Delivering Better CX to Patients at Gonzaba Medical Group

Customer Profile

Como Familia means “Like Family” in Spanish and that is how you are treated at Gonzaba Medical Group (GMG). Dr. William “Bill” Gonzaba, founder of GMG believes that “everyone deserves a medical home where they are como familia and where they get Cadillac care at the lowest price.” GMG is a unique healthcare model, providing Medicare Managed Care and family care to patients.

Dr. Bill started his family practice in 1960. As the patient population started growing, so did the staff at GMG. The practice now has multiple clinic locations for primary care, radiology, specialty care, physical therapy and rehabilitation and chiropractic care.

Committed to the health of the senior residents of the community, GMG was on the search to move to the cloud and selected Five9 to support their contact center needs. Darryl Flores, Director of Customer Experience at Gonzaba Medical Group, was asked to come on board for a 30-day consulting project to help the organization streamline its business processes. The new platform was helping GMG move in the right direction, but from Flores’ viewpoint, there appeared to be some opportunities to adjust settings and routing logic to more effectively deliver calls. “Two weeks into the engagement, GMG asked me to stay on permanently. With Darryl’s lengthy experience he was able to identify key areas to improve the contact center’s operations.

I made a few modifications to correct some of the processes and we saw better results shortly,” shares Flores.

Providing Seamless Services to Patients One Call at a Time

A common practice is to use auto dialer campaigns for appointment reminders, patients are able to confirm their appointment by selecting 1 to confirm or 2 to reschedule. If they press 2 they are transferred to an inbound campaign and put in the queue to speak to the next available agent. This helped cut down on missed
appointments and no shows.

Prior to implementing the Five9 solution, when patients called they often
received a busy signal. The legacy system had limited telephone line
capacity, customers would hang up if they received a busy signal or waited on hold for over 15 minutes. GMG didn’t know how many calls they were truly receiving each day and they estimated an average of 1,100 calls a day but once they went live with Five9, actual call volumes exceeded 3,000 per day. This was good because it
meant 173 percent more calls were getting through to the contact center.

However, as you might imagine, GMG agent staffing wasn’t sufficient to handle the true call volume. GMG patients were upset with the wait times. What would have been a 10-minute wait on the old system could now take as long as an hour and a half.

Flores was able to fix this issue after implementing a few changes to the
outbound auto dial campaigns. To make more representatives available to take inbound calls he set the auto dialing to occur only if the calls in queue were low.

With this change in place the average speed to answer went down to 1 minute or less with 70 percent answered within 60 seconds – a company goal. Because of the
improved speed to answer, GMG saw their abandonment rate go down by 4 percent, not including the artificial abandon rate caused by the limited telephone capacity. “Our Technical Account Manager (TAM) is invaluable to us, he helped us implement an overflow queue, so if a threshold is met or exceeded the agent pool is expanded to include our nurses to assist” explains Flores. GMG has bi-weekly meetings with their TAM to discuss new efforts or for knowledge share.

Easy system administration with Five9 adapter for Salesforce

To make marketing calls to prospects, GMG agents use the Five9 adapter for Salesforce. A subset of the contact center is trained to take marketing calls, GMG has the open enrollment period and direct-response marketing campaigns. Using the Five9 Agent Desktop, Marketing efforts are tracked by phone numbers, so when a call comes in it generates a screen pop with the patient data for the agent to
help them provide a more seamless customer interaction. The Salesforce
integration allows agents to know where the prospect has come from and which marketing campaign to assign them to.

Five9 Making a Difference

In conjunction with auto dialer for appointment confirmations, GMG implemented a two-way SMS text interaction. The two-way interaction SMS has been helpful – patients can reschedule by pressing 3 to continue SMSing with an agent to reschedule. To comply with the “Do Not Call” (DNC) registry, GMG went through a phone list scrub. They found over 33,000 numbers were inadvertently put as a home number when they should have been classified as mobile numbers. With
the clean-up, SMS texting has become quite successful and GMG sends over 73,000 texts to their patients monthly. “SMS texting has been well received by patients, we stopped doing automated dialing for mobile numbers. Customers prefer the less invasive texting over a phone call. The no-show rate has gone down for appointments and the rate of patient confirmations has gone up,” remarks Flores. “Before it was 12% and now we have an average of 8% rate of no shows, a reduction of 4%.” SMS texting has improved the response rate by 15%, even if patients don’t reply they use the text as a reminder.

Successful Supervisors and Agents

Prior to implementing Five9 WFO, supervisors were using Excel to schedule their agents. Using Excel for this purpose is time consuming and ineffective, staff would often use the same shift schedules repeatedly. Using a schedule copy did not take into consideration agents requests for shift changes or PTO requests, this had a negative impact on agent morale. With Five9 WFO implemented supervisors finally had the visibility to schedule and make changes efficiently using workforce management to schedule agents by their skills. Staffing requirements dropped by 20 percent due to schedule visibility and the addition of adherence as a weekly goal.

Supervisors use the Five9 Supervisor portal to manage agents, view alerts, average speed to answer, breaks, and add different skills easily. GMG also takes advantage of the ability to have bilingual skills for their agents, often using Spanish to help, the supervisors and agents feel empowered. Another thing that GMG implemented was a helpline so that new employees can call and ask questions and get training when needed.

“We also use broadcast messaging to communicate with our agents. We use it to let our agents know about things like overtime, if we are working through lunch, and for fun stuff like recognizing individuals for their great work. Five9 really has helped our organization by enabling our agents and supervisors to be more efficient,” concludes Flores.