Apparo and Coca-Cola Consolidated support has helped Charlotte Community Health Clinic triple clients reaching them by phone.
Jennifer Frey, Director of Development at Charlotte Community Health Clinic, explains that they reached out to Apparo for Tech Therapy support for two important initiatives: improvements to their telephone system and their website. These initiatives have proven to be incredibly important in communicating with and serving their community through the coronavirus pandemic. See PDF of Project Snapshot.
“While Novant Health provides IT support to us, we don’t always know the right questions to ask. That is where Apparo comes in. Before the pandemic, we reached out for help to address our customers’ biggest complaint: our telephone system. Apparo matched us to volunteers from Coca-Cola Consolidated who assessed our current system and made a recommendation for shortening the queue. That recommendation was to allow those who are working the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking lines to support each other. Novant was able to execute the recommended solution. In addition, we learned it was possible for incoming calls to ring to multiple lines. During this pandemic, it’s been especially crucial for patients to reach us and working with Apparo and Coca-Cola Consolidated helped us to increase our call answer rate to 80%, up from 25-30%.”
“We also turned to Apparo for support as we worked to launch our new website. It went live in mid-March and served as a very powerful way to get out information related to COVID-19. It is a much better communication vehicle than what we had before.”
Strong communication, enabled by technology, is especially important during this crisis.
Jennifer continues, explaining why good communication is so critical today. “As of the 2018 State of the County Health Report, there were 270,000 adults in Mecklenburg County without primary care providers. That’s 28% of the county. Our clients are an underserved community and have no one else to turn to to discuss their symptoms. If they reach out to us, we can help resolve their issues. If they don’t realize they can get help here or can’t get through on the telephone, they go the ER, which is the most expensive place to get care, increases their risk for exposure to COVID, and unnecessarily utilizes scarce ER and hospital resources.”
“These communications tools are incredibly important during this pandemic. People have so many questions about their symptoms and need our support to get their questions answered. They need to know that we are here and can also serve them remotely through our new video and phone visits. We want to limit community exposure and keep people at home who don’t need to leave their homes. Especially our community, which tends to use public transportation.”
Jennifer explains that past Apparo support put them in a better position to launch their new tele-health services, of which they did 189 visits in their first week alone. “This support came at a beautiful time, leaving us well-positioned for our tele-health services. Our old phone system would have been a huge barrier. We appreciate Apparo so much and the support you are able to give to nonprofits to help us serve our communities’ needs.”
Corporate volunteer, Sheldon Morman shares, “Overall it was a very good experience and it felt great to be able to assist the Charlotte Community Health Clinic however we could. The call flow issues that they were experiencing are the types of issues that the IT Voice Operations Team at Coca-Cola Consolidated address on a daily basis. While it ultimately didn’t require a ton of time to improve their call flow process, dedicating that time can sometimes mean the world to a nonprofit’s organization.”
