How to Improve Patient Communication at the Front Desk

Our ground-breaking, hands-on approach to improving the front desk area of your practice has produced some very interesting data about how your phones are being answered – and where the biggest shortfalls are in the process of handling incoming calls. One specific item of concern, and the subject of this article, is inbound calls that last over ten minutes in length.

This should be a very small number – no more than 3% of the total – and should be limited to “outlier” calls such as those involving vendor issues, calls between doctors, and the very occasional special circumstance with a patient.

Otherwise, some of you have a real problem here – an ongoing, routine occurrence of calls that are excessively long. And, when you do, these events happen for one of two reasons:

• Poor handling of patients on HOLD
• New patient calls taken using the computer

Placing Patients on HOLD
Callers should NEVER wait more than 2 minutes without either a response or an update from your staff person. In spite of this we have routinely observed these poor customer service habits (emphasis on “habit”):

• Immediate hold; the call is answered and the caller is put on hold right away
• Holds lasting over 5 minutes without an update or acknowledgment
• Ring-backs from “HOLD” that are immediately put back on hold again without an update

Don’t think any of this applies to you? Not so fast. Unless you listen to recordings, you have NO idea what is happening with your calls. And very few of you do.

Another common “hold” problem within orthodontics that Amy involves the need for a clinical staff person to help the front desk with a question about a repair and how to schedule it. A simple, recommended change we successfully implemented with a client had the front desk obtain the name and number of the caller and then have the clinical staff return the call, address the need, and schedule the appointment later. This was a win for everybody involved – especially the caller. 

Best of all, it resulted in a drop of 60% for this practice in the number of calls lasting more than five minutes.

New Patient Calls
You already know that NP calls are the source of your income, and therefore the lifeblood of your practice. This also means that how your incoming inquiries are handled by your front desk staff is directly related to your conversion rate – and people who are not yet your patients have a much lower tolerance than patients do for excessively lengthy calls.

To that point, an unexpected fact that emerged from our research was the impact that the method of collecting information has on the length of the call. When completed on paper, the calls typically take 5 to 7 minutes. But if the office conducts New Patient calls by keying directly into the computer, the average call is extended – out to 10 to 12 minutes!

Why is this the case, when one can type faster than one can write? Because of two things:

• Clicking, tabbing and searching between multiple screens
• Asking unnecessary questions that are embedded in the system to complete the call (trust us, some of your system designers gave no thought whatsoever to the value of the your caller’s time). By “unnecessary questions” here we mean information that is not needed now and can be provided later at the initial visit.

The rule of thumb  here is simple: if it can wait until the visit, don’t ask it on the telephone.

Also, keep in mind that, by switching to paper for the call,  your front desk still has five minutes to key data afterward, thereby gaining control of phone time management. So our recommendation is to consider using a paper document for speed. Yes, it adds a step for your team, but  remember, this is about your caller, not about you. It will save your callers their valuable time and will likely save cases for you too. Our training program includes a consistent, effective and time-sensitive document for accomplishing this.

In a hypercompetitive environment, the key to succeeding with higher fees is outstanding customer service. First impressions matter. Make sure that a caller’s experience with your front desk team mirrors the experience that they will have as a patient. Don’t look the other way when it comes to how your phones are being answered.