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30/Nov/2020

Agencies cannot guarantee “100% satisfaction” when it comes to caregivers, but On-call Ma can guarantee 100% response to after-hour calls. Let’s face it, responding to customers is “customer care”. Customer care knows that emotion never goes side by side with logic and the Home Care Agency knows when it comes to caregivers, it is all about emotion. What does that mean? It means as an agency, we need to learn how to give out speeding tickets. Confused yet?

If you ever received a speeding ticket from a state trooper police, you might show some emotion for a few reasons. First, you need to go to court to pay a big fine – few hundred dollars, followed by paying thousands of dollars over a few years to insurance. Do not worry, no matter which insurance you change to, they will make you pay. It can be a very emotional process and you swear you will never speed again.

On Call Tracking Pulls up with a Solution

On-call Tracking module from On-call Ma takes the concept of driving on the road. As long as everyone follows the rules, less car accidents happen. For example, we should not pass the red light. Whenever someone does not follow the rules such as speeding, on-call tracking brings the case to a police officer. Imagine, you have multiple coordinators, hundred of cases to deal with per day. Patient’s family member is always calling if something doesn’t look right. This is where software can help.

On-call Tracking monitors all after hour calls and makes sure coordinators respond to all calls. If the coordinator does not respond, then On-call Ma brings the calls up to the supervisor’s attention. What makes this more interesting is that On-call Ma also listens to all after-hour calls to determine if the call was joyful, angry, or sad. If the call is angry, then it is brought to the coordinator supervisor’s attention. These features out of many help to portal home care agencies.

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06/Aug/2020

“Follow me” is one of, if not the, most common phone feature. This is especially true if you often find yourself out of the office or working from multiple locations. It also goes by the name “find me”, but the core function is the same. Imagine you have multiple offices and you are not sure which office you are going to be in at a given time. You want to make sure when clients call you, you can somehow pick up the call. This is a great alternative to giving out your cell phone number.

The follow-me feature solves the issue by forwarding your calls to multiple locations, simultaneously, such as your two offices and cell phone. It is almost like broadcasting the call to many extensions and phone numbers. As soon as you pick up the call in one location, the call is transferred and pulled from the other location(s). With the follow-me feature, you can have unanswered calls  go to voicemail. We can also have some type of ring strategy, as well. For example, we want to ring to the first location, followed by the next location and so forward.

On-call Ma software takes the same feature and modifies it from ground up to help home care after hour on-calls. We know that home care agencies never close and therefore rely on after hour on-call coordination. Coordinator takes all the calls after traditional business hour and represents the company’s customer care. It was a challenge, but not impossible.

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01/Aug/2020

“Doc, today seems to be slow, I haven’t received any calls yet,” said Jimmy who works as a medical receptionist. Dr. Secretname was confused as well, They have 3 receptionist and wondering if they need to decrease the number of employees. Finally, someone called Dr. Secretname cell and told him that he could not call his front desk. The confused face became a worried face. He had this problem before and took 2 days to fix the phone. “Jimmy, email the phone company about our issue.”  Two hours later, Jimmy finds the contact information. The phone company located in another state responds back toward the end of the day. To make it worst, the phone company told them it is an internet issue and their phone will not work until the internet is fixed.

Secret Revealed

The following day his marketer called stating there are too many Google bad reviews yesterday. His unresponsive office is broadcasted to the world. Dr. Secretname is not a secret anymore. Dr. Secretname studied and practiced medicine for 30 years before opening his clinic. He has no idea about IT. The IT guy that reaches out to him few months ago popped in his mind.

“Manny, I don’t know what to do. My phone does not work and the phone company saying that I need to fix my internet”. Manny took another job for 100k per year. “Dr. Secretname, I’m at my job, and I cannot talk right now. I would call the internet company”. For some reason, Dr. Secretname has no idea which internet company he is with. So he called his accountant to find out who he is paying for the internet.

Stories like this go on and on for small businesses. Experienced business owner knows this type of pain too well. After working for a few VoIP companies, it is clear to me that small business owners like the doctor office should hire local companies. Local VoIP companies provide better customer service such as on-site visits on the same day for emergency issues.

