Most medical offices and clinics use call forwarding service to send their phone calls to their medical answering service. Call forwarding service is an inexpensive feature provided by your local phone company. Though there are other options to send your calls to your answering service, call forwarding is the most common and convenient providing someone remembers to activate it each day.
Go Back to Your Office to Activate Call-Forwarding
The typical solution is to make a return trip to your office. That’s a hassle, but often it’s the only option. If you live close to your office, it’s a mild inconvenience. However, if you live further away or must deal with traffic or bad weather, making that return trip is downright irritating, not to mention time-consuming.
Even worse, what if you’re headed out of town, perhaps for a well-deserved vacation or weekend getaway? Then the break you so desperately need will have to wait.
One solution is to arrange for the staff member who lives closest to the office to serve as the emergency person to handle this. They make a return trip to the office, activate call forwarding, and then return to what they were doing. Though this is far from convenient, it has the overall lowest interruption on you and the rest of your staff. But what if the designated person isn’t available? That’s a problem.
Let Phone Calls Go Unanswered
The alternate solution is to leave your phone unforwarded and simply let calls ring. Though shocking, this sometimes seems like the only solution to a harried healthcare worker who desperately needs time away from the office in hopes of achieving some work-life balance.
This, however, is a grave disservice to patients and callers, which may have significant negative side effects to their continued use of your healthcare services. Certainly this option isn’t ideal, but it’s understandable why some healthcare providers may choose it, particularly after an especially difficult day.
Use Remote Call Forwarding
The good news is that there’s a third option. It’s called remote call forwarding. When your office phone number is provisioned with remote call forwarding, you can activate call forwarding remotely from any phone. This means there’s no driving back to the office to activate it or opting to leave your phone unforwarded and unanswered.
As a bonus, if you let your medical answering service know your access code, they can keep it on file for future use. This means that they can remotely activate call forwarding for you if your office staff forgets or if it becomes deactivated for some reason.
Remote call forwarding is a feature that you must set up with your telephone company in advance. There’s a small monthly fee for it, but it’s certainly worth the peace of mind that it provides knowing you have a backup plan to activate call forwarding and won’t need to make an extra trip to the office. You can place the order directly with your phone company or ask your medical answering service to order it for you.
Conclusion
Having the remote call forwarding feature configured for your practice or clinic’s office telephone will allow you or your medical answering service the capability to forward your phone if someone forgets to do it or if call forwarding becomes deactivated for any reason.
It’s a low-cost insurance policy that will save time and frustration if you need to remotely call forward your line. Set it up today, and you won’t have to worry about call forwarding problems in the future.
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.