Reducing Call Center Work Queues Leads to New Levels of Success
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Reducing Call Center Work Queues Leads to New Levels of Success
Mayo Clinic’s Central Appointment Office (CAO) serves as the front door to the patient’s experience and performs many functions in addition to answering phone calls and assessing where the patient should have their first appointment. These additional offline tasks create a significant amount of work for the team and, before this study, there was no systematic way of measuring its impact.
The CAO lacked detailed information and definition for each process, associated tasks, and amount of effort needed to complete these incremental tasks above and beyond the core functions of phone triage.
In order to fully understand the impact of the (incremental) offline work, process consulting was needed to define the tasks of each function. As a solution, a thoughtful timing study was created to understand the duration of each task. Combining this information with system volumes for each task, an estimate of FTE (Full Time Employees) – at different confidence levels – was assembled to help guide the CAO.
The result of this project included reducing abandonment rate by over 80%, reducing work queues by over 300%, and a final financial assessment that assessed the impact of the improvements in terms of lost P&L and cash flow impacts.
"The assessment that was provided helped us take our department from failing service level metrics to being able to meet and exceed our targets for the past 2 years.”
Courtnie G., Operations Manager Central Appointment Office
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