Answering Services

Partnering with a professional bilingual answering service offers innumerable benefits starting from expanding the target market to increasing the client’s satisfaction rate, it goes beyond one’s individual ability. In today’s world answering services are crucial. From small businesses to large companies, answering service plays an important role everywhere because this huge task of answering a thousand calls a day can’t be expected to be done by an individual. Previously people used to hire internal staff to conduct the responsibility of taking an influx of calls.

However, this was an expensive and troublesome solution since people had to train the staff to answer calls professionally. Not everyone knows the rules of professional calling. Henceforth, they can’t perform up to a certain expected standard but no company can ruin its reputation due to their poor calling service. It’s because whenever customers reach out to them, they should have the trained staff to answer their customer’s queries. Otherwise, a company may lose its reputation by dropping the customer’s satisfaction rate. However, professional answering services have several advantages. There are innumerable reasons to choose a professional service rather than hiring in-house staff. Let’s take a look at a few of them,

1. It Resolves Hiring Problems

A professional bilingual answering service provides trained staff to help businesses save their time and effort in finding in-house staff. Considering the global business demand in today’s world, it’s not easy to hire the top talent after a thorough screening. Especially it’s a daunting task to hire an individual who will be available for 24*7. However, by hiring an answering service, one can easily resolve the problem. The reputable and reliable staff of a professional answering service will accept calls for 24*7*365 without an exception that too in multiple languages. It means businesses can decrease their staff needs quickly by outsourcing their telephone answering requirements.

Expansion of Services

The best part of hiring a bilingual answering service is that it allows businesses to expand their target customer’s group. If anyone is able to answer calls in a particular language, then it limits the customer numbers because not everyone can speak the same language. Having bilingual support, one can easily provide customer support in different languages. Not only it will help to increase the satisfaction rate of their clients but also it helps a business to expand.

Increase Client’s Satisfaction

In several functions, the staff should be prepared to deal with intricate problems especially in help desk services where an influx of customer queries arises. Without ensuring the best results, none can increase their client’s satisfaction rate which plays a crucial role in a business operation. Without keeping customers satisfied, no business can be successful. Professional answering services allow their clients to customize the scripts so that they can add or remove anything that may seem irrelevant. Besides, it allows them to leave their in-house members free so that they can dedicate their time to other crucial things. These are the reasons why hiring a professional answering service is crucial in the realm of business.

The lives of doctors are highly occupied with daily phone calls, hundreds of patients to attend, a couple of reminders to look after and innumerable appointments to schedule. If you’re feeling confident about conducting all these activities all on your own, you’re mistaken. It could make your life a lot messier than it already is. You will no longer be able to dedicate yourself to diagnose the patient efficiently. It’s because physicians are entrusted with the responsibility of saving people’s lives and a majority of doctors sacrifice their personal lives to make that happen to their patient. If you find it tough to attend patient calls, then you can consider opting for med answering services.

They dedicate their entire life at the clinic to treat their patients, to find aids for them and whatnot. These are not a trivial task. However, it gets complicated when you’re faced with hundreds of phone calls to attend. Your mental health takes a toll on yourself. But, it could be easier if you consider hiring professional med answering services to handle all the miscellaneous work. There are unavoidable reasons to choose professional med answering service. These include,

1. Save Your Cost For Hiring In-house Staff

Well, you must be aware of the expense involved if you consider hiring in-house staff for your clinic. Also, you have to bear the expenses of training them properly to handle all the calls. In the healthcare industry, the professionals should follow certain etiquette of answering the phone calls especially if you get emergency calls every now and then. The trained staff knows how to handle the emergency calls and when it should be routed to you to answer their queries. An unprofessional individual doesn’t have this knowledge and expertise. Physicians often don’t consider these things while hiring the in-house staff and suffer later. If you want to avoid problems in future, you should consider professional med answering services to handle all the tasks efficiently.

2. You Can Work Peacefully

You will no longer have to worry about scheduling the appointments, answering the thousand phone calls throughout the day, or any other tasks. You can simply focus on diagnosing your patients and leave the rest of the work to the professionals. They work as your in-house members but from a remote location and handle all the tasks effectively. Now you can work peacefully without misbalancing your profession. The professionals will be there to attend the phone calls for 24*7, schedule the appointments, give reminders to your patients, and all the other miscellaneous work.

3. Keep Your Patients Satisfied

In the realm of healthcare, nothing is more important than keeping your patients satisfied. Isn’t it? After all, the reputation that you have earned after working tirelessly for years is dependent on how well you can satisfy your patients. However, it gets a little difficult to maintain the level of satisfaction without having a helping hand. These professionals’ answering services can be the most efficient helping hand to help you conduct a smooth practice throughout your career.

Are you a doctor who wants to ensure that your patients get a proper response to their health information quickly? If yes, then you must have a telephone answering machine installed in your clinic or at the hospital. While providing health information, it is also important to be compliant with the Health Insurance and Accountability Act (HIPPA) that requires you to protect the sensitive information of the patient. This sounds impossible but the reality is that HIPPA compliant answering services can save you a lot of time and money. Since you are busy while performing other duties at the hospital, the telephone answering machine can answer the patient’s problem.

Customer care today has become an integral part of the business and medical practice is not different from any other work. Customer care helps to deal with patients where they can leave their messages as well as listen to your important message too. A call answering machine can make your medical practice more efficient and quick. On the other hand, you can personalize the on-call and escalation process the way you want in your answering machine.

HIPPA compliant answering services are the need of the hour that can be beneficial in emergency and non-emergency health situations. It is a great tool to treat your patients with care and resolve their issues without any delay. The answering machine works in a systematic manner where no person is put on hold and gets the message quickly. Ensure that you buy HIPPA compliant answering services to run your medical practice seamlessly. Now, you can also get a bi-lingual answering machine or customize it with the language you want.