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23/Jul/2020

“Are you listening to me?”. I go into auto-pilot and respond “yes dear, that is a good point”. Then my wife goes back to explaining something. I am sure many of us daze off sometime in our life, but that cannot happen when it comes to health care. As I work on On-Call Ma – finding on-demand caregivers, one of the problems I am trying to solve is monitoring after hour calls. More importantly, On-Call Ma must determine if should bring the the call to a supervisor’s attention.

There are many times my wife catches me “multi-tasking”. Personally, I am jealous of her sixth sense that detects and validates if I am listening. One of the ways is by asking “what did I say?” We can also validate if a call went well in the phone system world by doing a survey after the call ends. Usually, we ask at the beginning of the call if it is ok to call back for a survey.

Not All Call Surveys are Created Equal

The less question you ask the higher chance the client will finish the survey. It is important to follow the “don’t make me think” concept because the more work you force into your audience, the more resistance they will have and result in not finishing your survey. We can have tactics such as breaking down the audience in half so we can ask two questions and still get a high survey completion. It is important to not confuse principles with tactics. The principle concept, such as “don’t make me think,” must always be there.

I replied to my wife “you were talking about your students. Wow, you really care about your students.” My wife continues expressing her thoughts, which means she confirms that I am listening. In the phone system world, we take the survey data and create some type of algorithm or call survey formula that gives a number that we can understand. For example, you scored 9/10 on your quiz, and the passing grade is 6/10. This means we have to answer at least 6 questions correctly.

Call Survey Responses Have Their Own Formula

It is important to know that in each industry, the passing grade may be different. A delivery logistics company expects a higher call success rate, compared to a collection agency. One way to find the passing grade in an unknown industry is to get the average result for a few months and use that as a base. Here is an example with a two-question survey: “Would you recommend us to others?” gets a Yes response (pressing 1 for yes) 800/1000. The follow up “Did the representative answer all your questions” with a yes response 850/1000 where 1000 is the total survey completed. Any week if we exceed a 800/1000 ratio, then we are performing as expected or better.

I should admit that my wife usually knows whether I am listening or not. She has mastered all my tactics to cover up my answer. She certainly has higher accuracy than a survey. Artificial Intelligent Tone Analyzer also has higher accuracy than a survey. IBM Watson is an example of a Tone Analyzer. What this product does is use speech to text to convert a call. Then analyze the words to determine if the person has anger, fear, joy, or sadness. As previously explained, we need to come up with a call survey formula that gives us results such as anger is 100/1000 where 1000 is the total calls for 3 months. Then we can see the performance in real-time.

“Why did I marry you, I will never know”, that is the response I get from my wife when I fail my performance test – “what did I say?”. In the business world, we give a bonus based on performance. If the performance is below expectations, then we need to make changes. The same applies to getting a divorce. I am happy to say that I am not divorced :0).

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04/Jun/2020

“Manny, can you install Microsoft Office on my computer? When can you come by?”. The fact is most things have moved to a cloud model and does not require installation like before. Moreover, browser technology is maturing and can do anything a common person does . All you need is a link and credentials, such as username and password. For example, do you need billing software? Maybe your should try QuickBooks or Freshbooks online. Similarly, is there a need for word processing? In that case, sign up for the online version of Google doc or Microsoft 365.

“Marie, there is no installation need. Just go to www.office.com/launch/word and use the username and password I provided to you before”. And that was the end of the conversation.

One of the projects I am working on is tracking and monitoring cloud-based application software: oncallma.com. The application keeps on-call coordinators and caregivers accountable by using artificial intelligence (AI). It is 100% online based, no installation required. If a coordinator needs to find caregiver replacement, On-call Ma will find you one. Similarly, if clients need to chat with you, as a coordinator, the SMS feature is built-in with an automatic chatbot. It is a fact that most new software deployments are online. As a result, software can be used on any device that has a browser such as:

  • iPhone
  • iPad
  • Tablet
  • Laptop
  • Desktop PC

Next time you are looking for software, do not limit yourself by forgetting about web applications.

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28/May/2020

It was a reality check and unfair as it comes. There he was sitting at his $10,000 dollar desk as he expressed his pain. “I need to cut my operating cost because I have no money coming in. What section of the IT can we cut, Tim?” I looked at the marketing guy and thought how would he answer.

