Your practice receives and initiates calls on a regular basis, both to and from current and prospective patients. Tracking these calls provides several benefits to your business, including contributing to an improvement in practice efficiency and patient happiness.
Here are 5 reasons why your practice should be tracking your office’s phone calls:
1. To Improve Your Patients’ Experience
When staff knows that phone calls are being tracked, they are highly motivated to provide a greater standard of customer service, which results in a better patient experience, which can increase retention and referrals. Likewise, monitoring calls can help management identify areas in need of improvement. The ability to evaluate your staff’s call-handling proficiencies can lead to targeted training geared to improve phone communication skills.
2. To Evaluate Effectiveness in Scheduling Appointments
By tracking your staff’s calls, you can assess how effectively patient appointments are being scheduled and managed by phone. How long, on average, are the phone calls? What is the “close” rate to schedule a prospect for a consultation? How challenged are staff members when they make follow-up calls to book a patient’s next Botox injection, for example? Are they able to reach patients within a reasonable timeframe/number of attempts?
3. To Understand the Reach and Effectiveness of Your Marketing Efforts
Whether you’re spending big bucks on TV, Radio, Internet and/or print advertising; focusing primarily on free outlets like social media; and/or benefiting from a website that both attracts and keeps prospects on the site, you need to know which marketing channels are generating the most calls, so you can make decisions about current and future marketing plans and budget.
We assume you are assigning unique phone numbers to each marketing channel/campaign so that you can easily identify which source(s) are generating the most calls. Some excellent options include CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics, and Ringba. Remember, if you’re doing extensive and varied marketing (see above), patients may not remember the original source of their interest in your practice. Many patients will say they found your website but how did they find it? Google search? From a friend who sent them to your website? A print ad? You need to know!
4. To Understand How to Allocate Staff Time
Perhaps there are peak call days and/or hours when your staff is overloaded with calls, and you need to schedule additional staff members to work the phones. By monitoring calls, you can discover if this is the case.
5. Legal Documentation Purposes
Having a record of calls can help you tremendously if legal issues or even simple disputes arise. It gives you a reference point between your practice and your patients, which, in certain situations, can be critical.
The Bottom Line:
It is crucial that you understand what is being said to callers; what difficulties (if any) exist for patients calling into the office; what staff members (if any) need phone training, and which marketing efforts are generating phone calls. We urge you to employ this technology to your benefit!