Genesys CIA Nominee: Presbyterian Healthcare ServicesGenesys CIA Nominee: Presbyterian Healthcare Services

Shouldn't patients be able to call one number and talk to one person to understand what insurance would cover, pay the hospital bill and schedule the next appointment?

One of the highlights of the annual Genesys Analyst Meeting is presentations by Customer Innovations Award (that CIA) nominees. Four such presentations were made this week, offering a broad variety both geographically (North America, Latin America, Japan and Australia) and by vertical (healthcare, hosted service provider, insurance and cellular carrier). While each story was compelling in its own way, I will highlight one here, Presbyterian Healthcare Services of Albuquerque, New Mexico.Dale Parchois, Vice President, Customer Service Center for Presbyterian, did a masterful job in her 30 or so minutes to outline the challenges faced in healthcare customer service. Dale was brought to Presbyterian Health Services as part of a conscious desire to integrate multiple points of customer service. As the market leader, aspiring to national excellence, Presbyterian saw a gap in this area that needed to be addressed.

Dale described how they designed a game plan and some of the results already achieved with the impressive implementation of that plan throughout 2008.

The challenges included multiple 800 or local numbers customers used to reach small pockets of answering resources spread across 25 different sites. As is common in the industry, making a doctor's appointment, getting an insurance question answered or solving a billing problem involved calling different numbers and talking to different people.

Perhaps it was Dale's years of experience at AT&T and Convergys that helped her see both the problems and the solution. Shouldn't patients be able to call one number and talk to one person to understand what insurance would cover, pay the hospital bill and schedule the next appointment? Couldn't Presbyterian offer that?

Part of the answer was consolidating call answering resources into one main center of about 250 agents, the Presbyterian Customer Service Center and two small geographically-diverse centers for redundancy. Another piece was creating both the notion and the training required to develop universal agents who could handle scheduling, billing, insurance, physician interactions as well as proactive contacts.

Certainly not every agent today handles every type of contact but there are plans in place that allow employees to expand the number of types they do handle, offering the opportunity for career progression.

From a Genesys point of view, over the course of 2008 Presbyterian deployed Genesys Workforce Management, skills-based and multi-site routing, screen pop, Genesys Voice Portal with speech recognition, and partner Virtual Hold's Concierge solution for queue management (to name a few.) More solutions are planned for roll-out in 2009.

And now the punch line. When I asked Dale what telephony infrastructure she was using with the Genesys contact center applications, she didn't know.

She had no idea what PBX was installed at Presbyterian. She knew that Presbyterian hasn't yet moved to IP technology and that there is an evaluation of VoIP technology underway.

She queried IT staff and let me know later (and I don't see the need to call out the name of the traditional PBX player that essentially lost this business.) The point is that Presbyterian needed a contact center application solution and implemented Genesys. They didn't call their PBX supplier. Seems like an application-based world really is beginning to emerge.Shouldn't patients be able to call one number and talk to one person to understand what insurance would cover, pay the hospital bill and schedule the next appointment?