Managing Incoming Inquiries Efficiently
An area of your business in which I am getting increasingly involved, by request, is the manner in which incoming inquiries are handled by your front-desk staff. My book Yes to Treatment includes a chapter showing your front desk how to handle these calls in a way that maximizes new-patient starts.
What I do not cover in that chapter is the issue of time management on the telephone. This issue came to light recently when one of my practice clients showed me a survey sheet they were provided by an outside resource that had, by my count, fifty-one question boxes to be completed by the front desk during the incoming phone call. That’s fifty-one different pieces of information to be gathered by a staff person who is handling other incoming calls at the same time. That’s a lot of time to be utilized by your staff person, and a lot of time to be expected from your incoming caller. In my opinion, an unrealistic amount for both parties.
To make matters worse, I was told that these questions were to be asked prior to the appointment being set. That in itself is a big no-no, simply because until your caller has committed to a visit to your practice, and therefore has a vested interest in the outcome, they are not going to want to spend time on the phone answering what they consider to be irrelevant and mundane questions from your staff person.
When handling an incoming inquiry, the first priority of your front desk staff is to get the appointment set, because none of your questions are relevant until that bridge has been crossed. Once the appointment is scheduled, your caller will answer any questions that your front desk wants to asks, because there is a what’s-in-it-for-me involved. That doesn’t mean that they want to answer fifty-one of them, however.
To those of you who use a scripting page for this purpose, I strongly recommend that you do what my client is having me do for them – go through the questions that you currently utilize, and ask yourself how many of these are needed on the phone, and how many can wait until the patient arrives at your office to answer. In this case, there was a significant amount of information that wasn’t needed prior to the practice visit.
When people are sitting in your lobby, you have a captive audience; you have their undivided attention and they have plenty of time to fill out forms and answer questions. When they are on the telephone, neither they nor your front desk staff have the time luxury of doing this in any significant fashion. By reducing the amount of information you collect on the phone you will improve the quality of the phone call for your potential patient and free up your staff to handle incoming calls more promptly and professionally.
