(Excerpted from the 2/2/07 issue of Medical Economics)
Here are some suggestions to improve the efficient processing of telephone calls within your practice:
1. Keep your office open during lunch. Practices that close and switch incoming calls to an answering service (or worse, answering machine) lose a certain amount of quality control and image. Try rotating staff during lunch periods so that an experienced person is always available to handle the phones.
2. Answer all calls by the fourth ring; and by a real person. High quality customer service is becoming ever more important in the health field. If a call isn't answered by the fourth ring, have the call automatically switched to the back office. Another possibility is to hire retired staff or those on maternity leave to field "overflow" calls from their home.
3. Teach courtesy. To some people telephone courtesy comes naturally, to others it doesn't. For those that need more training, consider a scripted greeting and some coaching on how to listen to the caller. Some telephone companies even offer free training for your staff.
4. Spell out priorities. Who comes first, that patient on the phone or the patient at the window? If you're on the phone with a patient and are almost finished with the caller, signal the patient at the window that you'll be with them shortly. If the call promises to be a long one, the receptionist should excuse herself and place the caller on hold in order to attend to the patient at the window.
5. Don't rush to fill empty appointment slots. If there's an empty slot on the calendar, most receptionists will quickly fill the spot with requests for routine visits. However that can squeeze out any available room for sick patients that really need to be seen. Consider a policy to ration the routine slots, scheduling non-urgent calls at a future time, in order to maintain some flexibility for urgent calls.
No practice handles all calls perfectly. But if you set the procedures to process calls the right way, your staff will be happier and your patients will be giving you higher marks for courtesy, efficiency and professionalism.
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