How Ozonetel’s call automation helped Dr Lal PathLabs manage the surge in post-pandemic call volumes.

About Dr. Lal PathLab

Dr. Lal PathLabs Ltd., incorporated in 1995, is a leader in the diagnostics space and has operations all over India.

Challenges

When the world came to a standstill due to COVID-19, it was challenging for the Dr. Lal PathLabs team to carry out testing and patient support activities. These activities became incredibly complicated due to the corona-virus-induced lockdowns and unprecedented spike in incident-driven call volumes. The Dr. Lal PathLabs team decided to automate as many queries as possible to better serve a large number of customers.

How Ozonetel helped

Dr. Lal PathLabs’s association with Ozonetel goes back to 2016, when the Dr. Lal PathLabs team was evaluating a scalable call center software solution to cater to their growing customer base. So, when the pandemic broke out in 2020, they relied on Ozonetel’s capabilities once again and their trusted vendor didn’t disappoint. 

The first objective was to reduce the ever-growing call volumes. Dr. Lal PathLabs decided to tap into Ozonetel’s flexible, robust IVR technology to quickly offer an effective self-service solution to their customers.

Multi-level complex IVR for ever-changing business demands

Ozonetel completely redesigned Dr. Lal PathLabs’s IVR flows with a personalized greeting offering callers a simple, well-designed menu. With multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, customers could interact with the IVR to answer multiple queries. 

The newly designed IVR solution had a dedicated menu for COVID-19 related testing and registration purposes. This helped the customer support team manage large call volumes, including concurrent calls, without agent intervention. In this way, customer engagement was personalized — and for queries requiring a human response, Ozonetel’s deep CRM integrations ensured that agents were equipped with relevant information beforehand, such as caller details, past interactions, and possible solutions. Moreover, the Dr. Lal PathLabs team thrived on the intelligent call routing feature that automatically routed calls to available agents, significantly reducing the customer wait time.

Every single caller query regarding ETR (Estimated Time for Test Results) was handled entirely via Self-Service IVR.

Real-time SMS notification

Requesting test reports was the other most frequent query at the Dr. Lal PathLabs contact centers. SMS, one of the most predominantly used communication channels, proved to be another game-changer. Ozonetel conveniently added, “Get Test Report” as an audio prompt in the IVR system. The callers seeking their test results could easily select the option from the IVR menu and receive the link to their test results through SMS. As a result, Dr. Lal PathLabs’s business operations ran smoothly during lockdowns while also successfully adapting to the norms surrounding post-pandemic commutes and social distancing.

Faster outbound calling with auto dialers

The Dr. Lal PathLabs team makes nearly 3,000 outbound calls daily. Manual calling is a daunting task and wastes precious agent time.  To avoid these drawbacks, the auto dialers from Ozonetel connected calls only to live connections and skipped unproductive instances such as busy tones, answering machines, and disconnected calls. The auto dialers reduced the agents’ idle time and ensured only answered calls were routed to the agents. It also increased agent productivity remarkably, enabling them to attend more inbound calls.

Connectivity with virtual numbers

Dr. Lal PathLabs has a pan-India presence with 140 agents who handle nearly 90,000 calls monthly.  So, Ozonetel offered virtual business numbers to expand Dr. Lal PathLabs’s market reach in the local regions. All of the actual numbers were masked to ensure the privacy of both customers and agents. This also enabled the Dr. Lal PathLabs team to work remotely during the pandemic because agents could answer calls anytime, anywhere. The managers and supervisors could also monitor each call and agent performance live from any location. The automatic call recording feature on the virtual numbers helped the customer experience team monitor and review calls for training and quality purposes.