When a call is made to your office, the one thing that is important to note is the time that it takes for the person to take care of the caller’s problem and hang up. The duration of each of these calls should lead to a statistic known as average handling time, or AHT, or short. Average handling time indicates the efficiency, or lack thereof, which the specialist is able to handle the customer or patient’s problem over the phone.
The longer your calls are, the more time you spend with each caller, and thus, the fewer callers you are able to handle. This leads to a drop in satisfaction in addition to missed opportunities to make money. This problem turns into having to resort to either patients having to wait longer to talk to somebody at your medical practice, or more staff in order to take more calls at a time.
However, a medical call center can help you take on as many calls as you need at a certain period of time. When you employ the services of a call center, you can get more help in certain sectors of your medical practice while not having to hire new employees. Here is how medical call centers work to reduce average handling time that your company sets.
Representatives Are Trained Professionally
Unfortunately for you, you likely do not have the expertise or resources to train employees for how to answer calls from patients in a professional manner. However, you won’t need to with an answering service. Answering services will train each employee that joins their company before they answer their first call. They learn how to speak in a clear, positive voice while being straightforward in helping to deal with the patient’s issue.
Representatives Use Scripts
Call centers use scripts tailored to your medical practice. When a representative works with a caller on your behalf, they read a script that helps the caller along the call so that the caller gets the help they need as soon as possible. Depending on the responses from the caller, scripts branch off, leading to advice or instructions that the representative may have for them. Representatives see scripts as a mere guide so that the thing they say doesn’t sound as artificial or half-hearted.
Representatives Stop the Rambling
Call representatives at answering services are trained to put a stop to callers who trail on about personal matters or irrelevant subjects that are not useful to inquiries and otherwise waste precious time. Some callers just love to vent their frustrations or talk about themselves, but the concerned representatives will get the call back on track so that the problem can be solved as soon as possible and they are able to help the next caller. They will do this in a professional manner so that interruptions don’t seem as rude.
Representatives Transfer Calls When Need Be
If a representative does not know an answer to a question, and that is the main priority of the caller, the representative will most likely have the call transferred to another representative or to the right personnel at your medical facility. This is super helpful to patients rather than having the caller and many callers still in waiting to wait even longer to get the help they need.
Summary
Average handling time can indicate whether or not your company is good at customer service and handling phone calls from patients. Hiring a medical call center to reduce the average handling time and help more patients professionally in a given period of time.