CX GUIDE FOR HEALTHCARE

Close to Care: The Benefits of Onshore Healthcare Contact Centers

Powering up your CX by balancing technical expertise with empathy and effective communication

In the outsourcing world, nearshoring is the hot new option for companies who want to strike a balance between cost and quality.

But is it the best option for all industries?

The truth is, for industries that manage extremely sensitive or personal customer data and situations—such as healthcare, insurances or finance—onshoring is often the better option.

Not only do onshore contact centers provide better understanding, trust and cultural alignment, the cost-benefit analysis is clear as well: onshore contact centers are a clear win for healthcare organizations prioritizing patient-centered communication, experiences and trust. In this guide, we’ll explore and break down why local truly is better when it comes to healthcare contact centers, and we’ll demonstrate how an onshore team can positively impact your patient satisfaction, provider relationships and overall healthcare outcomes.

Why CX is so important in healthcare

Consumer expectations are growing across industries—even so-called “service industries” are facing growing consumer demands as the Amazons and Netflixs of the world make service easier, faster and better. That being said, it shouldn’t be any surprise that individuals are coming to expect more from their healthcare organizations as well.

Recent research clearly supports the need for increased CX (or patient experiences) in healthcare:

rate customer service (70.8%) and communication (63.4%) as more important than bedside manner.” (Cut out “when it comes to a positive healthcare experience.

cite “ease of appointment booking” as a major factor in 5-star service from healthcare providers.

consider “good pre- and post-appointment communication” as key to their loyalty as a patient, up 28% from 2019.

But it’s not just that consumer expectations that are growing—it’s that these consumer expectations are driving loyalty, retention, satisfaction and even overall health outcomes. If it seems like the scheduling, billing and communication processes at your healthcare organization don’t impact the level of care or health outcomes your patients receive—think again. We’ll dive into this research later in this guide.

So let’s assume from the data that customer experiences matter in healthcare—perhaps even more than you might think. Does it matter where those experiences happen?

Does location really matter?

While there are dozens of factors that play a role in your contact center and customer service success, location is certainly one of them—and it’s one that’s often overlooked, given how large of a role it plays.

Far too many companies simply pick a contact center provider based on cost, services or simply ease, without considering how location will benefit or disadvantage their operations.

So, first things first—what are the primary location options to choose from when outsourcing?

Offshore Outsourcing Locations | Icon
OFFSHORE

refers to outsourcing locations that are overseas and far geographically from your place of business (i.e. India or the Philippines).

Overseas Outsourcing Locations | Icon
NEARSHORE

refers to outsourcing locations that are overseas but located nearby geographically to your place of business (i.e. Mexico or Puerto Rico).

Outsourcing In a Domestic Location | Icon
ONSHORE

refers to outsourcing in a domestic location.

Outsourcing to a remote | Icon
HOMESHORE

refers to outsourcing to a remote, location-flexible contact center team that operates without a physical location and can make use of agents around the world.

Outsourced Contact Center | Icon
SMARTSHORE

refers to an outsourced contact center that provides a blend of solutions, i.e. combining a small onshore team for certain tasks with a larger offshore team for other tasks.

Offshore teams are often the most affordable option, but they generally come with quality issues, decreased control, increased miscommunications and potential compliance issues or concerns.

For sensitive industries like healthcare, offshoring may be a bigger risk than you’re able to take. For healthcare contact centers, compliance, connection and communication are essential elements that need to be supported with high-quality teams. Onshore contact centers reduce risk by keeping all operations located domestically, as well as provide stronger connection and communication through agents who are attuned to your audience’s needs, concerns, language and culture.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits onshore offers for healthcare organizations.

Ready to take the next step?

The key benefits of onshore contact centers for healthcare

Patient experiences matter—not just for patient satisfaction and loyalty, but also for healthcare organizations’ revenue and overall patient outcomes.

