Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Veterans' Administration Opens Call Center Services in Hot Springs

By Madhubanti Rudra
TMCnet Contributor

On the first day of business at the Veterans’ Administration Call Center in Hot Springs, the agents handled nearly 1,000 calls that were coming into the Black Hills Health Care’s VA Call Center in Hot Springs, S.D.

The Veteran Call Center serves veterans throughout the VA Black Hills Health Care System, including western South Dakota and portions of Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana. The center, run by an 11-person staff, is equipped to handle calls from more than 18,000 registered veterans in the Veteran Administration’s service area, Dianne Christiansen, the nurse manager said.

Abandonment rate – that is people who hang up before someone can help them -- is one of the effective ways of judging a call center’s efficiency. Christiansen said in a statement that when the call center opened back in August, the abandonment rate was 28 percent. The board in the call center showed 52 seconds as the average time callers had to wait before their call was answered, leading to a 1 percent abandonment rate.

 “On Monday, as you can see, we had 1,005 calls, 581 of which dealt with scheduling,” Christiansen said.

The call center line is open Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., at 877-339-6837. The line is available to veterans as a Nurse Advice Line, to schedule and reschedule appointments and for pharmacy refills or renewals.

The secret of this success lies in a system redesign.

“The call center came about after issues came up regarding long waits by veterans calling the VA health care system. We did a system redesign to address the problems,” she said. “A year and a half later, we opened the call center,” the acting assistant director of patient care services Gloria O’Neil explained.

This, according to O’Neil, turnd the call center into a one-stop call for veterans, which ensures that whenever one calls, he or she can talk to someone who can help them

“Research has shown that having a centralized location leads to better results. Having the right people definitely help in performance,” Christiansen said.

Calls are separated into three types –- scheduling, triage and pharmacy. Christiansen said that triage calls -- for someone calling with an immediate health issue -- are handled by RNs, and LPNs take pharmacy or lab results calls. A separate group of staff works with scheduling.

“We average between 800 and 1,000 calls per day,” Christiansen said. “In November alone, we had more than 14,000 calls. And they all end with ‘Thank you for your service to our county and have a wonderful rest of the day.’”

Earlier this year, the Department of Veterans Affairs signed a contract with Alexandria, Va.-based STG International, Inc,. to run the existing Veteran Community-Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC) in Scottsbluff. On March 2, 2010, the contract took effect. The clinic is now staffed and supported by full-time STGi employees and physicians, but is still part of the Black Hills Health Care System and considered a VA clinic. The clinic continues to offer a full-time pharmacist and a part-time mental health professional povided by the Department of Veterans Affairs.