Aspect Software Helps Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Enhance Patient Experience

Aspect Software, Inc., the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact center, today announced that Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, an integrated system of hospitals and medical groups, has implemented 190 Aspect® EnsemblePro™ seats in its contact center. The implementation will enable Evanston Northwestern Healthcare to reduce costs while continuing to enhance its patient services by improving call process efficiency.

Based in Chicago, a competitive market where patients have vast healthcare choices, it is important for Evanston Northwestern Healthcare to differentiate itself based on patient care and service. The organization, which has received numerous awards for both patient care and its advantageous use of technology to enhance service, is focused on maximizing the unified capabilities that Aspect EnsemblePro offers.

Aspect EnsemblePro, from the Aspect Software Unified product line, is a complete contact center solution that unites inbound, outbound and blended multi-channel contact (voice, email, the web and fax), with voice self service, recording, quality management, and unified reporting and administration in a single platform.

“The patient experience doesn’t begin when they step into the hospital or doctor’s office, it begins the minute they pick up the phone and we believe that technology, like Aspect EnsemblePro, is helping us achieve our strategic business objective ? making the patient experience as valuable and as pleasant as possible,” said Fran Horner, senior director of patient access for Evanston Northwestern Healthcare.

One example of this is Evanston Northwestern Healthcare’s”?no queuing policy”. Making use of dialed number identification service (DNIS), data on available agents and skill-sets, customer profiles, and its no-queuing business rule, Aspect EnsemblePro can route each caller to the most appropriate agent within seconds. In addition, its intelligent network routing links multiple locations and leverages centralized real-time statistics, enabling calls to be automatically rerouted from one site to another until the caller speaks to a live person, all of which can happen almost instantly.

The contact center supports 23 clinical departments and physician locations where it can route calls and will be bringing another 17 online by fall 2006. “We view the contact center as an extension of the hospital or clinical front desk and we want to be sure that patients are receiving the same high level of service they would get if they were standing in the hospital,” added Horner.

Evanston Northwestern Healthcare is also keenly focused on fine-tuning its contact center operations. They are using the integrated voice self service functionality of Aspect EnsemblePro to conduct a 30 second post-call survey. Patients are given the option of taking the survey following an interaction with the contact center where they are asked three short “yes or no” questions: 1) Was the representative helpful? 2) Did they meet your needs? 3) Will you choose Evanston Northwestern Healthcare for future medical care? At the end of the survey, patients are also given the option of leaving their name and a message or speaking to a supervisor.

In addition, the company is taking full advantage of the recording capabilities in Aspect EnsemblePro to record 100 percent of its contact center calls for quality monitoring purposes. They will be using the information gathered in the calls for training purposes and call optimization.

“Because our contact center handles both incoming calls from patients looking to schedule appointments, register or update insurance information, or to speak to a doctor or nurse about a medical condition, as well as outgoing calls like appointment reminders and checking on insurance billing status, we needed a solution that could provide a blended call option, which we were able to get with Aspect EnsemblePro,” said Horner.

“Evanston Northwestern Healthcare is an organization that embraces the idea that technology, used properly, can clearly improve the customer or patient experience,” said Ralph Breslauer, executive vice president of global sales and marketing at Aspect Software. “By maximizing the unified capabilities of Aspect EnsemblePro to offer patients their choice of how to interact, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare is really differentiating themselves in their industry.”

Evanston Northwestern Healthcare has a number of initiatives planned around continually leveraging Aspect EnsemblePro, such as building out the knowledge base. This capability will eventually enable the contact center to go paperless, providing agents with an automated way to access all of the information they need to do their job.