The reality check is, Information Technology (IT) is embedded within the operation cost where it is harder to extract out the value, in the form of numbers. I am sure the marking dude can tell me how many leads came in and how many leads became a customer. He would certainly love to point out how the customer acquisition cost decreased over the years. I know he is going to finish me if I attempt to explain 50% of the marketing value came from IT. You cannot blame him as he is only trying to keep his co-worker.

Demonstrating Phone System’s Value

That is how Tim, my colleague, expresses his thoughts and he is 100% right about IT being embedded. For example, a client of mine provides immigration services. He has a phone system. It is clear that the phone system brings value because if he cannot talk to people, then he can’t convert them to customers.

One of the ways to put a value on a phone system is to view the dilemma in the opposite way. That is: How much money does the company lose if the phone system is down? Imagine that the marketing department converts ten leads per day. Not to mention five employees that are costing $1000 per day. We can simply say that losing the phone system will cost the company at least $1000 per day.

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(646) 687-7700
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23/Apr/2020

 There I was, trying to pull a fast one by taking my wife on a gondola ride in Las Vegas. They built an actual canal indoor to make it look like Venice, Italy where you can take a gondola ride while the gondolier is singing. “Wasn’t that great? Now we don’t have to spend all that money to visit Italy”. Of course, that did not work. The following year, I was in a hotel in Rome, booking a train ride to Venice. My wife deserves some credit for not showing a bad mood while I was talking to clients in the United States.

On all those occasions, I was using a Grandstream Wave softphone that connected to a phone system in the United States from Italy. After you  download the Grandstream Wave App from the Apple Store or Google Play, all that you require is a wireless connection, such as WiFi.

Softphones are not created equal

Many people do not know that there are two types of softphones:

📶 Internet-based softphone – Uses 100% wireless (eg: wifi, 3g, 4g, LTE and etc). Grandstream Wave falls under this category.

☯️ Hybrid softphone – Use minor wireless data in the beginning, followed by a carrier reception. When I say carrier’s reception I am talking about using cell phone towers as if you are using a non-smart phone to make a call. Examples are Google Voice or On-Call Ma mobile app.

Internet-based softphone has greater flexibility. It can work anywhere, as long as a quality internet is provided. On the other hand, Hybrid does have a number of advantages. For example, there are regions where Internet only softphones experience blockage by the internet service provider.  If you are not aware, some countries such as India or Bangladesh do not allow VoIP technology. Softphone falls under Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.  Consequently, it can be used to make international calls for free as I did in Italy.

Side by Side Softphone Comparison

The table, below, shows the difference between Internet based and hybrid softphones:

Internet-based Softphone

Hybrid Softphone

  • Must have quality wireless internet to work. It does not need a SIM card if quality wifi is provided
  • It was not designed to handle calls while moving very fast. For example, driving
  • Voice quality changes depending on the compression. Softphone compresses your voice and decompresses when it arrives on the other end. In voice technology, we call it codec. It is the same process as when you zip a file, send it by email, and the receiver unzips the file. 
  • A mobile phone needs to provide high-speed computing power to allow the softphone to compress on the fly. A slow phone might not work too well with an internet-based softphone.
  • Needs some type of cell reception. This means a SIM card is required. NOTE: Carrier such as Sprint do not need SIM and that is because they use CDMA technology
  • It works just like making a call using a non-smart phone. Softphone tells the phone system over the internet to call the cell phone and join the 2nd party like a conference call. When the call comes into the cell, the softphone app makes it look like you made a call. Also, the phone system spoofs the number so the call appears it came from your cell phone or whatever phone number you want to assign (e.g. a business line).  Moving at high speeds, driving or on a train to Venice, is fully supported by the cellular-based system.
  • The voice quality usually stays the same since the compression is mostly done on the phone system side.
  • You do not worry about the phone speed. Phone manufacturers make sure the phone has enough speed to handle calls from the cell tower.

It is also IMPORTANT to know that you should not pick-up your phone during a gondola ride because Return On Investment (ROI), namely your wife’s happiness, will decrease like a recession during the coronavirus season. However, you do not have to take my word for it.

-Oncallma.com
(646) 687-7700

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