MANAGING CALLS FOR BETTER PATIENT SERVICE

In light of recent research, showing that many organisations are missing up to 25% of incoming phone calls, Yac has launched Yac Call Manager, a web-managed Inbound Call Service (ICS). It is a low-cost hosted system that requires no expensive phone hardware or computer software, can be implemented quickly and can virtually eliminate missed calls.

GPs’ surgeries, like many other organisations, are high-pressure environments, where skilled people often spend a disproportionate amount of their working day on routine administrative tasks – giving standard information, booking appointments, transferring calls to the correct department. Much of this time could be better spent on other skill-dependent tasks, at which staff excel. When staff are stretched to the limit, patient service, staff moral and efficiency can all be adversely affected.

Yac Call Manager is based around a low-rate, non-geographical (0845) number, which both addresses the Health Minister John Hutton’s stand on expensive telephone numbers that charge patients over the odds to contact local NHS services, whilst helping health services to benefit from a system that ensures calls are dealt with quickly and efficient improving patient experience and staff productivity. The Yac 0845 number means that patients only pay the price of a local call, wherever they are in the country, whilst the Yac Call Manager system behind the number ensures that calls are dealt with more quickly and efficiently than to standard numbers, reducing the amount of time that patients spend on the phone.

Yac Call Manager is controlled through an online interface, allowing users to individually tailor options to match their patients’ needs. Callers can be automatically routed to the correct staff member – for appointments or test results, for example - or, if all lines are busy, placed in a queue, and given important health messages rather than hearing the engaged tone. Using an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) menu the system can be set up to ensure that calls are dealt with quickly and efficiently and if patients are calling for standard information (such as ‘when are you starting flu jabs?’) or with non-urgent calls, they can select pre-recorded information or leave voice messages which can then be automatically e-mailed to the relevant personnel, to be dealt with later, thereby freeing up valuable staff resources to deal with more urgent tasks.

Yac Call Manager not only frees up valuable human resources, and increases staff efficiency, but the online call monitoring report allows managers to analyse call activity during the day, which can then be used to schedule human resources and set up to cope with periods of high demand or to operate different menu and call options for different times of the day or week. And because the service is managed and hosted by Yac, any necessary upgrades and maintenance are taken care of, reducing the need for costly technical personnel.

Yac Call Manager is a flexible and low-cost solution for health centres looking to better manage their inbound patient telephone calls.  It uses customers’ existing phone lines, requiring no additional hardware, and is managed via a web based control centre offering instant changes and daily call reporting. Yac Call Manager can start at as little as £100 for set up and £200 per month thereafter.

For further information please contact Tom, Phil or Kristen at Eulogy! on 020 7927 9999  -  tom@eulogy.co.uk / phil@eulogy.co.uk / kristen@eulogy.co.uk

 Please mention countrydoctor.co.uk

Notes

Yac is a leading hosted telephony application provider, and since being set up in January 1999 has provided Inbound Call Services (ICS) to over 500,000 customers.

At the core of Yac’s offering are a range of products designed to enable organisations to successfully manage incoming calls themselves, to improve the service they offer over the phone, and increase internal efficiency.

Yac’s experience and skill in the provision of ICS products enables organisations to manage incoming calls themselves through a secure personal web interface, which can be accessed and updated instantly.  This enables better management of call volumes, and ensures the greatest efficiencies by allowing the organisation to route calls to the most appropriate destination, and reduce the number of missed calls. 

Yac’s products offer low operating costs, and are purely software based, so avoid the need for any investment in expensive hardware.

 (5/4/05)