But how exactly does onshoring support this? Here are seven key benefits we’ve seen:

Younger customers prefer live chat | Icon

Strengthen patient satisfaction

Overall patient satisfaction with their healthcare experiences matters more than ever—not only is it a determining factor for loyalty and retention, but it can also impact how likely patients are to follow care plans and experience positive health outcomes.

Obviously, then, healthcare providers should do everything possible to strengthen patient satisfaction across the entirety of the healthcare process, from appointment booking to in-person care to follow-ups and billing. And all of these things really do matter—according to recent research:

say the “quality of customer service” is a major determining factor in loyalty

say the “quality of communication” is a major determining factor in loyalty

Compare this to patients who said “bedside manner” (only 49%) or “cost” (47%) were as important to their loyalty and satisfaction. The rise in telemedicine (up 337% since 2019) has also increased the need for digitally effective, easy and streamlined processes for healthcare.

Onshoring can make a direct impact on improving patient satisfaction through improved CX and streamlined communication processes. For example, we worked with one healthcare organization and were able to achieve a 14% increase in Ease of Contact Rate and a 16% increase in Ease of Scheduling Rate, as reported by patients. These improved patient experiences were tied to a scalable team, improved speed of answer and streamlined processes—and they tied directly to improved patient outcomes and increased revenue for the healthcare organization.

While other outsourcing locations may also provide similar services—answering calls, managing appointment setting and so on—the quality may not be high enough to guarantee patient satisfaction and positive outcomes.

Convenient customer service | Icon

Improve understanding and communication

A big motivation for many healthcare organizations in moving to onshore contact centers is benefitting from improved understanding and communication between their patients and their organization.

Today, much of healthcare happens remotely—whether that’s telehealth visits, making appointments, following up on a prescription, checking test results or something else, there’s less and less face-to-face interaction, and more interaction with your teams over the phone, web chat or other electronic communication channels.

As a result, improving communication and understanding at all touchpoints is essential to deliver a streamlined, cohesive and supportive patient experience—and something that onshoring is uniquely situated to provide the best.

With onshoring, you’ll ensure that all your agents live and work in the US, allowing for much higher levels of cultural understanding and familiarity with the US healthcare system and your patients’ situations. In addition, higher levels of English fluency allow for fewer misunderstandings. With offshoring or nearshoring, most—if not all—of your agents are likely to speak English as a second or third language, which can introduce communication problems and misunderstandings. Onshoring resolves these concerns immediately.

Increase customer trust | Icon

Increase customer trust and respect

Similarly, while consumer trust and respect are important in all industries, there are few places where this is more important than in healthcare. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, trust in healthcare and healthcare organizations are waning—but can your contact center really help with that?

The answer is yes. With waning trust comes lower healthcare provider retention and decreased health outcomes, among other negative effects. But look at the recent data:

said a negative healthcare experience has “led them to lose trust in their provider.” This includes things like not being listened to, being given incorrect information and not feeling cared for, among other more concrete care-related problems.

said they would not return to the same provider if they had an experience that eroded their trust.

would switch providers without a negative experience if they could experience more “trust and respect” with their new provider.

said they lost confidence and trust in their physicians due to a lack of clear and consistent communication during the pandemic.

As the data makes clear, lost trust is a major cause for concern, with the vast majority of patients willing to switch providers after just one untrustworthy experience. However, more surprisingly, a significant portion of patient trust is not determined in a clinical setting, but based on the communication, care, and information they receive outside of their clinical care.

As a result, your contact center plays a large role in enforcing—or disintegrating—patient trust. With onshoring, you can ensure higher levels of customer trust through higher-quality communication, care and relatability.

Prioritize Patient-Centered Communication | Icon

Prioritize patient-centered communication

Patient-centered communication is a common buzzword among clinicians and medical training, but it shouldn’t just be for clinical settings.

