A health center answers ~1,000 calls a day with zero hold time
Eight locations, 71 reasons to call, and a traditional IVR that still needed a person to pick up every call. A multilingual Smart IVR now answers all of them, around the clock, in the caller's language.
About the client
The customer is a non-profit, US-based Federally Qualified Health Center that has served its community for nearly four decades. It provides primary, urgent, dental, vision, maternity, and mental and behavioral health care across eight locations, serving nearly 40,000 patients a year with about 500 staff and more than 100 providers. The organization is not named in this case study.
Phone calls are one of the main ways patients, families, physicians and other health facilities reach it. It needs to serve every caller 24/7, in the language they choose, as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, while making sure high-priority calls, such as those from doctors, are handled appropriately.
The challenge
Roughly 1,000 calls come in every day across eight locations and a wide range of service lines. Callers range from patients and families to physicians and other health facilities, with 71 different reasons for calling, in multiple languages, and those calls have to reach more than 40 lines across departments and locations.
The traditional IVR could sort calls by department and send high-priority callers like doctors to a dedicated line, but every call still needed a person to answer and forward it. Callers sat on hold. Nobody could switch languages mid-call. And outside business hours, apart from exceptions like the nurse line, the contact center was simply not there.
Every hour skilled staff spent answering and forwarding calls was an hour not spent helping patients, insurance companies and doctors, at a cost no non-profit can afford.
The solution
The health center put a 24/7 multilingual Smart IVR on every incoming call, live in about four weeks, with no integrations required.
Each call opens with a compliance greeting covering the recording notice and prescription guidance, and urgent callers are directed to 911. The agent then checks whether the caller is a patient or a provider, gives providers priority handling, screens out spam, and works out which of the 71 intents the call is about, from appointments and cancellations through refills, referrals, test results, records, billing and urgent care.
Routing follows the schedule: four time segments a day, covering evening urgent care, weekend hours and holiday calendars. If the right department is open, the call goes to its queue, one of more than 40 lines. If it is closed, the call gets after-hours handling. Callers can switch language at any step.
The outcome
The front door now answers itself, instantly and in the caller's language, at any hour.
Cost per phone call is significantly lower than under the prior operation, with more coverage. High-priority calls like those from doctors are recognized and routed appropriately, and contact center staff are free to focus on patients, insurance companies and doctors.
What it does for a health center
- Every caller's languageCallers are served in the language they choose and can switch mid-call.
- Instant answering, 24/7No hold time at pickup, and callers reach the center outside staffed hours.
- Safety in the flowEmergency check, recording disclosure and prescription guidance before anything else.
- Schedule-aware routingEvery call goes to whatever department and location is actually open at that moment.
- Lower cost per callMore coverage than the prior operation, at less cost per call.
- Staff back with patientsProvider and emergency calls are prioritized, spam is screened out, and staff stop forwarding calls.
The health center’s executive leader has described the Smart IVR’s routing as “pretty rock solid,” with “very few misdirected calls,” a misroute rate of less than 1%.