Poster
Client Context
United Digestive (UD) is a medical practice management company focused on delivering quality operational infrastructure to 140 gastroenterology practices within the Southeastern United States. UD’s Patient Service Center (PSC) is its call center that provides appointment scheduling, clinical advising, financial counseling, and health record processing for the patients of its client practices.
Project Objective
United Digestive has experienced substantial growth in its client base over the last three years resulting in an increase in call arrivals to their patient service call center. With this growth, United Digestive has focused on improving their call center to keep up with increasing demand. We identified areas of opportunity with predicting call arrivals as they acquire clients, determining the number of representatives they need to maintain service levels, and improving visibility into the call center performance.
Design Strategy
Throughout the project, the team met weekly with United Digestive leadership and shadowed call representatives during the work day at their midtown office. After our initial system analysis, the team built a staffing model using Erlang C formulas to determine the number of agents needed to hit desired service levels and a regression equation to model increases in call arrivals as UD acquires clients. To validate the staffing model's accuracy, the team created a simulation model using data provided by United Digestive. Using this staffing model, the team developed recommendations on when to pull other representatives to the primary scheduling queue and how many representatives to higher over the next year to match expected growth.
Deliverables
Staffing Model for determining agents required to maintain service levels which was used to provide a recommendation on the number of representatives to hire for 2022.
Power BI Dashboard for visibility into overtime usage, employee performance, and queue performance metrics.
Project Information
Student Team
Amanda Firestone
Kyeu Lee
Lauren Lee
Whit Morris
Katie Mueller
Akshay Patel
Erik Tischer
Jay Seckman
Faculty Advisor
Faculty Evaluator
