Are you a service-based business or a physician running a medical clinic? If so, you know the role and value of answering services in the healthcare landscape.
The quality of communication can make or break your business.
You may also be aware of your in-house staff’s stress and intense workload when managing these phone calls.
Whatever the type of business you run, you have to make sure there is someone manning your desk 24/7 to answer calls.
But did you know that investing in answering service companies could help you scale your business down the line?
Business answering services will make it easier for you to meet the needs of your customers or patients, which will result in better customer experience and sales.
With this process in place in your business, no customers or patients will be left unattended or supported.
Working with the best answering services, you get more than what you paid for.
You get a combination of a dedicated and professional team ready to answer your calls, take messages, and even schedule appointments.
Keep reading this post as we share the true value of answering services.
Definition and scope
Small businesses, doctors, and entrepreneurs are always on the lookout to increase their revenue and savings.
One strategy that has been tried and tested is to use an answering service
When you decide to outsource your phone calls, you’ll have a remote receptionist carry the bulk of work from your in-house staff.
You can do this by selecting a service provider and one of their subscription plans, ranging from a basic phone answering service to a more comprehensive business answering service that includes scheduling, message taking, and routing calls.
This would mean you can minimize the missed opportunities that may result in losing a client, a sale, or a qualified lead. This is only one of the reasons that one should not undermine the role and value of answering services in healthcare.
Types of Answering Services
Answering services take many forms and shapes depending on the needs of your business.
Below are some types of answering services available in the market today.
Traditional answering services
Traditional answering services are the most common and most popular among the types of answering services.
An actual or a live person answering calls on your behalf and following the guidelines and process you set.
Most providers assign a live operator to answer calls, take messages, and transfer calls to the appropriate person or department.
Virtual receptionist services
Virtual receptionists services are an answering service that’s best suited for e-commerce businesses and medical center that need help handling high volume of calls daily.
Whether it’s the peak season, sales campaign, or even helping your in-house staff, they are there to support your needs.
To put it simply, a virtual assistant will act as a live operator and answer your calls, schedule appointments, and handle patients’ appointments or inquiries.
Which will then help you focus on what is important and conduct business transactions effortlessly.
Automated answering services
Automated answering services are best suited for businesses that transact with customers or patients 24/7.
This type of call answering service doesn’t necessarily mean having a live person working 24/7, but when someone calls you, they just “press one” to learn about your regular business hours or “press two” to get the doctor’s schedule.
In this type of service, there are no live operators or live people to answer your calls, only an auto-responder.
How they work
Listed below are some of the roles of answering services that add value to the Healthcare landscape:
Incoming calls
Each incoming call is directed to the answering desk during regular business and after hours, ensuring all of your customers and patients are attended to.
Live call answering
Virtual receptionists will take your live call and answer it on behalf of your practice so you can provide services even without your supervision.
Message taking and call transfer:
Hiring an answering service to handle calls and route them to the appropriate person or staff.
Routing calls
Sometimes, a patient can dial the extension number, and the role of a virtual receptionist will route or transfer the call based on the caller’s needs.
The tasks they handle
Below are some of the tasks that an answering services or virtual receptionist do for businesses and medical practices:
Appointment scheduling:
Answering services book appointments on patients’ behalf and can even remind patients of their upcoming schedules or clinic visits.
Reduce call waiting time:
Each individual in the workplace has a unique approach to handling calls; if the callers are unable to get their intended result, they could become irritated.
That’s why the best answering services use certain guidelines to provide customer satisfaction.
Administrative and tech support
It’s silly that people set unnecessary expectations for businesses, thinking that they operate 24/7. So, how do you deal with this problem? Hire a phone answering service that will respond to their concerns or tech issues.
Do answering services still exist?
Absolutely yes! Answering services, including both a virtual receptionists or automated responding services still exist and helping businesses in answering calls. The role and value of answering services is crucial in the healthcare industry where communication is one of the criteria to be successful.
The evolution
The evolution happened by shifting the role of live operators to virtual receptionists in handling customer calls.
