CTG Quickly Expands Health Systems’ Call Center Capacity Amid Rapid COVID-19 Vaccination Rollout

In mid-January, California expanded its COVID-19 vaccination program to residents 65 years and older. This program, unprecedented in scale and time to deployment, quickly overwhelmed healthcare organizations’ call centers with requests for vaccine information. Call volume rose as much as 2,500%, as did consumer frustration with busy signals and long wait times.

To expand call center capacity quickly, several of the state’s largest university healthcare systems asked CTG to develop a solution. CTG delivered on the promise of digital transformation with the technology, staff, and project know-how to help these systems create efficient, scalable call centers in around 10 days.

The health systems needed a rapid, scalable, consumer-focused solution. With more than 30 years’ experience leveraging new technologies to meet evolving client needs, CTG had the expertise to quickly determine which technologies would facilitate the fastest rollout and most efficient communication.

The solution had to offer more bandwidth to accommodate the increased volume of calls, so CTG employed AWS Connect to enable cloud computing and provide bandwidth on demand. This allowed health systems to pay only for the bandwidth they needed rather than unused bandwidth during off-peak hours.

CTG also implemented a remote structure and redesigned the training program to accommodate hiring more agents in a shorter time frame while maintaining high-quality training. In four weeks, we were able to hire and train 112 agents — a 333% increase — with the majority of hires happening in the first two-week period.

As a result, the information centers are now able to handle peak call volume of 2,500 calls per day, up from approximately 900 calls per day. Without an external partner, it would have been nearly impossible for these health systems to ramp up agents, telephony bandwidth, and automation at the speed necessary to handle the influx of call volume. With CTG and more efficient communication capabilities, health systems can now help facilitate a smooth vaccination rollout and offer patients easy access to important information. And we are now able to offer a HIPAA-compliant outbound dialing service for patient outreach.

In healthcare and beyond, CTG delivers digital and IT projects with speed and impact, accelerating our clients’ digital transformations as the pace of change quickens and stakes rise in their industries.