From 12/02/21 Oummal started managing the National COVID19 vaccination hotline 1214, and designed successful procedures to solve the callers’ grievances categorized into more than 25 topics.  

The call center was operating 16 hours per day, 7 days per week. The team was formed of 6 operators and 1 supervisor per shift. From 19/03/21 the staff number increased to 10 operators, 2 operators plus and 2 supervisors per shift. From 01/06/21 the human resources department reconstructed the schedule and the contact center started operating with 15 operators during the am shift, 13 operators during the pm shift, 2 supervisors on each shift and one team leader.

The hotline was receiving an average of 2,500 calls per day. With the first increase in staff number, 80% of the calls were answered instead of 40%. After the restructure of the schedules, now 98% of the calls received are answered.

The calls are documented on a software designed by the programmers at Oummal. The software is flexible easily adjustable for the process of documentation and cases follow up, for faster and logged inter-communication between the agent and the supervisor and between Oummal and all concerned parties that were given access to certain modules in it like the module of the medical exceptions that we will mention later on.

The employees from all over Lebanon were working remotely and very well trained through the recruiting procedure and through an in situ monthly training. The training focused on communication and technical skills, competencies in software use and data entry, information update, overview on new procedures and official statements, it also included an in situ live training and case studies. The performance of the operators is evaluated by the supervisors who simultaneously monitor the calls received by the operators, their content, duration, hold period and handling.

The access to the callers’ information and the callers’ appointment and vaccination status was gradually obtained with the increase in need for it throughout tools provided to us by IMPACT. By that, in addition to registering the callers through a codeless procedure, the operators were able to confirm for them their registration status, their registration information, their vaccination status and appointment information, and to resend for them their deleted messages.

The operators and supervisors have signed a consent to adhere to the privacy and data protection standards related to the data they can access. They pledge to maintain the confidentiality of personal information and restrain from sharing any of it.

The operators and supervisors were given several tools that helped them change the vaccination center in accordance with the type of vaccination, to reschedule the appointment date, to change the vaccination status from scheduled to ready or rejected, and to unlock the information editing tool so that the callers could edit their non-essential information.

The medical exceptions:

The hotline received calls from people with serious health conditions who hoped to take the vaccination early instead of waiting for their age category according to the national deployment plan. Their cases were very complicated. Some of them were suffering from several diseases at once, others had urgent surgeries to go through. We documented their condition with details and referred them to the concerned party. We have designed a module on our documentation software specific for the medical cases and exceptions. On this module, the information of the patient can be submitted and the required documents attached after downloading them from the medical exception form filled by the patient. The team of health assistants would verify these files, and attach them to the software. They would tick the boxes conform with the patient’s health condition and make sure all his information is documented correctly. Then the patient would get an approval and receive the vaccination appointment message.

The operation support team:

The work of the operation support team was divided into solving people’s issues through the request forms they were submitting and providing technical live support for the vaccination centers. The forms included requests for changing the essential information and requests for early vaccination for the following reasons: serious medical condition, surgical operation, traveling to study and traveling to work. The team would validate the requests, check the proving documents, approve the requests and send the vaccination appointment messages to the requestors.