A medical answering machine is what you need when you want a patient’s satisfaction to efficiently perform your duties. Due to its benefits, it is increasingly becoming an important tool for medical staff.

Benefits of Medical Answering Machine

1. To Remind Appointments– You do not need an army of staff to call your patients on scheduled appointments. The medical answering machine will confirm the appointment be it a surgical appointment or just a routine checkup.

2. Availability – The medical answering machine is available 24/7 to answer an important incoming call. When your staff is receiving high volume, it is only the answering machine that can come to rescue you from never-ending calls. Utilizing a call center ensures that patients are not put on hold and get the resolution on time.

3. Flexibility – Medical telephone answering machine is flexible and provides support in many medical branches like in surgery, dental and physiotherapy where calls are forwarded to trained health care providers. A medical answering machine helps you in forming credibility among your patients.

4. Cost – Medical answering machine is better than hiring additional staff for answering incoming calls. By utilizing the answering machine your staff can give more time to other medical tasks.

HIPPA compliance– Medical telephone answering machine ensures that you remain HIPPA compliant all the time even after working hours.

Therefore, it is a must-have machine for doctors and medical practitioners.

There are many professions that work in after hours, but for doctors, there are no after hours. They sometimes have to work 24hours to help their patients. When a doctor closes its door for the day, their patients turn on to their phones for medical advice. As a doctor, you have to take those calls. You try to answer as many calls as you can, unfortunately, most of them go to your voicemail. Plus, it is difficult to weed out which call is important and which is not, this why you need a service that can help you manage your calls.

What is a medical answering service?

Medical answering service is a call center that takes calls on behalf of a doctor. The professional who answers these calls present themselves as in-house staff. Medical answering services offer a wide range of services such as taking calls, messages, scheduling appointments, and more.

When you hire services from a medical answering service provider, you get to enjoy the following benefits:

1. Save Money

You hire staff to do important tasks in the clinic, but most of their time is spent on answering calls. Yes, you can hire additional staff but it will cost you more money on salary, insurance and more. This is where med answering services come into the picture. They will answer the calls, allowing your staff to focus on important tasks at hand.

2. Decrease Hold Time

A doctor receives a countless number of calls each day and there is a limit to how many calls you and your staff can handle. Sometimes it is too much for you to handle, which results in long hold times. But with medical answering services, all the calls will be diverted to a call center, where your patients will speak to highly-trained professionals. They can take a message, schedule appointment, forward call to the doctor, and more. This helps in decreasing hold times, which also increases the patient’s satisfaction level.

3. Meet HIPAA Requirements

HIPPA has created a set of guidelines that states that all medical records should be safeguarded at any cost. If your answering service provider fails to maintain the privacy of your patient, you will be held responsible for the same. To avoid such situations, you need to hire a service provider that follows all the guidelines.

4. Keep Irrefutable Records

When dealing with sensitive data like medical records, it is important to keep your practice safe. All the calls made through the call center are recorded and time-stamped, which provides an accurate and irrefutable record.

5. Increase Profitability

When you hire medical answering services, you allow your staff to focus on more important tasks, which smooths the operation of the clinic. Plus, your patients don’t have to wait on hold for more than a few seconds before they are answered by a professional at the medical call center. This increases the overall satisfaction level, which leads to more patients, hence more profit.

Patient leakage is one of the major concerns that many healthcare providers deal with. But studies show that retention rates are higher when doctors offer transparent data and emphasize clear communication. So, whenever a leakage problem is recognized, caregivers may want to run a satisfaction survey to see what’s working and what’s not. They can then take tangible steps – like getting medical answering services to minimize wait times – to address them.

Most medical caregivers would wish to have 100% patient retention rates, but that’s often hard to accomplish. A new report from Fibroblast, a referral management company, revealed that 62% of healthcare facilities are losing more than 10% of their revenue due to patients going to other health systems. Some facilities reported losing at least 20% of revenue from mismanaged referrals and patient leakage.

It costs about 5X more to obtain a new patient than to retain an existing one. This is why patient retention is critical. So, if you are losing patients – whether due to poorly managed referrals or unclear communication – you may want to come up with ways to stop the trend. But you’ll need to understand your current processes to determine why your patients are leaving. You may realize that your patients are seeking help elsewhere because of one of these reasons.

Front office blunders

If you callers perceive your secretary as rushing through calls or being rude, they will feel the need to contact another facility. The same applies to when they have to wait for several minutes on a call to get help. Again, today’s clients don’t want confusion or misinformation from your part. If your survey reveals problems in this area, you may benefit from working with medical answering services. These experts are professional, well-organized, and always ready to help your patients when they call.

Lack of doctor-patient relationship

Patients want to work with doctors who are willing to listen and communicate well. They also want to feel that the doctor cares and understands them. Unless you try to nurture and maintain a good relationship with your patients, you’re likely to lose them to your competitors.

Bad patient experience

A patient can leave a facility never to return when they have had a bad experience. It could be that they were treated like another number, or that they were issued with the wrong medicine and so on. And the patient’s bad experience is likely to cost you a lot – especially when they go around warning people against you. When the patient shares their experience with others, they are likely to influence them not to come to your facility.

Poor management of referrals

There are times when you may need to refer your patients to another facility for specialized care. But these are still your patients. Not communicating with them or failing to offer them with transparent data of their condition can make them stick with your competitor. When you refer patients, make sure you have better monitoring solutions.

Conclusion

You can prevent patient loss by simply being proactive rather than reactive in your approach. This means coming up with a plan for process enhancement, team training, relationship management and reviewing and responding to feedback, etc.