When you think about your medical answering service and the critical role it plays in ensuring 24/7 availability to your patients, you may not give much thought to the infrastructure behind it. However, the reliability of today’s telephone answering services depends completely on the reliability of the technology behind it.
One piece of technology that’s often overlooked is the telephone carrier that allows your calls to reach your answering service. While telephone service is stable and reliable, it isn’t infallible. Phone service can go down, software bugs can crash the system, and programming errors can misroute calls.
That’s why the best medical answering services use multiple telephone carriers. They don’t want a phone company problem to become your problem.
Eliminate a Single Point of Failure
Most answering services have all their calls come to them through a single carrier. This simplifies their infrastructure and saves them money. It also introduces a severe liability.
Answering services that use one phone carrier have a single point of failure. If that phone carrier goes down, none of the answering service’s clients’ calls can reach them. Nothing.
That means your calls will go unanswered. What happens to those calls? Who knows? The phone carrier is down. Callers may receive endless ringing, a busy signal, or silence. Regardless you and your patients aren’t receiving the service your answering service promised to you.
That’s why today’s best medical answering services use multiple phone carriers.
Ensure Redundancy
Medical answering services that truly care that their clients’ calls reach them go to the extra expense to work with multiple phone carriers. This way, if one goes down, the other can take over. In most cases, this is an instantaneous switchover that you and your callers will never know about.
Often telephone answering services with multiple phone carriers use load-balancing, with a percentage of calls coming in on each of their multiple telephone service providers. If one carrier encounters a network slow down, calls automatically reroute to the other carriers. Of course, an extreme situation is if one of the phone carrier’s system goes down or suffers a cable cut. The other carriers immediately take on the extra traffic.
In this way, answering services that use multiple telephone carriers can ensure telephone service redundancy to their clients.
Provide Options
Every telephone carrier provides a standard set of services. However, each phone carrier also offers unique options that others don’t or can’t. This means that no single carrier can provide all the options you and your answering service might want. For answering services with one telephone carrier, the service can only use whatever features their carrier offers. However, for answering services with multiple phone carriers, they can select the best options from each carrier and offer them to their clients.
Summary
Most of the time it doesn’t matter if your answering service has multiple phone carriers or not. Most of the time telephone carriers work as intended. But do you want an answering service that answers your calls most of the time? Of course not.
You want an advanced medical answering service that will answer your phone calls all the time. That’s why you need an answering service that uses multiple phone carriers. This is the only way for them to eliminate a single point of failure, ensure redundancy, and provide options.
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.
