TASKE Improves Health Care Service Through Call Reporting and Analysis

With TASKE, Sanford Health has given their employees access to the information needed to improve call handling processes and customer interactions. Overall, customer experiences have been improved through reduced wait times and increased responsiveness.

Karen Roetman, of Sanford Health, says “various reporting options were available with multiple vendors, but TASKE was the only vendor that provided the Visualizer piece. We have found its call tracking and analysis features extremely beneficial in resolving disputes on hold times, as well as finding phone numbers for callers that may have been different than our records indicated.”

As the largest employer in North and South Dakota, Sanford Health provides an integrated healthcare system through its network of service facilities, which include many hospital departments, clinics, long-term care centers, and research centers. It’s the largest, rural, not-for-profit healthcare system in the United States, with a presence in 111 communities in 8 states. Through its dedication to the work of health and healing, the organization is building international clinics in Belize and Ireland.

Situation

Inconsistent reporting leads to frustration

Providing premium health care services requires effective communication among Sanford Health’s 21,000 personnel at Sioux Falls and Fargo offices, its geographically-disperse network of service facilities, and hundreds of thousands of clients.

To meet service quality objectives, Sanford Health staffs 300+ operators and agents, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Operators at five switchboard consoles route approximately 1,200 calls each day to the appropriate staff and queues. For the convenience of clients, Sanford Health also provides direct telephone numbers for most clinics, departments (such as billing), and other client-related services. As a result, the Sanford Sioux Falls telephone system is comprised of roughly 15,000 end-points handling approximately 60,000 calls per day throughout the system.

The organization’s previous telephone reporting software didn’t provide the information necessary to manage this complex call infrastructure and maintain high service levels. Specifically, the software didn’t generate consistent data. Karen explains that “you could run two reports asking for the same information and get two different answers.”

Solution

TASKE reporting minimizes caller frustration

Karen first saw TASKE’s solution at an Avaya Users Conference earlier in the year prior to the organization’s decision to upgrade their telephone system software which created the need to update the call reporting system as well. Based on what she’d seen at the conference, she was a strong advocate for TASKE when choosing from three different reporting solutions.

Today, report creators appreciate the flexibility to customize reports, including generating reports for specific date ranges or areas of coverage. For supervisors who use report data, but don’t want to generate reports themselves, Karen created standard agent, queue, and extension reports. Supervisors receive these reports via email at a frequency of their choice, with the option of viewing exported data in Microsoft Excel.

Sanford Health quickly realized the value of TASKE reports when they identified a previously unknown issue with the routing configuration. Requeued calls were being sent back into queues instead of to the front of the next queues. Once the problem was resolved, requeued calls were answered more quickly, resulting in increased customer satisfaction by decreasing wait times. This observation from TASKE also gave Sanford Health the opportunity to educate the staff to reduce the number of requeues.

TASKE reports also helped to reduce customer frustration resulting from service disruptions. Winter weather conditions can be severe in the geographical areas of some Sanford Health clinics, sometimes preventing them from opening at the start of normal business hours. If a clinic is not able to open at the scheduled time because of severe weather and an agent has forgotten to log off their phone the evening prior, the call would not follow its appropriate routing to the afterhours service but would be suspended in the queue. If this should happen, Karen is able to run a report to determine whether any of its agents are still logged in from the previous day. She can then log those agents out so that calls will be forwarded to the answering service until the clinic can open.

While TASKE reports have proven their worth in terms of maintaining service levels and operations performance, Karen says that “Visualizer is why we love TASKE.” The detailed call analysis has been invaluable for resolving disputes, particularly over call wait times. Directors can better manage caller expectations when dealing with issues as they are prepared with information from Visualizer, such as the phone number from which the call was placed, the queue that received the call, the agent that answered the call, any hold time during the call, and so on.

On more than one occasion, Visualizer played a direct role in Sanford Health’s ability to save a life. In one case, a mother called into a clinic, concerned about some symptoms affecting her daughter’s health. The doctor who received the information recognized that the girl needed immediate medical attention. However, the mother was not available at the number on record. Using Visualizer, the staff was able to find the number that the mother used to call the clinic, and then returned the call using that number. Because the staff was able to locate the mother quickly using the call tracking features provided by Visualizer, a life-threatening situation was resolved.