Time to Hand Off the Phone? 10 Signs Your Medical Call Center Needs Outsourcing
That very first call to a medical office establishes the first impression a patient has with their healthcare provider in seconds. From long hold times to poor customer service, a lot of variables can have negative impacts on patient access, patient volume, and practice profitability.
Rather than turning over (and over and over) a receptionist team or fixing a broken call center within a medical practice, there are many reasons why healthcare teams turn to professional medical practice call center outsourcing partners to solve their problems. Here are the top 10 reasons it may be time to consider our Patient Experiences solutions for your practice.
1. High Call Volume
Many practices struggle with phones ringing off the hook. Associates may be unable to answer all the calls while still helping patients and providing excellent customer service.
Outsourced call centers can add highly trained employees who can field calls and direct them where they need to go.
2. Long Hold Times
A high call volume often leads to long hold times. Ideally, patients are on hold for no more than a couple of minutes but hold times that exceed 10 minutes begin to frustrate patients.
You can reduce hold times significantly when you work with an outsourced call center, improving patient satisfaction.
3. Frequent Missed Calls
The additional help that an outsourced call center provides means your practice won’t lose out on new patients and valuable appointments due to missed calls.
People tend to hang up when hold times are too long. Missed calls mean patients aren’t scheduled, questions aren’t answered, and new patients are lost to other practices.
4. Patient Complaints
In a world where reviews make or break a business, limiting negative reviews matters. But when the call center isn’t working well, you’ll notice more 1-star reviews complaining about their ability to schedule an appointment or how long they had to hold. They will also assume the entire practice is sub-par when they have concerns with the call center.
Outsourced call center services are a great way to ensure high patient satisfaction.
5. Overwhelmed Staff
Employees want to do their best, especially those in healthcare who enjoy helping people. But when they feel overwhelmed, they may stop performing well or even quit, putting more work on the remaining associates.
You can quickly solve your team’s overwhelm by adding additional associates through outsourced call center services.
6. Recruitment Difficulties
Hiring great call center employees can be challenging. You and your HR team wind up spending weeks or months looking for the right person. If you need to find more than one qualified candidate, it can take even longer.
A great outsourcing company will manage the entire hiring process, including recruiting, screening, and interviewing.
7. On-boarding Stress
Once you’ve found the right person, the next step is to complete the hiring process. Hopefully, they will pass their background check and can get started. You’ll then have to spend time and money investing in their training. It can be another few weeks before they are up to speed and able to help your current employees manage the incoming calls.
Outsourcing your call center means you won’t have to worry about going through the hiring process and training each new employee. That’s all done for you.
8. Management Challenges
Managing a team to maintain the highest quality service while minimizing interpersonal drama and other HR problems is often more than a full-time job.
By partnering with an outsourcing company, call center management issues become a thing of the past.
9. Lack of Performance Analytics
Knowing where to focus your attention when improving your call center is a guess when you don’t have access to detailed analytics. Coaching employees to higher performance can be difficult without knowing their baseline and tracking improvements. Underperforming employees can simply go unnoticed.
A great outsourcing company provides detailed performance analytics, which helps them quickly identify poor-performing employees, allowing them to correct problems immediately. It also lets you know exactly what’s happening with your patient calls.
10. Need to Improve Patient Satisfaction
Mandated patient surveys are a part of healthcare, and call center challenges can lead to low patient satisfaction scores. When your scores are low enough, it can jeopardize your practice’s Medicare funding.
Outsourced call center employees are highly trained in customer service and can help you quickly improve your patient satisfaction scores.
Conclusion
If any of these ten signs feel a little too close for comfort, you probably need call center outsourcing services. From ten Patient Experience professionals to an entire call center team, BIS has the resources and expertise to help you. We handle all hiring, training, and management, freeing up both time and money to invest in other areas. We also provide detailed analytics so you know exactly how well your outsourced employees are performing.
We think it’s time to look at a customized approach to maintaining happy patients and satisfied customers in your practice with the help of BIS.