Case Study: GE Healthcare Reduce Their Contact Centre Error Rate

This case study explores how KMS Lighthouse cut error rates in GE Healthcare’s contact centres.

Background

GE Healthcare is a leading global medical technology company providing a broad portfolio of products, solutions and services used in the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of patients.

GE Healthcare is making a difference in the moments that matter most for patients with its install base of over 4 million imaging systems and a history of innovation that reaches back more than a century. GE Healthcare improves outcomes for healthcare providers around the world.

This is the best knowledge management tool I have ever seen.

The Site Director, GE Healthcare

Challenge

GE Healthcare’s call centre handles 400,000+ calls annually in a highly regulated environment, initiating maintenance and repair requests for equipment tightly monitored by the FDA.

In addition to the regulatory burden, its Cares Call Centre covers four distinct lines of business and over 25 modalities of medical equipment, ranging from MRIs to patient monitoring systems.

GE Healthcare supports many of America’s leading hospital networks, and each service agreement is unique and caters to that client’s environment, leading to additional client-based processes that vary by time of day, modality of equipment, type of request, etc.

All of this leads to a web of processes that are incredibly challenging to understand for even the most experienced customer service representatives.

Now consider that in this incredibly complex environment, any delay in service can have a catastrophic impact on patient care. An error can literally shut down an emergency room.

In the case of some critical equipment, such as invasive cardiology and anaesthesia, GE Healthcare’s efficiency and accuracy mean the difference between life and death for a patient on the table.

In searching for the right knowledge-management solution for their medical offerings, GE Healthcare wanted to reduce its error rate and cut the learning curve for all new agents in half.

Solution

Initially, the goal was to move GE Healthcare’s error rate from 1.6% to 0.25%, no small feat.

During the 12-month period following the Lighthouse implementation, GE Healthcare averaged an error rate of 0.20%.

More importantly, performance continued to improve even after the goal was met. GE Healthcare reached a record low error rate of 0.12% due to Lighthouse.

In addition, we have seen a dramatic improvement in new trainees’ learning curves.

Since implementing the Lighthouse system, new hires are reaching the goals for quality assurance (QA) and Average Handling Time (AHT) in less than 90 days, down from 6 months.

GE Healthcare agents frequently comment on how easy the GE Healthcare KMS is to use. This includes GE Healthcare agents with years of call centre experience.

With any work instructions available in 3 clicks or less, there are major improvements in the capabilities of new GE Healthcare agents to access the information they need. Lighthouse is a driving force in improving efficiency and accuracy.

The true success of our Lighthouse implementation is not about agents reaching AHT goals more quickly or lower error rate numbers announced on a bulletin board; it is about how those numbers impact our customers and their patients.

Burgh Hughes, Senior Manager, Call Center Operations, GE Healthcare

Author: Robyn Coppell