Editor's Note: This publication originally appeared on RevSpring's website.
Eighty-eight percent of organizations across the globe have encouraged or required their employees to work from home—regardless of whether or not they showed coronavirus-related symptoms, finds a recent Gartner survey of human resources executives.
Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 25-30% of the workforce will be working from home multiple days a week by the end of 2021. Longer-term work-from-home models are a reality forcing may organizations to rethink people, process and technology.
In healthcare, workers who handle patient support and other administrative tasks, such as appointment scheduling, bookkeeping and insurance filing, are now working from home to protect patients, themselves, and essential medical staff in response to COVID-19. Because healthcare has not traditionally embraced work-from-home models, technology and habits needed to adapt for remote work – and quickly.
“We’ve seen a rise in automated phone payments during this crisis,” said Steve Callis, President of Payments at RevSpring. “In facilities where inbound calls increased and patients faced extended hold times, automating phone payments through IVR has eased that call center burden to ensure every patient call is answered in a timely manner. Patients who really needed to talk to a representative are able to do so, and the hospital or provider can still take payments.”
But in some organizations, where workers have been sent home and visits and volumes are down, office staff are still able to provide a human connection to patients, including accepting payments. As workers in their living rooms and spare bedrooms facilitate payments over the phone, security is top of mind.
The PCI council cautions that as organizations make this shift, it is important to maintain security practices to protect payment card data.
“Safety must come first. Yet keeping financial information safe and remaining PCI compliant is critical, too,” said Callis. “This can be tough to ensure when CSRs are taking calls and payments over the phone as they work remotely from home—or even in the office to ensure PCI compliance isn’t at risk.”
The challenge is causing providers to rethink how they process human-assisted payments over the phone.
A recent Harvard Business Review article notes that crises present us with unique conditions that allow innovators to create rapid, impactful change. “In response to the coronavirus pandemic, innovators are jumping in to help. Around the world, beermakers and distilleries have shifted production to hand sanitizers. In Italy, a start-up engineering company began quickly using 3D printers to create the valves used in ventilators.”
And automation combines with human assistance to solve for PCI.
In response to client needs, RevSpring technologists quickly adapted an agent-assisted card capture capability. The innovation uses text and IVR to bolster PCI compliance while also increasing agent productivity. It ensures that card numbers are not spoken to the CSR and gives patients greater peace of mind while paying over the phone.
Once a patient is ready to pay, the CSR can conference in an IVR or send the patient a secure text link to enter card payment information. Patients privately key in their credit card information using their telephone keypad instead of the CSR transcribing the credit card information directly. Once the payment is processed, the CSR can check back to answer any remaining questions or end the call.
If speed is of the essence, once agents send the patients to the agent-assisted IVR, agents can drop off and take the next call while the patient proceeds to make a payment. Relieving agents from processing payments means they can take more payments in a given timeframe.
By combining live agent assistance with secure automation, this PCI compliant method provides a streamlined, all-encompassing patient payment experience for patients. Importantly, it keeps healthcare staff safe while they are working from home today—and in the difficult to foresee future.
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