Is your healthcare center struggling to focus on improving patient experience and customer service? Perhaps it’s because you have competing priorities such as quality and safety initiatives, and value-based care monopolizing your attention. Trying to balance might lead to staff burnout. This will make your callers suffer with missed calls, voice mail, and being put on hold. Your in-house call center staff won’t always be available to monitor and track calls to enhance the patient experience. This might make the practice to record revenue shortfall and low patient satisfaction rating.
How to tell your medical call center is vulnerable
In-house call center staff don’t operate like professional call centers. The chances are high that your front desk or scheduling personnel are in charge of gaining efficiencies and improving service. However, these usually miss an emphasis on offering excellent customer service. Additionally, they lack the vigor required to operate like professionals since they regularly deal with burn out. You’re likely to notice revolving staff turnover and patient frustration.
Signs to outsource a phone answering service
High staff turnover
This usually comes after hiring incompetent people with just scheduling and front desk experience to handle your customer service. It usually leaves employees leaving to look for less stressful jobs because of the burnout. Perhaps you terminate them for not living to your expectations. Regular staff turnover is likely to cost you a lot of money and time. The solution to limiting the high staff turnover is to outsource the task to professionals.
Poor call review
Success to medical answering requires less variation through scripting and installing scheduling protocols. In-house answering staff lack the technical telephony resources necessary for guaranteed customer service quality. This leads to patient dissatisfaction characterized by administrative and provider complaints. Luckily, outsourcing a professional medical call center encourages review of all recorded call and screen captures that ensure adherence to practice guidelines.
Frustration of referring providers
Are your referring providers failing to make appointments for their patients? This is bound to put your revenue collection in jeopardy and limiting future physician referrals. Regular health practices usually lack resources to handle patient calls efficiently. This usually results in reliance on old school methods like voice mail and faxing to get referrals. When you notice this in your practice, it’s a red flag to switch tactics and outsource a professional call center.
Inability to offer ongoing training to staff
Practices in health care service are always evolving. Lack of ongoing training inhibits giving patients excellent customer satisfaction. You’re likely to keep revolving frustrated employees after failing to offer patient satisfaction. When not prepared to give regular improvement training to your call center staff, it’s high time to realize that it pays to hire professionals to do the job. This will lead to low staff turnover and increased patient satisfaction.
Loss of revenue
Patients need convenience and access to a physician to become loyal to your medical practice. Therefore, you need to monitor your practice appointment volume periodically to protect and formulate strategies to grow your revenue. This requires an efficient call center to call patients to come for preventive healthcare or return visits. The inability to prevent patient leakage necessitates outsourcing a professional call center to boost your revenue.
Poor data management
Relying on in-house staff to handle your practice calls is prone to various data management errors. These include poor verification of insurance, incorrect patient information, and failure to meet payment expectations. This exposes your practice to rejected claims leading to more backend work likely to frustrate your staff. Limiting errors in your data management require outsourcing the work to a professional agency with highly skilled and experienced personnel.
Deteriorating reputation of your practice
Are you recording poor ratings from patients? Keep in mind that 96 percent of patient complaints are usually related to poor customer service. In the same light, if your practice is falling short of industry benchmarks, it’s time to take action. About 5 percent of patients hang up after being on hold for some seconds. Therefore, it pays to hire professionals who can offer about 99 percent call routing accuracy.
Wrapping up
Managing a successful medical practice requires having exceptional customer service. The trick is to hire a professional call center with experienced and trained agents. These have a calm demeanor, exceptional listening skills, service mentality, and patient empathy. A reliable answering service is a right partner to see your practice have more return customers and improvement on its bottom line.
