New Study Examines The Challenges of Healthcare Switchboard Operators

WOBURN, Mass. - April 20, 2017 - PRLog -- Parlance, developers of innovative virtual agent and operator solutions for large enterprises, released a new White Paper today that examines the role of switchboard operators in healthcare. The paper looks at the many different call handling and non-call handling duties assigned to this position, which can create difficulties in balancing service for callers with support for hospital operations and internal communications. The paper also recommends ways hospitals can support operators to allow them to easily meet their many competing responsibilities.

Voice communications continue to play a crucial role in healthcare for both internal resources as well as external patients, vendors, insurance agencies, and other public callers. The common denominator among these disparate caller communities is the switchboard operator. Beyond greeting callers, triaging their need, and connecting them to the appropriate destination or resource, operators are frequently tasked with a wide array of additional duties, such as announcing and tracking medical codes, coordinating emergency responses and medflights, monitoring medical gas supplies and facility alarm panels, to name just a few. The workload related to these additional responsibilities (some of which are literally a matter of life and death) can detract from an operator's core function of delivering excellent service that improves the patient experience and builds the hospital's brand.

The paper suggests that new advances in caller self-service can help alleviate the operator strain by allowing callers to speak naturally to get where they need to go – offloading a significant amount of calls from operators while speeding and improving the caller experience.

The study can also be accessed via the Parlance website, at http://info.parlancecorp.com/empowering-operators.