of risky or prohibited language
  • FDCPA procedural adherence issues
  • Cease and desist language
  • “Do Not Call List” notifications
  • Customer satisfaction issues (dissatisfaction/understandability)

Knowing where you may have compliance concerns or where you may have patient dissatisfiers is the first step toward making improvements. Through the custom scorecard each customer service representative is scored on the compliance/risk aspect of the call along with general call courtesies and negotiation. Call agitation levels and risk language are identified on each account, making it very easy for a supervisor to find the calls with coaching opportunities or trends that need to be addressed. We know there is a balance between collecting the payment, limiting the risk on any call, and building rapport with the consumer, and that level of desired balance is taught not only in new hire training sessions, but also in ongoing sessions. When you teach someone to build rapport first, you naturally are limiting risk and are able to talk with the consumer about their account.

Seeking first to listen and understand allows the agent to have a relationship that makes a financial conversation much easier for both the patient and the agent.

The goal is to resolve the patient account in a compliant manner, preserving patient dignity. Accomplishing this is done with training the three elements of customer service representative objectives on each call: Building Rapport, Limiting Risk and Collecting Payment.

Finally, when the agent is able to see their CallMiner scorecard and measure their call success against the three goals, they will learn and improve with each call.

There is no end to compliance and managing risk on calls, but rather a continuous improvement cycle which can be measured for success when supported by a speech analytics tool.

An excerpt from: “The Delicate Balancing Act: Using Speech Analytics to Optimize

About State Collection Service, Inc.

Since 1949, State Collection Service has provided quality collection service to countless healthcare organizations.

Through experience and innovation, State Collection Service has grown to become a tremendously credible and nationally-recognized collection agency offering services from pre-registration to bad debt. It is upon the basis of ethical behavior and a dedication to integrity that each State Collection Service employee works to uphold the company’s vision – Partnerships for a Lifetime.

*This article first appeared in “A State Collection Service, Inc. Newsletter Volume 19, Issue 4, Fourth Quarter 2013”