Look at your telephone answering service’s website. If it’s like most answering services, it trumpets their commitment to quality. This talk about quality may also come up in their literature, email communication, and even invoices. Yet does your answering service follow-through by providing the quality they talk about? Do they deliver quality service, or do they merely claim to?
Comprehensive Training
All answering services provide some training to each new employee. But many services cut training down to a few days or even a couple of hours. This hurts their clients and produces inconsistent, error-prone service.
In contrast, training at the best answering services span several weeks. Medical answering service agents require extensive training to produce exceptional results. There is no shortcut to achieve the highest outcomes. To deliver quality service starts with comprehensive training of all staff.
Minimal Errors
Though no answering service is error-free, some make many more mistakes than others. Mishandling calls, providing wrong information, and collecting incomplete caller data are all errors that hamper quality. These are huge, and they are noticeable.
A commitment to deliver quality service, through an extensive quality assurance program, is a critical step to reduce errors. A quality assurance program is a proactive tool to ensure the medical answering service meets the highest standards. This allows them to catch minor concerns before they become major issues.
Consistent Results
Providing consistent outcomes is the hallmark of quality service. Inconsistency from one call to the next results in patient frustration and confusion. Will they handle your next call like the last one? If they do, that’s consistency. If they don’t, that’s inconsistency, which points to a failure to deliver quality service.
Positive Interactions
When your patients reach your medical answering service, how do they feel about the interaction? Are they satisfied with what happened? Or are they frustrated with how they were treated or the outcome they received? Positive outcomes are the result of quality, while negative interactions spring from poor quality.
Summary
Medical answering services that deliver quality service do so because they take deliberate steps to produce exceptional results. They move from talk to action. These actions start with comprehensive training. The goal of this thorough instruction provides consistent results from one call to the next, positive interactions with patients, and minimal errors.
If your current answering service falls short in these areas, it might be because quality receives lip-service and nothing more. Leading medical answering services, however, move from talking about quality to acting upon it. They take steps to deliver quality service on every call, every time.
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.