Medscheme`s existing call centres - based in Gauteng, Durban and Port Elizabeth - handle a massive 650 000 calls per month; and this figure is projected to increase by some 10% a year.
"To handle the extra demand we are going to regionalise our Gauteng operations into a new centre in Roodepoort," says John Hall, customer service divisional manager at Medscheme. The call centre in Port Elizabeth opened in February, while the Roodepoort operation will be up and running by August.
Eventually the three centres will employ some 450 trained personnel, a figure that is set to increase as the centres expand. Currently there are 100 agents in Durban - the longest established centre - 80 in Port Elizabeth and the rest will be based in Roodepoort.
"Each agent handles about 120 calls per day, and we hope to bring that down to 85," says Hall.
Medscheme, whose customers cover the full ambit of the medical industry, from medical aid fund members, suppliers, medical service providers, pharmacists, doctors, and hospitals, uses the US-sourced Quintus eContact Suite, supplied by e-Contact Centre Solutions, a new entrant to the call centre market.
"The Medscheme Quintus application, MedQ, went live in December 1999, after only four months from project launch," says Rob Salvado, MD of eContact Centre Solutions. "It is a fully automated process which harvests all customer interactions and is then able to use this historical data to meet customers` needs."
Quintus eContact needed only minor customisation to fit in with the demands of medical aid administration. "The system`s strongest point is rapid deployment time, which is made possible due to its architecture, overall functionality and which requires the minimum amount of customization," says Salvado.
Quintus is in common use by hundreds of major corporations, including TicketMaster, the world`s largest ticket issuing company. Medscheme is one of four major corporations in South Africa which use the Quintus eContact Suite.
"We needed a powerful package which can handle our growth rates," says Hall. "Membership of Medscheme has doubled over the last three years and is continuing to grow all the time. We are planning to leverage the technology to handle the growing number of calls and are confident that Quintus can meet the demands we are going to make."
Although the call centres are nationally distributed, it will soon be possible for customers to dial an 086 number, whereafter calls will be routed to the most cost-effective centre.
Medscheme runs some 59 different medical aid schemes and each of these schemes has five different options to them. On top of this, each scheme has a range of some 80 different benefits. All this presents a formidable task for an agent and Quintus.
"The situation becomes so complex that we have started creating specialised teams in the call centres who only deal with specific schemes," says Hall. "This helps in training and staff turnover problems, and ensures that agents have the necessary skillsets to answer all queries efficiently."
The centres` operating hours, which run from 8am to 4pm weekdays, will soon be expanded to 8am to 9pm seven days a week, with the Durban centre handling all after-hours calls.
"It is possible to handle all the calls from one point due to a Quintus Knowledge Q," says Hall. "This is a central data bank which can be called up from any agent`s desktop and provides any specific client`s complete history and current status."
Call operations are purely inbound at present, but Medscheme plans to move the technology forward to convert the data gathered into an outbound service as well. "The next phase is to leverage the system into a customer relationship management phase, where it can be enhanced with customer satisfaction questionnaires, and eventually even into sales and marketing functions," says Hall.
Medscheme also has an interactive voice response (IVR) system which is only used by suppliers in Gauteng. This enables, for example, a pharmacist to dial in to the system, and without human interaction, to extract data such as a patient`s benefits list, available funds and other details, merely through typing in certain codes on their keypads.
"The cost of handling a live call in a call centre runs at about R7,80 per call; an IVR automated response costs 85c per call," explains Hall. "Eventually we are going to expand this service to make it available to all customers using an 086 number. In addition, we are looking to create further self-service facilities on the web, where customers can access information through a firewall," says Hall.
"Self-service strategies such as the IVR system and Web-based applications serve a twin purpose: not only do they offer additional channels of service to clients but they also can relieve the load upon call centres themselves."
Share