There are many answering services that you could consider to handle the medical-related calls for your practice, clinic, or healthcare facility. Most answering services are general-purpose providers. They are easy to find.
Contrast the general-purpose answering service with a specialty answering service. The specialist answering service focuses on one or two market niches or industries. They are not as common and are harder to find. But they do exist.
A Generalist Answering Service
What is a generalist answering service? A generalist as an all-purpose answering service. This means they will take on any client, from any industry. In short, they say “yes” to about any business opportunity that comes their way. They seldom say “no” to a prospect.
As a generalist answering service, they know a little bit about everything, which they apply to every client they have. But they lack a depth of knowledge that many answering service clients need and expect. As the saying goes, they are a “jack of all trades and master of none.”
As a result, an all-purpose answering service can offer a basic level of service and can do it well. But when you ask them to provide a deeper level of support, they often flounder. This is because their business model doesn’t allow them to deliver in-depth coverage to meet one specific industry or segment of clients.
If you need your answering service to cover just the basics and not much else, you may want to go with a generalist answering service. Just know that when they answer your phone, they’ll be juggling your healthcare patients with callers from a variety of other niches. They could bounce from an apartment complex to a funeral home to an electrician to a musician to an attorney to a consultant. These are all respectable businesses, but how well do they mix with the needs of your patients and callers?
A Specialist Answering Service
In contrast to an all-purpose answering service is an answering service that specializes in specific industries.
Since they major in just a few areas, they can become experts on the needs of their clients in knowing how to best meet those needs. Over time they build an understanding of how to best deal with specific challenges that their clients typically face. This wealth of knowledge is one reason that makes the focus of a specialty answering service a can’t-miss-characteristic.
Then they won’t need to juggle calls from a diverse array of callers leaving messages for all manner of companies. Instead, they can focus on a specific subset of call types applicable to their selected industries. This ability to focus on certain areas allows them to produce a higher level of quality to their clients in these industries.
The Medical Specialist Answering Service
Let’s take the idea of specialty answering service one step further. What if instead of focusing on a couple niches they chose just one? What if they decided to focus exclusively on healthcare?
That’s the benefit of a 100 percent medical answering service. They handle medical calls. They know healthcare. And they excel at what they do. If you want the best for your patients and callers when they reach your answering service after hours, you should go with a medical specialist 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.
