A medical practice just like any other business has to make profits to keep it afloat. This requires having strategies in place to achieve this. Apart from offering the highest quality patient care, understanding how to increase savings is essential.
Managing a clinic requires various things that cost money including having an efficient customer care department. Allowing your front desk officer is not enough to handle customers on the phone. Outsourcing the task to a professional answering agency is a more viable idea.
Read these 5 money saving tips you didn’t know about a doctor answering service.
Flat rate
The cost of managing the customer service increase with the volume of calls and the number of staff. Allowing your front desk office to handle incoming calls in costly in the long run. Letting professionals handle the task is more viable and cost-effective. However, ensure to choose a company charging a flat rate for their service. This ensures that regardless of the number of calls received and messages managed, the company will just charge you a flat rate. It lowers operating expenses and makes planning easier.
Eliminates patient frustration
Allowing limited in-house staff to manage customers is bound to cause immense frustration to your customers. The limited employees are likely to cause call delays and many missed calls. Additionally, for patients with emergencies, not being able to reach the physician during after business hour puts them at risk and comes with a lot of frustration. Answering agencies handle calls even in after hours to save your customers the frustration. Calling a medical facility without getting assistance might have made those customers move to other providers.
Bilingual agents
The society has people from various backgrounds and languages. Therefore, it pays to plan for all sorts of customers. One of the most important things to do is having bilingual medical answering services to manage your calls. Regardless of whether the caller speaks French, Spanish, or German, the agency will have an agent who can speak to the caller in their language. With this, your practice is bound to make more money since no one is turned away for not speaking English.
HIPAA compliant
It’s obligatory for every medical practice to be HIPAA compliant. This regards utmost safety of patient information. Allowing professionals to manage your calls guarantee that your practice becomes HIPAA compliant. This is important for your practice to adjust to real-time changes, fit on-call schedules without any chances of lawsuits for breaching regulatory obligations.
Customers talk to real people
Do you put your phone on voice mail sometimes? This is a major cause of frustration when patients call any practice. Customers prefer talking to a real person who will clearly understand their concerns and pass them on to the physician. Therefore, it pays to outsource an answering agency with down to earth customer service to talk to your customers. This will eliminate patient no-shows leading to higher cash inflow in your practice.
Bottom line
Customer services can make or break your practice. To avoid taking chances, ensure to hire a professional doctor’s answering agency to handle the task. You’ll enjoy tremendous savings as highlighted above.
Author Bio:
Mike Haynes is a Fitness & Nutritionist Who Believes in Living a healthy Lifestyle.He Loves to write about Fitness & Nutrition. He is also a expert advisor of Medical billing company which is dedicated to provide accurate billing of patients,daily fitness tips, detailed fitness guides & fitness gear reviews.