Healthcare services
An outbound call list loaded in minutes, not seven days
- Industry
- Healthcare services
- Engagement
- Full-time, data and reporting
- When
- 2007 to 2010
- Stack
- Automated import
- Triage information system
The challenge
A healthcare services company made outbound customer-satisfaction calls for its clients. Each list of about 5,000 calls was keyed into the triage information system by hand: six people, seven days, and about 300 calls completed.
The approach
- Wrote an import that loads the list exactly as the client sent it, in under five minutes.
- Moved the six people who had keyed the list to making the calls full time; one became the outbound manager.
The result
Loading a list went from 7 days to under 5 minutes, and completed calls rose from about 300 to nearly 3,500 of the roughly 5,000 listed. Every record matched the client's file, where hand-keying had often introduced errors.
See it measured
Read the method and its limitsSwitch between keying and importing
A week of hours against five minutes
Before: keying the list took 7 days, shown as all 168 squares of a week, one square per hour.
Drawn to scale: each square is 1 hour, 24 to a row, so the seven days are 168 squares. Under 5 minutes is drawn at its upper bound, 5 of the hour's 60 minutes.
Verdict
Six people stopped typing the calls and started making them.
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