If you care about your medical practice or healthcare facility, you should care about how your calls are answered. This includes those calls answered by your staff during office hours and even more importantly those afterhours calls handled by your answering service. This is serious business and not something to clown around about.
Selecting a Medical Answering Service Is Serious Business
Don’t let just any answering service manage the all-critical calls that arrive when your office is closed—that is, if you care about your patients and the future viability of your practice. Remember: not all answering services are the same. Most answering services take on any business from any industry. And this seldom works in your best interest.
That means that unless you’re careful, your medical practice could end up using the same answering service as this clown—or a plumber, mortician, or rockstar. Though we have nothing against these professions, it’s just that serving a diverse group of clients with diverging expectations doesn’t align with the goal of providing quality medical answering services for the healthcare industry.
You’re Known by the Company You Keep
You may be familiar with the adage that you’re known by the company you keep. It’s not much of a stretch to apply this to your answering service and the clientele they handle.
Do you use a medical-only answering service that focuses exclusively on the needs of the healthcare community? If so, you’ll enjoy the exacting standards that they apply to all their medical clients. And this will bode well for their after-hours interactions with your patients and callers.
Another saying is that a rising tide raises all boats. Isn’t that the type of focused medical answering service you want to be associated with? Isn’t this what your patients expect?
Or do you use a jack-of-all-trades answering service that represents a cross-section of industries and businesses? There’s nothing wrong with this, but remember that as they attempt to be all things to all people, they must make compromises to achieve a workable common denominator that will fit every one of their customers regardless of the type of business they’re in. In doing so, they lower the bar to offer a one-size-fits-all solution.
Professional Clowns and Professional Answering Service
Like most people, we like clowns. Really, we do. They entertain us and make us laugh. But they also have their place, and your answering service is not the right place—assuming, that is, you care about the quality of interactions your patients receive when they call after hours about an urgent matter.
They expect to reach someone who understands healthcare, someone who specializes in serving the medical community. This is not the time for them to talk to a representative who just finished speaking to a clown.
Summary
It’s time to get serious about your after-hours phone calls and stop clowning around. It starts with an affordable answering service that’s focused on serving the healthcare community.
Learn how medical answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your practice, clinic, or facility by delivering quality results on your patient phone calls. Then get a free quote to discover how affordable their healthcare communication services are.