Virtual receptionists now provide a personal touch to the you conduct business.
They handle incoming calls, perform message taking, and route calls just like a traditional receptionist but do it in a remote area.
Part of the evolution is introducing new features such as toll-free numbers, tech support, and the ability to seamlessly handle and transfer business calls.
This makes them a flexible and scalable solution for businesses and companies.
Key Functions and Features
Modern answering services do much more than just simply answer calls.
Here are some key functions that have a significant impact on modern businesses today:
Qualify leads
Book appointments
Live call answering
Assist website visitors
Call transfers and live call answering
Provide bilingual service
Who benefits from an answering service?
Oftentimes, in the busy season or peak business hours, customers and patients are left out in the cold waiting to get a response to the inquiry they sent.
Now, this responsibility falls to either the business owner or employees to respond to it.
But there’s a better and more efficient way of dealing with this challenge.
With the help of a business answering services your customers will no longer be left.
Answering services, whether automated or not, contribute value by adhering to its role of maintaining steady communication in several industries including healthcare.
Listed below are some of the fields that can benefit greatly from rendering answering services:
Medical practices:
With the high volume of inbound calls being experienced by medical practices, they could rely on answering services to free up their time and serve each patient’s needs.
Legal firms:
Law firms need all the time to focus on their cases and the last thing they need is a phone that keeps ringing.
With the help of a virtual receptionist, they can have an uninterrupted focus on their work.
Small businesses
Small businesses can take advantage of the unique business solutions that virtual receptionists provide, such as scheduling appointments and even customer follow-up.
Government agencies:
The government needs all the help it can get with communication in working on different projects and cases to better serve its countrymen.
How to choose the best answering services
So, your offices are getting bombarded with phone calls, and it’s just too much for your employees to handle them all.
Before hiring an answering service for your business, here’s a word of caution.
Learn everything you know about their business, how they work, their service cost, and how they can take off the workload from your staff.
Still, there are some critical areas that you can use to choose an answering service:
Exceptional service
Professional and transparent
No hidden fees or charges
No lock-in contracts
Proven track record of efficiency and reliability.
The average cost of an answering service
First things first, here’s an honest fact for you: there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for your business.
Each practice and business has unique needs, and the price varies depending on the plan you choose.
Generally speaking, there are two main types of plans in the market today: per call or per minute.
To help you make an informed decision, let’s talk more about the plans that service providers may offer to you.
Breakdown of Costs
The monthly plan
Most answering services charge a monthly fee, which can vary depending on your chosen payment scheme.
Generally speaking, 24/7 service coverage costs around $.80 and $1.17 per minute.
So, looking at an hourly perspective, the standard rate is $20 to $45.
As mentioned above, each business has unique needs, so if you require a bilingual answering service, a remote receptionist with specializations, and 24/7 coverage, you will have to spend more.
Per-call or per-minute charges
The pay-per-call or pay-per-minute scheme is commonly used, and you get to pay for the time you consume.
The going rate in the market today ranges from $0.75 to $1.50, but still, this price will vary depending on the service you opt-in.
Whenever you select a service, it’s important to make a clear assessment on the total call volume your business or practice receives each day.
Setup and onboarding fees
Like most services you’ll hire, it will always require you to set up and onboard so that it won’t have any issues on the deployment date.
Since this is a service you’ll request from the company, they might require an initial setup fee, which could range from around $50 to $150.
Together with it are the setup of tools, training virtual receptionists on specific procedures, and integrating them within your pre-existing system.
Additional features
Service agencies offer services and features that can be beneficial to your daily business operations.
For instance, they could offer access to various tools that can bring more value to their service, such as:
Custom phone numbers
Email and SMS features
Toll free number
Qualify leads
Personalized greetings and canned responses
Appointment setting and scheduling
Factors affecting the cost
Amount of calls
Each service provider will give you call-to-price tiering where you can choose the right plan for your business.
Service level:
More often than not, patients can dial the wrong extension number and be rerouted to the right person.
However, service providers can charge you for each transferred call.