Instead, patient-centered communication should be a core aspect of your healthcare organization, stretching everywhere from the operating room or examination table to the front desk, web chat and payments call center. Creating clear and patient-centered communication at every step is one of the key elements of providing excellent patient experiences—and onshoring again can help support this.

Patient-centered communication involves focusing on active listening, empathetic responses, friendly communication practices to foster relationships, providing clear information, demonstrating respect and compassion, enabling patient understanding and agency and so on. Not only do these practices result in better health outcomes, but they also increase patient satisfaction overall.

These core practices also align with the type of care and communication that sets onshore call centers apart from offshore or nearshore outsourcing, in many cases. Of companies who moved their outsourcing operations to onshore models, 70% said it was due to the lack of quality with offshore models.

For many companies, offshoring can present fair-enough quality alongside a beneficial cost reduction. However, for something as sensitive as healthcare, fair-enough isn’t enough. Onshoring allows healthcare organizations to make use of the best talent and local resources and prioritize patient-centered communication models in every single patient interaction, increasing patient satisfaction and improving retention and health outcomes.

Protect sensitive patient health data | Icon

Protect sensitive patient health data

Another major concern with offshoring—particularly in sensitive industries like healthcare—involves compliance and regulations. When outsourcing healthcare contact centers offshore, compliance becomes difficult to manage.

This is becoming an increasing issue for healthcare organizations. In 2019-2020 alone, HIPAA found 39.82 million compromised healthcare records. Data breaches, security issues, email phishing attacks, scams—all of this is becoming more and more common, and puts pressure on healthcare organizations to increasingly prioritize security and compliance. Obviously, increased data breaches or other security incidents will tarnish your healthcare organizations’ reputation and erode the patient experience, even if the care they receive from your providers is exceptional.

As a result, many healthcare organizations are bringing all their customer data closer to home, and moving to onshore call center models. Onshore call centers are not only more familiar with US laws, more likely to be HIPAA-certified, and so on; but they also keep all your sensitive patient data onshore and close to home. When you’re not sharing patient data overseas, it becomes easier to maintain and ensure compliance, as well as prevents you from having to worry about international policies.

Actionable insights | Icon

Improve overall healthcare outcomes

Finally, as mentioned briefly in other sections, onshoring indirectly contributes to better overall healthcare outcomes.

There’s a variety of factors that contribute to this:

Better Customer Service Experiences | Icon

Patients who have better customer service experiences with their providers trust their provider more, thus being more honest in visits and receiving better care.

Stronger Continuity of Care | Icon

Patients who have good experiences remain more loyal to their healthcare organizations, resulting in a stronger continuity of care.

Adhere to Care Schedules | Icon

Increased trust and loyalty correlates to a stronger willingness to seek treatment when needed and adhere to care schedules or prescriptions.

But let’s take a look at a very specific example related directly to customer service and your contact center.

Recent medical research suggests that “missed appointments represent a significant risk marker for all-cause mortality,” indicating that patients who miss appointments—particularly if multiple are missed or the patient has mental health conditions—have up to an 8-fold increase in mortality rates compared with those who missed no appointments.

This data suggests that existing healthcare systems may not adequately support the most vulnerable populations, but that increasing positive patient outcomes can be as simple as ensuring patients have the necessary communication and follow-ups needed to make and attend their appointments. This is something that outsourcing your customer experience, appointment setting, or other administrative concerns can greatly improve.

For example, at ROI CX Solutions, we worked with one healthcare organization to improve these types of results. This healthcare system was struggling to keep up with an overwhelming call volume, which led to decreased customer satisfaction, an inefficient patient experience, a high level of abandoned calls and a high no-show rate. Our team stepped in to improve the efficiency, quality and staff size of their customer team, improving speed of answer by 99% and reducing the no-show rate by 75%. We also helped them achieve a 16% increase in Ease of Scheduling rates, as reported by patients.

