Anytime, Anywhere Visibility into All Schedules Enables CentraCare Health Agents to Work from Home

CASE STUDY: CentraCare Health

CentraCare uses Calabrio ONE to permit visibility into forecasts and schedules, use different scheduling types for different needs, and ensure consistent customer/patient service.

Overview

Not-for-profit CentraCare Health provides comprehensive, high-quality care and numerous specialty health services to Central Minnesotans via hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and senior housing. An important component of the compassionate, dignified and respectful care to which CentraCare is committed is the service delivered by its patient schedulers, triage nurses and telehealth providers—all of whom rely upon Calabrio ONE.
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Contact Center Debut Demands More Sophisticated Approach to Workforce and Quality Management

When planning to launch CentraCare’s first, centralized contact center—CentraCare Connect—in March 2017, leaders knew the company’s existing approach to scheduling and quality management couldn’t ensure patients would continue to receive the same level of care they’d come to expect. CentraCare needed a sophisticated solution that would help it effectively, efficiently manage a diverse workforce while ensuring a high quality of service.

“We needed to quickly up-level the way we managed and scheduled our teams,” explains Kristin Suggs, quality assurance and training analyst for CentraCare. “Spreadsheets weren’t going to cut it. We needed better, more modern ways to—for example—create and modify schedules, track PTO requests and save emails.”

Standardizing on Calabrio ONE

After evaluating several workforce optimization (WFO) platforms, CentraCare selected Calabrio based upon its scheduling and call recording capabilities. “Calabrio proved to offer us the most capability and flexibility at the best price point,” explains Suggs. “In addition to our most urgent scheduling and call recording requirements, we also needed everyone to be able to see the forecasting, we needed to create virtual queues, and we needed intraday dynamic scheduling. Neither Verint nor NICE could match Calabrio’s workforce and quality management capabilities, so Calabrio was the clear choice for us.”

Putting Calabrio ONE to Work

As the first employee hired into CentraCare’s new, centralized call center—and the only individual at that time possessing a call center background—Suggs worked quickly to introduce Calabrio’s modern capabilities to the teams at CentraCare, delivering CentraCare’s first formal forecasting methodology as well as immediate and noticeable improvements to the health system’s scheduling and call recording processes.

Facilitating Work-From-Home, Visibility Into Any Schedule From Anywhere

More than half of CentraCare Connect agents now work from home because Calabrio lets agents see other agents’ schedules, from any state in the U.S. “Work-life balance is important to our organization and to our leaders, but letting agents work from home wasn’t even a possibility until we implemented Calabrio because we couldn’t ensure we’d have enough agents at any given time to provide the level of service we required,” explains Suggs. “In Calabrio, agents can see daily forecasts and schedules for other agents, so they themselves can find someone to cover their shifts, see who’s filling in for them or coming on next, and find the best time to take a break. This kind of visibility is really important since our agents are spread across different states. And now, because of Calabrio, 50 percent of our agents work from home, and we’re looking to grow that number to 80 percent by the end of 2019.”

Empowering Agents to Self-Schedule

With Calabrio ONE, CentraCare Connect agents who field patient calls regarding scheduling, Registered Nurses offering triage support, Advanced Practice Providers seeing patients via
telehealth through quickClinic and eClinic visits enjoy flexible scheduling as determined by leadership that lets them easily manage their schedules and availability from wherever they are. Agents also use Calabrio to enter PTO requests and easily set exceptions to accommodate meetings and trainings, confident their shifts will be covered. “My team uses firm dates and special events,” says Suggs. “And we use intraday management constantly—for agents that go home early or for scheduling overtime, for instance.”

Set schedules are augmented by Calabrio’s dynamic availability—where agents select the times they’re available to work—and dynamic scheduling, where agents select the specific schedule they will work. Dynamic scheduling also rewards tenured, high-performing agents by giving them preference based upon important factors like seniority and performance when building the schedule. “Before Calabrio, we couldn’t offer the kind of flexibility that self-scheduling allows,” says Suggs. “Now, agents have much more control over their schedules, and they’re happier.”

Managing Call Quality For A Superior Service Experience

Unable to monitor quality before Calabrio, CentraCare now ensures a consistent, high level of service quality with what they call a “WOW Factor” scorecard. Using a point-based system (instead of the standard, percentage-based one), managers quality-control all teams—nurses, schedulers and providers—by monitoring and scoring 1-2 calls each week along five parameters: greeting, discovery, solution/technical, closing/technical and KPIs. The system auto-fails those agents who don’t do what’s required and assigns zero points to team members doing only what’s expected—a design intended to inspire individuals to go beyond what’s merely expected of them in order to deliver highquality service at all times.

“The quality management workflows and flexibility Calabrio gives us are really wonderful,” says Suggs. “Healthcare clinics often resist relinquishing control of their incoming calls to a centralized call center even if they acknowledge it’s better able to field incoming calls. Calabrio capabilities—like being able to build custom quality forms based upon specific teams and different roles in the organization, for instance—calmed any fears our clinics had and made that transition so much easier for them.”

Recording Calls And Screens for Protection Against Liability

To protect against liability, CentraCare also uses Calabrio to record calls made by agents, and record and then archive for seven years the screens of remote workers. “Whenever there are internal quality concerns or external complaints from a patient, it’s great to be able to review the relevant recording. In fact, our leadership views Calabrio’s recording capability to be so important that we’re now rolling it out organization-wide. Moving forward, all calls made by anyone at CentraCare will be recorded.”

Enabling 24/7 Availability Of Key Services

Calabrio also enabled CentraCare to expand its patient scheduling, nurse triage and telehealth offerings to be available 24 hours per day, seven days per week. “Patients often need our health services outside of regular business hours,” explains Suggs. “It was imperative we find a way to make key services available to them in the evenings and on weekends, and Calabrio helped us do that.”

Looking to Calabrio as a Platform for Growth and Differentiation

States Suggs, “I love Calabrio. They’re the only vendor we work with that gives us the level of service we expect. And it absolutely was the right choice for CentraCare’s needs. Because of Calabrio our patients can call any time of day or night to schedule an appointment or speak with a nurse; our agents are better engaged and happier; and only one person has to manage the entire workforce process.”