The Best Advice on Choosing a Physicians Answering Service
If you run a medical practice, you might probably be familiar with physicians answering service. Even if you do not subscribe to such a service, you will surely have heard of other doctors excitedly discussing the benefits of this customer response system. So, let us take a look at what makes this service so indispensable for today’s doctors and hospitals.
Why Use an Answering Service?
Almost all doctors have one system or another to manage patient calls that come in after the regular working hours. However, most of these methods are far from effective. Before the advent of physicians answering service, most doctors used an automated voicemail that requests callers to leave a message. In case of an emergency, the voicemail will instruct the caller to try another number.
Imagine a patient who suddenly feels sick and uncomfortable at night and needs to know what is wrong before heading to a hospital. He may only need to contact the pharmacy or know what kind of medication to take. In such a situation, a voicemail will be a huge disappointment, forcing the patient to turn to another doctor. It is also a fact that no physician can keep his office open 24×7. A hospital answering service is the best solution for such situations.
By utilizing live operators to attend incoming calls to the doctor’s office, these answering services make sure that the doctor’s service continues to be available even after the office has closed. With this physicians answering service, callers can schedule appointments or get answers to their medical queries at any time of the day or night. Since the live operators are trained to identify emergencies and respond accordingly, it will help save the lives of patients as well.
Deciding on the Best Answering Service
The right answering service can help manage the overflow of incoming calls during working hours, deal with after-hours calls, provide prompt response to customers and maintain detailed records of all these calls. However, to ensure all these benefits, it is integral to associate with the best answering service out there. So, here are three tips on identifying a good service:
1) Quality of response matters
You must ideally choose a doctors answering service that employs competent individuals, provides them adequate training and then successfully retains those operators. Courteous, polite response to queries and a caring voice will keep customers calm and satisfied.
2) Opt for screening services
Many physicians answering service companies now offer call screening options. It is highly recommended that you choose this option and provide them with a script for screening calls so that live operators can easily identify the urgency of each call. In hospitals, this screening service will help direct calls to the right department.
3) Effective techniques to follow up messages
Traditional answering machines are only capable of recording messages that doctors can listen to later. It does not offer an instant solution to the customers. A physicians answering service, on the other hand, offers a number of ways for effectively and instantly processing messages. The best answering services now transfer calls based on the urgency level. For example, it could be an emergency or if the caller is highly emotional, the live operator will immediately transfer the call to the doctor’s cell phone. You can also choose the recorded messages as emails or as text messages sent to your mobile device.
As the practices of doctors become more like businesses, it is extremely important to keep customers happy in order to keep profits high. The live operators with a physicians answering service will enhance the professional image of a practice and keep customers satisfied.
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