Cost-Benefit Analysis for Healthcare | Icon

Make the cost count: a value-based solution

At the end of the day, a cost-benefit analysis shows onshoring as a clear benefit for healthcare organizations. While opting for a “cheap” solution may work for some companies or industries, in healthcare, customer service is too important to skimp on.

The value of hiring an onshore team should be clear by this point, but the following table makes the cost and benefits exceptionally easy to see:

HEALTHCARE OUTSOURCING: A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
Offshoring / Nearshoring Onshoring In-House Teams
Lowest cost option Typically a middle ground between offshoring and in-house teams The most costly option
Loss of control is common with offshoring; as is high time demands due to lower quality teams Onshoring keeps operations local, while still relieving your teams of operational / logistical demands Time-demanding and resource-heavy; internal teams have to manage HR, hiring, training, scheduling, operations and so on
Easier to scale and manage large call volumes Easier to scale and manage large call volumes while still maintaining quality Difficult to scale, meaning call volume becomes overwhelming quickly
Increased security and compliance risks are common. Reduced security and privacy issues by keeping things domestic, plus compliance is managed carefully by expert teams. Reduced security and privacy issues, but compliance must be managed adequately internally
Reduced quality due to miscommunications, poor language / cultural understanding and other issues are common. Increased efficiency and clear communication from onshore teams lead to improved quality of patient experiences. Customer experience quality may suffer due to small team sizes and operational inefficiencies.

While onshoring is typically more expensive per-agent than offshoring, the quality, security and privacy, communication clarity, efficiency and overall value is much higher, an essential benefit for healthcare organizations. And compared to managing in-house teams, onshore outsourcing allows for much greater flexibility, scalability, operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Hear it from one of our healthcare partners:

Orange Quote | Icon

Thanks to ROI CX Solutions, we have provided faster and more efficient service to our patients, significantly improving our patient experience and revenue capture. With their expertise in integrating technology and implementing solutions, we have reduced our no-show rate by 75% and increased monthly revenue by over $1 million. We are thrilled with the results and grateful for the partnership with ROI CX Solutions.

Is CX onshoring right for you?

Is CX onshoring right for your healthcare organization?

These common benefits of outsourcing to an onshore team could make all the difference for your healthcare organization:

  • 24/7 service offers increased accessibility to support customers whenever they have a need (not just during business hours)
  • Strengthen customer care and support with quality call center services to help patients set appointments, schedule follow-ups, navigate insurance claims, and more
  • Protect sensitive patient data with domestic teams that ensure you maintain compliance and prevent data breaches
  • Prioritize patient-centered communication with domestic staff that reduces miscommunications and improves patient experiences
  • Improve processing efficiency with an external team to manage processing, payments, collections, and more while providing professional support for clients

With ROI CX Solutions, outsourcing can deliver massive results for healthcare organizations. With one healthcare organization we partnered with, we achieved results of:

99.7%

INCREASE IN SPEED OF ANSWER

(from an average 40-minute wait to a 7-second wait)

$1M+

REVENUE PER MONTH

by providing more efficient service, our client saw more appointments scheduled and fewer no-shows

75%

REDUCTION

in no-show rate

14%

INCREASE

in ease of contact rate (as reported by patients)

16%

INCREASE

in ease of scheduling rate (as reported by patients)

What could results like these achieve for your healthcare organization?

Improve patient experiences and satisfaction, strengthen trust and understanding between your patients and your providers, and improve overall health outcomes by trusting your customer experience to an onshoring partner who can drive results effectively. Connect with an expert from ROI CX Solutions today.

About ROI CX Solutions

ROI CX Solutions drives customer satisfaction and business success through outsourced customer service and global sourcing management. With decades of experience across our expert team, ROI CX Solutions has innovated results-driven performance and improved customer experiences for brands across a variety of industries. With flexible, customizable solutions, state-of-the-art technology, and world-class customer service representatives, we deliver results for your business—and your customers.

Interested in a Free Quote?

Get in touch with us today to discover what ROI CX Solutions can do for your business.