Our Client:
Established in 1963, The Cardiovascular Care Group is New Jersey’s largest vascular surgery group dedicated solely to the diagnosis and management of diseases of the arteries and veins. Some of the country’s best vascular surgeons call this group home. Consistently recognized by peers and patients for its excellence, the group utilizes years of experience in conjunction with the newest technologies to provide the highest care and the most outstanding results. The group has approximately one hundred employees, including fifteen vascular physicians, and six offices throughout New Jersey.
The Challenge:
Like many companies, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, some employees of The Cardiovascular Care Group transitioned to remote work. In the nearly six decades the group has been operating, this was a first. That brought with it some inherent challenges:
- The patient care call center is the group’s first line of defense, and while the company was navigating this transition to remote work, a large volume of calls was still coming in. Despite challenges, they needed that call center to work efficiently to schedule appointments and to triage calls effectively to all the different offices.
- Some employees were not as technologically savvy as others, and everyone needed to get up to speed on any new software solutions that made remote work possible. This was a particularly big adjustment for older staff members.
- Having never worked remotely before, the quality of home connectivity and the level of productivity from home were both unknowns.
Our Approach:
To address their challenges, The Cardiovascular Care Group utilized both our TeleCloud web phone and TeleCloud mobile application software options. Nearly every employee used the mobile application, and those who had laptops or desktop computers with built-in speakers and microphones used the web phone capabilities as well.
These software options included management via the TeleCloud user portal, meaning a designated employee could toggle people online or offline to answer calls, monitor calls that were coming in, look at call productivity by employee in the call group, and receive daily data reports that illuminated call volumes.
We also set up a dedicated phone number for their front desk staff to facilitate parking lot check-ins. This allowed patients to avoid crowded waiting rooms and to comply with safety measures and social distancing protocols. This number, which rang at both check-in and check-out at the front desk, was provided at the time of appointment scheduling and reinforced later with an appointment reminder. It was programmed never to go to voice mail and, if unanswered, to escalate to a pop-up on the front desk computer.
The Results:
“If we went dark for a couple of hours on Monday morning, we could easily miss at least one hundred calls. Downtime isn’t really an option for us,” says Jason Jacobs, marketing manager at The Cardiovascular Care Group. “With the software and support from TeleCloud, we serviced just as many, if not more, calls during the pandemic, and the level of service our patients received was the same or better, even though our call center was now remote. With the help of Telecloud, we really didn’t miss a beat.”
The Cardiovascular Care Group saw particular value in the immediate and actionable patient call center analytics available at the end of every day.
“Management within the portal and the associated analytics have been tremendously helpful—not just during the pandemic but in general,” says Jacobs. “It’s a fantastic management tool that helps drive informed decision-making at a high level. It guided us more than I would have guessed in the beginning. If, for example, we saw call volume went up twenty percent in a given week, that was a good indication we could expect appointments to be up the following week, and we could use that immediate insight and data to prepare accordingly.”
In addition to the software itself, The Cardiovascular Care Group benefited from the attitude and culture of customer service at TeleCloud.
“The availability of solutions from TeleCloud was great, but what also helped us was the staff’s ability to work with our people, to be accessible, and to quickly resolve any issues that did come up. Whether it was user error or glitches as things got up and running, TeleCloud made themselves available to us for immediate troubleshooting.”
About Us
TeleCloud is a telecommunications service provider based in Union, New Jersey. We offercloud-based VoIP phone systems, and the driving tenet of our business is customer service. From white-glove on-site installation to end user training to ongoing post-installation support, our dedicated team of voice and data specialists always puts the customer first, working closely with every unique client to offer a personalized phone solution that meets the company’s individual needs.
