How 31West Helped A Healthcare Technology Solutions Company

Our client, a healthcare technology solutions provider was scaling up rapidly. Aggressive marketing & new feature releases resulted in growing support queries. Turnaround time for support tickets started hitting north of 36 hours. SLAs were not being met. Feature adoption & referrals took a beating. Customers were happy with the product but not with the service. NPS fell <6. We took ‘unity in diversity’ literally and a successful collaboration helped bring NPS to 9.

Our client, a leading health care technology solutions provider in the US. They offer innovative, cloud-based solutions for hospitals & health care practitioners. In under 24 months, they expanded their operation covering 14 states and 31 cities.

Aggressive marketing, the rapid expansion of product portfolio & new feature releases resulted in a large number of support queries going unanswered. From accessibility to private cloud deployment, all sorts of queries were coming from customers. Our client did not have enough bandwidth to deal with the volume of tickets. The Healthcare industry demands 24/7 support desk availability. This is another big concern for the client. SLAs were not being led to increasing in penalty payouts. Basic triage queries were answered after 24-36 hours. Due to the large volume of support tickets, the Level-2 team spent most of their time answering level-1 queries. This lead to compromising level-2 issues.

Intense product training, high attrition rate & prohibitive cost made it unviable to expand the in-house support team. NPS had dropped to 5.8 which was a big concern for the management & investors.

• Turnaround time of over 24-48 hours.
• Increase in penalty payout due to unmet SLAs.
• NPS score of 5.8 & falling.
• Growing concerns with management & investors.
• Compromised quality during after-hours & weekend support.
• Growing dissatisfaction amongst clients & users.

We identified 3 main causes for these problems.

1. The inadequate customer service team
2. Ongoing product training
3. Managing 24/7 Support infrastructure
4. High cost of running an internal support team

Since the client was running out of their resources for handling the queries we deployed a total of 18 support reps. We built 2 teams of 9 Reps each. Team A covered business hours on weekdays while Team B took charge of after-hours & weekends.

Internal Mandate: Zero Inbox before sunrise, every single day.

 

Only level-2 issues would be escalated to the client’s in-house support team. It was important to provide the level-2 team with all the information to be able to easily reproduce the bugs.

Having done plenty of simple & complex process transitions, we did not take much time to draw up a robust & efficient plan to start migrating the process.

 

Challenge 1: Structured Knowledge base

The client’s development team was constantly adding new features & improving existing ones. This required an efficient knowledge base system. The development team had to make sure they were constantly updating the knowledge base. Level 2 team regularly updated existing articles to keep them current. Our support teams’ contribution was largely to build template answers to make the support process error-free and efficient. With an easy-to-search, updated & handy knowledge base system in place, half the battle was won.

Internal Mandate: Publish self-help articles, training videos, and other content for faster onboarding of new support trainees.

 

Challenge 2: Agent Training

Training new Reps quickly is not an easy task. The rapidly growing product makes it harder. Throw in the complexity of a technology product, it’s no mean task. Keeping error rate to <0.1% & you can feel the heat.

To prevent new agents from being overwhelmed with a ton of information, we split the knowledge base into very small modules. After training the agents on a particular module, they would be shown the customer side of the application. It was important for the agents to know what our customers saw & used. That’s the only way our team would be able to relate to the customer. After a week into training, agents were asked to post draft replies to simple tickets. The tenured agents would review the draft, if correct, send it as it is. If not, modify it suitably & educate the trainees on what they missed.

Internal Mandate: 21 Days rigorous training program for new agents & maintain error rate of under 0.1%.

 

Challenge 3: Collaboration with client’s in-house team for seamless service delivery.

For an evolving technology product & servicing a hypersensitive healthcare industry, it was very important to ensure the service delivery was seamless, accurate, and timely. Any deviation in the above parameters would lead to unwanted time overruns and jeopardize the effectiveness of the entire process. Keeping this in mind we had to ensure that our team was constantly collaborating with the client’s in-house team. We also made sure that our collaboration was not limited to the support function but also encompassed other verticals like Product, Sales, Development, Customer Success, and Finance. Our team was the face of the company and whatever we said or did directly impacted the brand. We received calls and emails not only for support issues but also billing queries, new client onboarding, renewals, and everything in-between.

As a result of the delivery of our comprehensive solutions, the overall turnaround time in addressing support tickets was reduced to <4 hours. Customer satisfaction levels soon saw a steep curve with a heightened satisfaction level, about 60% more than what was recorded earlier. NPS improved to 9.2.

This helped our client retain existing customers, renew contacts while up-selling other offerings.

Management & Investors were confident of sustainable growth.

Taking into consideration our rich domain knowledge & 12+ years of experience in handling high volume IT help desk services, it was cost-effective and profitable for our client to entrust us for this engagement.