5 Reasons Why Your Medical Office Needs a Business Answering Service
No business, and that includes your medical office, can survive, much less thrive without customers. You know that right from the start. And it’s their satisfaction and happiness that you strive hard to meet.
So, you develop these plans made of KPIs (key performance indicators) in the hopes of passing your patients’ standards.
The question is, how much of these determiners address customer calls? How sure are you that your office takes all these calls in the first place?
If you don’t have a business answering service, then let us tell you from the very start that you’re missing a lot of those calls. Even with a voicemail, expect almost half of your callers to hang up without leaving any message.
This alone should already make you recognize the value of having an answering service for your medical office. But here are five other reasons you should know about.
1. The Most Essential: People Care about Their Health
Everyone wants to have a better quality of life. And for this, they know that they need to pay better attention to their health.
Who else do most of them turn to when it comes to health concerns? Doctors, of course.
Let’s take a look at these 2015 statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that’ll put things in perspective:
- 6% of adults had some form of contact with a healthcare professional
- For children, that’s 93%
- A total of 125.7 million people had a hospital outpatient visit
- There were a whopping 990.8 million physician office visits
- 51% of the above were visits to primary care physicians
You may not extract the exact number of your potential patients from these, but you get the picture. One way these people come into contact with doctors is through calling their medical office.
So, the longer you go without a physician answering service, the more potential patients visits you may lose. You need that business answering service, and you need it ASAP.
2. Missed Calls Give Your Customer Service a Bad Name
Great customer service is so important that 55% of consumers who had every intention of purchasing backed out due to lack of it. Consumers hold exceptional customer service in high regard that nearly three-fifths of them are willing to shell out more cash when they receive it.
Unfortunately, more than 80% of consumers say that their previous customer service interaction didn’t exceed their expectations.
Voice answering may be fine for some people, but why risk majority of the rest of patients who don’t? Besides, you should aim to take your customer service satisfaction to a whole new level. And a business answering service can help with that.
3. Taking Calls Is a Big Part of Your Medical Office’s Productivity
Again, you may have already set all sorts of KPIs and protocols for communications. Like making sure you promptly answer emails, your invoices get to their destination on time, or that you ring up a patient for an appointment reminder.
Indeed, all these help you meet your productivity goals. But what about those calls that come in during break times? Or when unknowing patients call during the weekends? Perhaps calling after office-hours because of an emergency?
A top-of-the-line business answering service takes care of these for you. It gives you peace of mind that each inbound call receives the attention it deserves. No call will get past the radar, because a team of highly qualified phone specialists is there to take it, no matter the time of day.
Remember, your medical office is just like any other office in the sense that it’s a business. And all businesses strive hard to meet or even exceed their productivity goals.
Those goals include taking in every call. And achieving this means taking one huge step towards having a perfect office. After all, productivity is what makes an office reach those aimed-for revenues.
4. Most Prospective Patients Give their Prospective Doctors a Call First
Google “How to choose a good doctor” and you’ll get more than 11 million results in half a second.
As you sift through those credible websites offering advice, like this one from WebMD, you’ll see that it recommends calling the office first before finalizing your decision. Another similar advice from U.S. News and World Report is to set up an appointment. And that basically entails calling the doctor’s office first.
All these point to the fact that prospective patients always ring up doctors first before going for an actual visit. And this should already tell you how a business answering service can help make sure your office can take in these patient calls.
5. It’s the Digital Age but People Still Want to Hear Human Voice
Yes, everything’s going digital. Everyone’s into automating tasks more than ever. You’ll even find such impressive humanoid robots living with us today!
All these innovations in technology indeed make the lives of humans easier and more convenient. Safer, healthier, and more secure.
But people are people, and despite all these technologies, we still crave human connections. And for those worried about their health, hearing a human voice answer their call to the doctor’s office gives them relief and reassurance.
Just put yourself in their shoes. How do you think you’ll feel when you’re sick and you call your doctor, only to have a robotic-sounding voice pick up the phone? Not really reassuring, is it?
In fact, this may even make you more antsy and worried. So, you most likely will call another doctor until you hear an actual person’s voice.
All these and more are the reasons you should start thinking about making the switch to a business answering service. Your practice is a human and personal service after all.
A Business Answering Service Makes Your Doctor’s Office More Personal
Making your patients feel that you value their health is key to a longer-lasting relationship with them. That’s why a more personalized approach to taking calls is important. And a 24/7 business answering service from qualified personnel can help you with this goal.
Want more useful business tips that can help you survive in today’s competitive market? Go and check out our blog site! We have more tricks and tips to share with you.
