How to Answer Patient Calls When My Front Desk is Short-staffed?
With a short-staffed front desk, your clinic’s phones are often the first area to feel it. To fix it, the solution is to move your patient calls to a dedicated outsourced team that specializes in scheduling, answering questions, and making callbacks. This allows your on-site staff to stay focused on the patients they see in person, without call-ins falling through the cracks.
What do unanswered calls cost a clinic?
Unanswered clinic calls can be expensive, as they lose potential new patients, jeopardize the stability of the schedule, and squander patients’ goodwill. When your clinic fails to pick up a patient call, the patient gets stuck in the frustrating position of having to call again, further clogging up your phone lines, or else scheduling an appointment somewhere else that was able to accommodate them.
What are some quick fixes I can do without outsourcing patient calls?
Until you’re able to get a dedicated team to handle calls, these easier fixes can help you stabilize.
Find your peak call hours
Pay attention to the days and hours you tend to get the most calls, and therefore when calls are most likely to go unanswered. This may vary, but for medical clinics this is often in the early morning or after lunch. Staff these hours accordingly to handle the volume.
Protect callback time
If manageable, try to delegate one person to carve out a block of time devoted to returning voicemails instead of leaving the task to the end of the day.
Update the phone menu
Ensure that your menu is set up to route your most common requests (like prescription refills or directions to the clinic) to the correct parties so that these calls don’t clog up the main queue.
Should I separate phones from the front desk?
It’s not efficient to staff one person on both patient check-ins and answering phones at the same time. It’s a much more lasting fix to delegate phone duties to a dedicated team, whether that’s full-time or if your clinic just needs help with overflow or handling the excess volume at peak hours.
What the call team handles
A dedicated call team handles a variety of phone tasks for your clinic, such as scheduling and rescheduling, appointment confirmations, questions about insurance, and routing clinical questions to the appropriate member of your staff.
Covering every location the same way
By supplying this dedicated team with one script and one set of rules, they are able to provide patients with consistent answers to their questions, regardless of which site they are asking about.
What is the privacy on outsourced patient calls?
Any outside team that handles patient calls and deals with patient information is required to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) and undergo HIPAA training. Have a look at our HIPAA handoff page to learn how that arrangement works.
What are some numbers to watch with a dedicated outsourced team?
As you work with a dedicated phone team for your clinic, be sure to track these 3 important metrics.
- Abandonment rate: What percentage of calls do patients hang up on before they receive an answer?
- Average hold time: On average, how long do customers wait from the time they call your clinic until the moment they are connected to a real person?
- Callback turnaround: How long does it take a customer to receive a call back from your clinic after leaving a voicemail or an unresolved request?
What to do first to outsource patient calls?
As you begin the process of more effectively covering your patient calls, get started by reviewing a single week of call data for each location to establish what your baseline looks like. With that information in hand, are you ready to see where calls are slipping? Get in touch with ROI CX Solutions today to see how we can scale your phone operations and strengthen your bottom line.
