10 Key Performance Indicators For A Reliable Answering Service

Using an answering service has become essential for the success of any medical practice.

Working with a team of professional and experienced agents will have a significant impact on your operations and patient satisfaction.

This requires partnering with the best answering service with industry experience, reliable agents, and appropriate technology.

To ensure that the answering service is on par with your expectations requires periodic evaluation of their services.

Here are KPIs to assess the success of your call center management to meet patient satisfaction.

Percentage of blocked calls

This has a significant impact on overall customer satisfaction. It requires evaluating the number of callers who didn’t go through or never got the assistance they were looking for.

This might have been caused by a long queue or absence of an agent to respond to all calls.

Additionally, the callers might have been directed to voicemail, which is frustrating. Any blocked call is a missed opportunity for your practice to make some money.

Average time in the queue

Patients hate waiting in queue for a long time especially whey having an emergency.

For customer satisfaction and positive experience, your answering service should have less waiting time.

Customers are more likely to hang up and call another practice after waiting for a long time.

To ensure that your answering agency is doing a great job, patients don’t have to wait for long before getting the appropriate assistance they want.

The average rate of abandonment

This is the percentage of callers hanging up before talking to your answering agent.

It might be caused by having to wait for too long in the queue and having to follow too many voices prompts before actually talking to a live agent.

Professional and reliable physicians answering service should have a low average call abandonment rate to encourage customer retention.

The rule of thumb is for your team of agents to keep this KPI below the target threshold.

First come first serve caller resolution

This KPI relates to the level of customer satisfaction. It is very important that every caller’s needs are addressed before moving on to the next caller.

Professional agents should understand the importance of having to resolve caller’s issues according to the order of interaction.

Your answering agents should ensure to first address the first callers’  concerns to make them feel important.

This is an important KPI with a direct impact on the level of customer satisfaction.

Level of customer satisfaction

The level of customer satisfaction is an important KPI derived from multiple sources.

Determining the level of customer satisfaction in your medical practice is through conducting surveys.

This requires having a quality assurance standard. Arriving at this KPI is proof of answering service efficiency and effectiveness.

Agent occupancy rate

This is how long answering agents spend handling live calls and accomplishing any related tasks.

It is very important for your agents to optimize the occupancy rates while being cognizant about the workload.

To avoid agent burnout, the agency should have enough staff to work in shifts. This significantly encourages better optimization of agent occupancy rate to lessen dropped calls that might result from caller frustration.  

Rate of service level

It is important to determine the number of calls handled in a particular number of seconds.

Your answering service should offer this in real-time with a handy dashboard. This allows making informed decisions depending on available data.

Understanding this will have a significant impact on the performance of your answering agents.  

Average answering speed

The answering agents should take less time to answer incoming calls in a particular period. Callers should not spend long in the queue before the agent answers.

Additionally, it should not take long for the agent to go through the IVR system.

Having a high degree of accessibility to agents for callers is a strong benchmark to tell the efficiency of your answering service.

Agency downtime

Inability to handle callers at any moment n can’t be tolerated in call center management.

A reliable answering service should always be available 24/7 to offer all necessary services including appointment scheduling and setting.

The answering service should offer affordable reliable services at a flat rate with prioritized urgent calls.

Average after-call work

Call agents usually do some work on ending a call. This might include sending emails, informing the responsible physician, and updating databases.

Time spent on completion of a call should be efficiently managed. Less after-call work promotes maximization of time the agents spend interacting with patients 24/7.

Key takeaways

Evaluating the above key performance indicators is essential in determining the level of customer satisfaction in your medical practice.

You have to undertake a periodic assessment of your medical answering agency to ensure that it is at par with your expectations.

A reputable medical answering service will do whatever it takes to optimize patient satisfaction in all their services to your practice.