With growing patient demands and stiff competition, health care providers have to make an effort to stay in business. One of the essential aspects to work on is customer service.
In response to market trends, smart medical practitioners are shifting to professional phone answering. This doesn’t only drive engagement but also promotes customer retention and more revenue.
The traditional phone answering marred with putting callers on hold and dropped calls no longer applies in the modern world.
Why the shift
Medical practices today need a strong patient-provider relationship to gain a strategic market shift in patient care.
The shift has to put changing customer expectations and market requirements in mind. Patients desire better medical care at an affordable cost.
Therefore, health care practitioners need to capitalize on each patient interaction. This might include supporting proactive health care, ongoing patient, and recovery to help patients successfully retain their life.
Here’s a catch
Achieving this requires a medical practice to have a unified voice. Additionally, it requires delivering consistent and positive experiences in every patient interaction regardless of the communication between the patients.
It’s therefore very important to ensure that all calls to your practice have the capacity to deliver to patient expectations. The solution to this is outsourcing your phone answering to a professional doctor answering service.
Need for a professional answering service
It’s essential to have a med answering service to handle all patient interactions with your practice.
The right answering service should have appropriate equipment and capacity to handle repeated functions such as appointments scheduling, event enrolment, differentiating emergency calls, forwarding patients messages, and handling referrals.
A professional answering service eliminates the need to have separate departments for specialized functions such as handling marketing responses and nurse triage.
Why traditional phone answering does apply today
Patient frustration
With traditional phone answering, callers are likely to impersonal once and do transactions. These transactions are characterized with long hold times and voice mail.
All these contribute to patient frustration with your customer service. In extreme cases, the patients might decide to ditch your practice for a competitor.
Callers hate being transferred from one specialist to another to get their issue addressed.
Long term cost to the practice
Health practitioners use in-house staff to handle calls in a bid to cut costs. However, the limited employees are supposed to handle the large volume of calls.
With the low response rate for all callers, you’ll begin noticing more abandoned calls, fewer calls per hour. With stiff competition and fast-paced lifestyle, patients desire to get immediate solutions to their issues.
Failure to get this will make the patient not hesitate to switch medical service providers. Taking long to fix this will eventually leave your service without customers.
Limited marketing value
Quality phone answering must focus on making a positive impact on patient perceptions about your services.
This is possible with engaging callers or broadening callers’ awareness of relevant services that’ll benefit them or their loved ones.
Unfortunately, traditional phone answering doesn’t focus on offering marketing value and potential up-sell opportunities that extend patient lifetime value.
More about hiring a professional answering service
To solve the challenges of relying on traditional phone answering, it’s important to hire a professional answering service for better patient engagement.
An answering service integrates healthcare CRM data to offer personalized customer interactions. This requires being more proactive to boost caller satisfaction.
Medical answering agents access comprehensive caller profiles offering information for tailored conversations with patients. This allows successful engagement with content resonating with the caller.
Other benefits include:
- Extending patients’ lifetime value
- Customer acquisition and retention
- Driving high-value service promoting growth
Additionally, a professional answering service complements other communication channels such as social media and email.
This allows connecting and creating seamless cross channel engagement. Allowing professionals to handle your phone answering simplifies cross-selling and upselling.
This is possible since the agents have the necessary key information and experience to enhance customer interaction.
Final Thoughts
Outsourcing your phone answering to a professional call center offers a valuable opportunity to transform your practice into a seamless and profitable health care center.
A professional answering service has access to specialized technology, data, analytics, and highly trained agents.
Switching from traditional phone answering to professionals will make your practice to deliver better patient care on-the-fly.
Mike Haynes is a Fitness & Nutritionist Who Believes in Living a Healthy Lifestyle. He Loves to write about Fitness & Nutrition. He is also an expert advisor of Medical billing company which is dedicated to providing accurate billing of patients, daily fitness tips, detailed fitness guides & fitness gear reviews.