We talked about the importance of using a medical answering service that has multiple phone carriers. It’s even more important to use an answering service that has multiple locations. The multilocation medical answering service offers reliability benefits that a single location service can never match.
Power Outage Protection
Advanced answering services take precautions to make sure an interruption of utility power doesn’t affect their operations. They install sophisticated uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems to deal with short-term power interruptions and powerful generator systems to deal with long term outages.
Even so, these solutions aren’t infallible. What if one fails? What if they can’t resupply the fuel for the generator? These things can happen. And if this happens at a single location answering service, the whole system goes down.
However, if any of these unlikely scenarios occur at a multilocation answering service, they simply reroute calls to the other locations until the power comes back or the backup systems resume working.
Severe Weather Options
Regardless of where an answering service is located, there is some type of weather scenario that’s a common threat. While some locations are better than others, no location is perfect. Though we can’t control the weather, we can control our reaction to it.
If severe weather threatens the viability of an answering service or inhibits the staff’s ability to make it into the office, the multilocation answering service can simply reroute calls to one of their other locations until the situation passes.
Given this, it’s critical for a multilocation answering service to have offices that are at least 100 miles apart and not subject to the same weather conditions at the same time. This ensures that when a bad weather scenario affects one location, the others don’t suffer.
Pandemic and Human Health Safeguards
In the event of a pandemic or a human health issue, it may become inadvisable or even impossible for staff to travel to their office to take your phone calls. Just as it’s critical to keep staff safe in this scenario, it’s also critical to provide you with uninterrupted telephone answering service. With a multilocation answering service, this isn’t a problem. Calls that can’t be answered in one location due to staffing issues can automatically reroute to other locations.
Natural Disaster Defense
In addition to weather issues, there are also natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, and floods, not to mention man-made problems such as terrorism. These types of disasters may hamper a one location answering service from functioning. This could include it being unsafe to enter the building, all the way up to the destruction of the facility.
Though we hope these things will never occur, we must prepare as though they might. Again, a multilocation answering service is the only certain way to ensure that one of these unthinkable events doesn’t inhibit your answering service’s ability to answer your calls.
Summary
There are many benefits to using a multilocation answering service. When using an answering service with multiple interconnected offices, they have options to answer your calls more effectively should anything occur to impact the viability of one facility. A single location answering service lacks this capability. If serving your patients with excellence and without interruption is important to you, be sure to use a multilocation medical answering service.
Learn how medical answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your practice, clinic, or facility. Then get a free quote to discover how affordable their healthcare communication services are. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer and call center authority.