To avoid unwanted and unnecessary costs, train your virtual receptionist to answer basic inquiries and solve simple issues.
Call duration and hours of coverage:
Service providers can charge you based on a pay-per-minute billing model.
The more time you spend on the phone, the higher it costs.
Spending less time on the call will result in lower costs.
But you should not compromise the quality of the call to reduce expense
Customization and integration:
As a doctor, you have to understand that the complexity of the services you’ll need directly impacts the total cost.
However, one should not look at the cost but rather the personalized experience one could give their customers.
True value of a phone answering service
On paper, answering services seems like an unneeded business expense, but its value lies in its power to build personal connections. For example, in healthcare, the role and value of answering services would be an asset since it would attract and retain clients since there is a steady stream of communication.
And the first step to having a loyal customer is through the personal connection you build.
They do this by using professional first-call experience, which then helps you retain existing clients and attract potential customers.
Hiring an answering service will help you reach more people and improve scalability.
So, if you manage customers correctly, filled with real person interactions, they can become a value and income generator for your business.
Criteria for evaluation
The idea behind hiring an answering service is to make people feel they’ve called your office directly.
When you shop around for your answering service provider, you should focus on your business goals and budget.
Understanding your goals will help you create a set of create to evaluate your service provider.
Here are the top three criteria to help you evaluate them:
Value for money
Cost consideration:
If you’re working with a limited budget, pricing is a critical factor in choosing the perfect call answering services company for business and medical practice.
See to it that you fully understand and carefully read the fine print of each cost, pay-per-minute, service cancellation fees, and money-back guarantee program.
Monthly Fees
Always compare the monthly inclusion in your monthly subscription to avoid unwanted costs.
Included minutes
Since you’ll be billed for every minute spent on each call, you must know the total duration of the consumable minutes daily.
Setup fees and onboarding process
Needless to say, you would want to work with an answering service company that will help you with the onboarding process, but some providers will require setup fees.
Free trials and money-back guarantees
Let’s admit it: not all services don’t fit the system of the business, so opt for services that offer a free trial or a money-back guarantee so you won’t take unnecessary financial risk.
Impact on score
When you score this, take into account 20% of the total score because you have to ensure you get the best value for your business.
The key features
Canned responses and custom scripts:
Scripts are the backbone of an answering service that will manage your phone calls.
So, make sure that they have a process in place to update their scripts.
Call routing and transfers:
There will be cases in which patients or customers can dial the wrong extension.
What you want to do in this case is to assess the ability of the service provider to ensure that important calls are transferred effectively.
Impact on score:
Key features account for 30% of the total evaluation score, as it directly impact the service you give to your customers and could cost unwarranted fees.
Value for money features
Growing businesses today require you to listen attentively to each of your customers, so you have to find a way to listen and interact with them.
So, when you hire an answering service, look for these features:
Call recording functionality
Email functionality
Third-party integrations
Customer Survey
Call recording and customer satisfaction surveys:
Call recordings are a great tool to get in-depth knowledge and live customer data to know which key areas you need to improve in the business.
Peak season and after-business hours support:
Maintaining the same level of efficiency in peak season is not easy so you need to ensure that a backup process is in place.
Impact on Score:
Unique features account for 20% of the total evaluation score, as you need to have clear strategies in place in the busy season and after-hours support.
The ratings and reviews
Customer Feedback:
Just like hiring an employee you need to do background checks on the service provider that you’ve choose before signing them.
Their professional reputation can definitely speak volumes as to whether or not they can deliver what they promise.
Reputable Answering Service:
People expect a professional experience from you.
So, you should read all the reviews from their pasts clients in the past and reviews they got from social media.
Experienced Answering Service:
Your reputation is on the line if your service provider can’t meet your demands.
A good answering service is accountable and has a level of reputability.
Impact on Score: Ratings and reviews account for 30% of the total evaluation score, as they will directly impact your business, the quality of service, and the reputation of your business.
In summary
An effective answering service company can be your business’s true value and income generator.
Investing in answering services is a smart move for us to relax and free up our minds.
