As Asia-Pacific beings its gradual path to recovery with the COVID-19 vaccine, organisations are moving to communicate distributing and administration with stakeholders about the vaccine rollout.
At the heart of this new future are the people. Gaining the public’s trust and cooperation has proved to be an essential process in recovery. Citizens looked for supportive assistance and reassurance from professionals and experts during uncertain time. All the while health departments and government organisations faced staff, budget and resource constraints when it came to educating people about the new vaccines, much less administering them and providing ongoing support.
At TTEC, with decades of experience guiding organisations across different industries in transforming customer/member/citizen experiences while also reducing costs, we know there are critical steps to building and managing positive customer experiences. We’ve outlined real-world examples of how digital innovation combined with human expertise can enable key players to quickly mobilse trained staff to provide fast vaccine support and drive success rates through CX.
Building trust
Officials will need to be transparent in guiding the public through the steps of vaccine development, distribution, administration and tracking. Proactively explaining vaccine efficacy and safety testing measures will be critical to curbing any signs of doubt.
This is where well-trained, experienced contact centre agents equipped with effective technology solutions play an important role in communicating public health information about the vaccine and promoting confidence and uptake. For example, in the US, when ramping up for open enrollment, a regional health insurance company that offered plans in 10 states struggled to find expert associates for part-time work in certain locations. We helped the company implement a Smart Seasonal strategy using a highly skilled yet cost-effective offshore pre-sales workforce for initial open enrollment inquiries and qualifications.
This allowed licensed, based associates to focus on more complex sales and enrollment activities, further enhancing the member relationship. Callback assist allowed prospective members to receive a call when it was their turn to speak to an associate, rather than wait on hold. And for associates, a robust knowledgebase and real-time coaching helped enable dynamic improvements to call flow and sales processes.
As a result, cost per enrollment decreased by up to 45 per cent and sales conversions rose 29 per cent from the previous year. In other cases, healthcare organisations used AI-powered chatbots and Intelligent Voice Assistants to deflect routine questions. A similar combination of digital efficiency and skilled agents, or COVID-19 BCP support, will be key in providing the public with fast and attentive vaccine aid.
Nimble support
Flexibility and agility will also be important. As the vaccination process unfolds, health departments and pharmacy services will need to quickly ramp up and scale down customer support as needed. One agency did exactly that when it experienced an unprecedented surge in unemployment claims at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a partnership with the agency, TTEC delivered fast results using cloud and automation technology to deflect calls from the department’s at-capacity system and a team of 30 experienced at-home agents to answer calls and lighten the in-house agents’ workload. Using at-home agents enabled the agency to rapidly expand its capacity, and scale back when call volume receded. And by routing calls to the appropriate resource—AI or human agent—claimants could file claims and get their questions answered with minimal wait times.
Speed to ramp
Rapidly training an army of employees in the collection and analysis of vaccine data, including keeping track of who has received which doses, appropriately escalating and reporting reactions to the vaccine, and ensuring that immunisation targets are being reached, among other requirements, poses another challenge.
Equipping learners with customised digital learning tools, including AI-powered simulations and skills and competency assessments is one of the most efficient ways to rapidly train a large group of people. For instance, because of a surge in e-commerce activity, one of the world’s leading online retail marketplaces needed to remotely train and deploy hundreds of agents across several countries and time zones to monitor transactions for fraudulent activities.
We collaborated with the client on identifying specific topics for a customised virtual training program that accounted for the top volume drivers to keep the training focused and increase efficiency. To further expedite the program, we ran four parallel virtual batches which were monitored and observed by program-certified training and operations leaders to assess training efficacy.
All training batches went live as scheduled and we succeeded in ramping up to 170 team members in less than two months. In fact, remote training throughput came in at 91 per cent compared to 88 percent in a brick-and-mortar contact centre.
Help is coming
The magnitude of the challenge the world faces in rapidly distributing, administering and monitoring the coronavirus vaccines as they become available can’t be overstated. And while there isn’t an easy solution, customer experience leaders know that gaining consumer trust is the first step to success.
Contact us to learn how TTEC can provide vaccine support, quickly and efficiently.
