For service-oriented businesses, such as medical practices, the reputation of your practice can make or break you. Excellent rapport with your patients, skill in treatment, and a staff that makes patients feel welcome and cared for are all essential to growing your practice. One area that impacts your practice’s growth that remains overlooked is its reputation. It takes work to build and maintain a great reputation but it will lead to more referrals, keep your current patients with your practice, and keep your happy employees around longer. Here are some suggestions to upgrade your practice’s reputation that you can apply in ten minutes or less:
1. Improve your practice’s workflow
Optimizing the workflow of your practice will help you to improve patient wait times, have clearer role and responsibilities for your staff, and provide the best experience for your patients. These will boost your practice’s reputation and help the office to run more smoothly:
- Have a weekly review to assess the appointment schedule
Rather than racing from appointment to appointment, review your global schedule with the team. Look for efficiency, length of time for each appointment, a comfortable mix of complex and non-complex appointment types, and buffer times for catching up or seeing walk in patients.
- Set a time during the day to huddle with your staff to communicate answers to questions about treatments, coordinate lab orders, refills, or respond to messages from patients.
2. Succeed on the phone with scripting
Phone skills are rated extremely high as a decision criterion when practices look to refer patients to other practices. This should not come as a surprise. After all, the first impression you get of the practice is, you guessed it, the phone call to the front desk. Patients are expecting to be treated like they are the most important person to your practice.
Phone scripting is a best practice for delivering a consistent, quality experience for the caller on the other line. While recordings for hold time can lend a more positive experience than music, they do nothing towards helping your staff to control the call and deliver consistent, quality experiences. Meet with your staff to agree upon the most common phone experiences, get them down on paper, and then read them out loud. Your speaking “voice” is very different from your written one. Soon you will have a set of best-practice answers for your staff that they can deliver with confidence.
Is an answering service right for your practice? Dexcomm is able to offer custom scripting, experienced and trained operators, and HIPAA compliance. You can trust us to answer your phones with the diligence, care, and discretion that you would want for your medical practice. Contact us today!
