3 Better Approaches To Medical Office Phone Service

Medical Answering Service

Your medical office is a busy place, there’s no doubt about it, but you’re never too busy to give your callers your all, are you?

Too often, medical office workers are overwhelmed by the work in front of them added to the constant interruption of the telephone. They really can’t juggle both well and your patients tend to be the ones that suffer.

There’s got to be a better way to do this!

3 Ways to Provide Great Medical Office Phone Service

If you were a first time caller to a medical office and you were placed on a ridiculously long hold, dealt with abruptly or otherwise mishandled, would you really want to see that provider in person? Sure they come highly recommended, but that’s simply not enough.

You don’t want your callers to get the wrong idea about you or your services, so why not give the medical answering service approach a try?

Turn over appointment handling to a designated team. One of the biggest interruptions during your day revolves around appointments. Callers make them, cancel them and change them all day long, it leaves little room for anything else. Instead of letting these calls be as disruptive as they are, designate a person or team to do all the appointments.

When a caller hits “0” on their telephone, they’re taken straight to the appointment setter with access to a tool for making appointments. If you can’t handle the call volume in house, the best answering services will offer appointment setting for a fee based on how much time they actually spend working with your patients.

Always ask before placing people on hold. Or better yet, just don’t place them on hold. This may sound impossible, but with the help of an answering service’s overflow call handling, no one has to wait to speak to a human.

If they want to make an appointment, they can be redirected to the appointment scheduler, if there’s a message to be left, your outside operator can get it to the right person in your office quickly. Having support for overflow calls is sort of like having a super power.

Give your team the room to empathize with the caller. Sometimes, your office is just so busy that patients who call with concerns are kind of brushed off. It’s not that your staff doesn’t want to help, it’s just so hard to do when there are so many things demanding their attention.

In these situations, you’ll drastically improve patient care and staff happiness by outsourcing some of the tasks that are currently in-house. This might mean hiring an appointment scheduler, using an answering service to take all your calls or hiring additional staff.

Your telephone operators are often the initial contact that your future patients have with your office. You don’t want them to meet your staff under the wrong circumstances. Instead, better approaches like eliminating telephone wait times, getting a little more help so everyone can have a more empathetic phone experience and designating appointment setters to reroute call traffic can create the image you’ve been seeking.

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