1. First measure what is happening now
Most healthcare organisations do not know how their telephone reachability is really doing. They do know there are complaints, and that the supplier’s monthly report quotes a percentage nobody trusts. So start at the source: your telephone system or contact centre platform records, per queue, how many calls come in, how long people wait and how many hang up before they are helped. That data already exists. It is just not being looked at.
Pull those figures for one week, per outpatient clinic or per team and per hour. You will usually see three things: a peak on Monday morning, a second peak after lunch, and one or two departments that consistently score worse than the rest. That is your starting point. Not the average across the whole organisation, because that average hides precisely the clinic where things go wrong.
Unable to get that data out of your system? Then that is your first finding. A real-time dashboard on top of your existing telephone system, such as Effecta Connect Dashboards, reads out that data without you having to migrate.
2. Set a service standard you can explain
A service standard is an agreement with yourself and with your patients: within how many seconds do we answer, and how often do we manage it? A commonly used form is 80/20: eighty per cent of calls answered within twenty seconds. Whether that standard suits you depends on the type of contact. An urgent care line calls for something different from a line for repeat prescriptions.
“Without a standard, every figure is an opinion. With a standard, a forty-second queue becomes a signal instead of a debate.”
Choose a standard you can explain to a nurse, a team leader and a director in one sentence. Set it per queue, not just for the whole. And attach a colour to it: green when you meet it, amber when it gets tight, red when you drop below it. Before long that colour will matter more than the number.
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3. Let the team see for themselves how things stand
The biggest difference in telephone reachability comes not from technology, but from visibility. A team that sees twelve people waiting responds differently from a team that reads about it in an email tomorrow. Put a wallboard up in the department, or give agents a compact little screen that stays on top of the electronic patient record or the CRM. What belongs on it:
- Number of callers waiting and longest wait per queue, in the colour of the standard.
- Who is available, who is on a call and who is in wrap-up. So a colleague can see when he or she is needed.
- Today’s service level, so the team knows whether the day can still be saved.
- An alert at a threshold. If the waiting time rises, the screen changes colour and the team leader gets a push notification.
At organisations that introduce this we see the same thing every time: the team starts shifting things around by itself. Someone postpones wrap-up work, a colleague from the reception desk picks up the phone for a moment. Not because they have to, but because everyone sees the same reality.
4. Make opening hours per outpatient clinic visible
In a hospital, every outpatient clinic has its own telephone opening hours. The cardiology clinic can be reached from eight to twelve, the orthopaedics clinic from nine to four, and the appointments line all day. Patients do not know that, and often the customer contact centre does not either. The result: callers end up in the wrong place, are transferred to a closed line and call again. Every extra attempt adds to your queue.
| Step | What you need | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Measure | Real-time data from the telephone system, per queue | Knowing where the pressure is, not on average but per clinic |
| Standard | A figure everyone understands, with a colour | Managing instead of reacting |
| Wallboard | A screen in the department | Team sees the same reality and shifts things around itself |
| Opening hours | Colour indicator per department: open, closing soon, closed | Fewer wrong transfers, fewer repeat callers |
Put the opening hours per department on the dashboard, with a colour indicator: open, closing soon, closed. A customer contact centre agent can then see at a glance whether transferring makes sense. And a team leader sees the peak coming that arises every morning at eight when three clinics open at once.
5. Automate on-call duty
Outside office hours, at the weekend and during an outage, reachability in healthcare hangs on on-call duty. Who is on duty? Is the number forwarded to the right mobile? Is that mobile charged? In many organisations this is manual work: a planner who switches the forwarding on Friday afternoon and hopes nobody swaps. One day that goes wrong, and in healthcare a missed on-call shift is not an inconvenience but a risk.
Link the duty rota to the call forwarding. Shifts automatically forwards the on-call number to whoever is on duty at that moment, rings everyone on duty at the same time and lets colleagues swap for themselves in the app. You can read how to set up on-call duty like this in Organising on-call duty and on-call backup without the hassle.
6. Test what happens during an outage
Ask yourself three things: when did you last test what happens if telephony goes down? Who calls the supplier then? And how quickly are they there, on a Saturday evening? At a large university hospital in the Randstad, the permanent telephony administrators became overloaded during a merger. A specialist from Effecta took over the administration, so first-line telephony was never at risk. The point is not that you need an external party. The point is that you know in advance who picks it up, and that this person is not only there during office hours.
Schedule a test. Deliberately put a queue into failure mode and watch what happens: does the alert arrive, does the team leader know what to do, does the fallback work? An hour of testing on a quiet Wednesday afternoon prevents a crisis on a busy Monday. If you want to arrange that administration on a structural basis, take a look at Effecta Nexus with standby cover.
7. Report weekly, manage daily
The monthly report remains useful for management, but you do not manage with it. You manage by the day, with real-time figures, and you learn by the week. A short weekly report per outpatient clinic with service level, missed calls and the peak moments is enough to see whether your measures are working. Trends over weeks and months come from your dashboard’s historical data, so you can see next year’s winter peak coming.
None of these seven steps requires a new telephone system. They require visibility, an agreement and on-call duty that works. Want to know where your organisation stands today? Take the Real Contact Scan, or see how we tackle this at hospitals and healthcare institutions in practice.