Own the Phone

Proven Ways of Handling Calls, Securing Appointments, and Growing Your Healthcare Practice

Spencer Peller

• Publisher: American Association for Physician Leadership
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780991013579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care

The phone rings non-stop at your medical practice, and sometimes it seems like all you can do is put up with the incessant work it creates. Practice leaders struggle to develop proper phone strategies for staff but often give up before they've found the right ones. Sometimes, they simply move the phone answering function to a back room and try to ignore the noise.

But thinking that way is a mistake. Every day, potential buyers call your practice, and too often, experience poor customer service, which turns them away. Inefficient phone handling also frustrates existing patients and hurts patient retention. All told, poor phone management causes practices to lose much-needed appointments and revenue more often than they suspect.

Luckily, there's a way to turn this situation around. In " Own the Phone: Proven Ways of Handling Calls, Securing Appointments, and Growing Your Healthcare Practice, " author Spencer Peller offers a detailed plan for phone improvement which can generate quick results for any medical practice. This includes in-depth instructions on how to set up office phones to your best advantage.

"The telephone is the lifeline of your practice, " Peller says. "No matter what technology or medium exists today that allows patients to communicate with you and your staff, or how easy it has become for them to learn more about your practice from the Internet, the phone still sits front and center as the key ingredient in their doctor selection process."

Own the Phone provides high-level strategies to change the behavior of each member of your team and phone handling best practices that can be put in place quickly and easily (and made repeatable for everyone in the organization), as well as strategies for training.

Chapter 1: The Internal Commitment Required to Deliver Amazing Phone-based Service

Admitting you have a problem

While I truly enjoy working with doctors and am always impressed by how much they know about the human body and how confident they are in diagnosing ailments and formulating treatment plans for their patients, I also am amazed at how difficult it is for them to diagnose their own business problems! For example, I have worked with countless doctors who have front desk phone issues, yet when I ask them point blank about their comfort level with the way their phones are answered, I generally get one of three responses:

1. “I think they are doing a pretty good job handling the phones at the front, but I don’t sit up there so I’m not 100% sure.”
2. “Jane handles most of our calls and she has been with me for many years. I know she can deliver better customer service but I don’t have the time to focus on it. And bringing in someone new means I have to train them from scratch, which is just too hard given all of the things we have going on at the moment.”
3. “I listen when I walk by the front desk and they sound fine to me.”

These responses are tantamount to putting your head in the sand and hoping everything will be ok when you come up for air. Well, that attitude just does not work in today’s transparent world where everything that occurs in your offices is immediately posted on the web for all to see!

It is your responsibility to scrutinize everything that occurs in your practice. If your patients are not complaining about something, that doesn’t mean everything is hunky dory. Many patients won’t bother to report the issues directly to you. Instead, they will simply book an appointment with another doctor in your town and then tell everyone how bad their experiences were with you. That is something you cannot afford to let happen. That’s why it’s your job to search for problems first.

One of the issues you face right off the bat is that the logistics of running a healthcare practice are much different than most other businesses that have customers walk through their doors. Most other businesses have rows of products for customers to choose from, desks where people answer phones out in the open for all to see and hear, and managers who walk the floor constantly, keeping an eye on how customers are treated at all times. Your setup is unique, and thus offers unique challenges.

First and foremost, in a doctor’s office, the doctor is the product. Sure, some people go to doctors’ offices to purchase products, but 99% of the time they are visiting the practice to receive an exam or be treated by a doctor. They go to a private room in the back of the house, away from the front desk or lobby. Most front desk staff members are in the front of the house handling customer service on the phone and in person with patients in the lobby while the doctor is in the back of the house with the patients, which makes it difficult to perform the necessary quality controls to ensure patients are handled with excellent customer service at all times.

Some of you may already be using technology to keep an eye on what’s going on out front. Monitoring tools have advanced considerably and are very affordable these days. These technologies include cameras, phone call-recording applications, and online customer service surveys. We will talk more about the tools you need in the next section.

Chances are you know there are issues or you suspect there are issues. You must set the tone for change, and that won’t be easy—fixing bad habits never is. It takes strong leadership at the top. Then you need everyone in your office to acknowledge that the problems are severe and need to be corrected. Finally, it takes a commitment from your team to make changes because the consequences of not fixing the issues are detrimental to the overall business.

Getting your team to buy-in

After you acknowledge that there’s a problem with the way your phones are being handled at the front desk, you need your team to buy into the fact that the problem exists and that it needs to be fixed. Since most people don’t like to admit their faults, this can be a challenging step for your team members if not handled properly. If you get buy-in the right way, you should experience very little push back from your team—and if some individuals do push back, they may not be the best fit for your organization.

To get the quickest and most comprehensive buy-in from your team, you need to present them with concrete data—not hypothetical assumptions—about how inbound phone calls are mishandled. If you don’t present hard evidence, your staff members will feel as though they are being picked on, attacked, or wrongly criticized. That can cause a whole host of other problems you don’t want to deal with. Therefore, you need a system in place to track and analyze the phone calls coming into your practice so you can present your team with concrete data about the state-of-the-nation on the phones at the front desk.

I recommend implementing a call-tracking and call-recording system. There are lots of systems to choose from, and most are easy and inexpensive to implement. In fact, cloud-based systems are available that allow you to track and record phone calls without having to upgrade your phone system or download any software to the computers in your offices.

Many of the call-tracking and call-recording systems today are built for businesses that use thousands of tracking numbers and have entire departments of people who analyze the data the systems produce. In a doctor’s office, you have limited resources to analyze the data—it’s probably you and maybe an office manager. Therefore, your number one priority is to choose a system that is easy to navigate. As a rule of thumb, if you need more than five minutes to figure out the system, it’s probably a bad system for your practice. I also recommend choosing a system that can be accessed from your smart phone so you can keep track of the data whenever you want and from wherever you want. Because there are quite a few options for tracking and recording your phone calls, we have devoted a section of Chapter 2 to helping you choose the system that is right for you.

Within your call-tracking and call-recording system, you will want to take detailed notes on the outcome of the calls for at least one month, including:

1. What type of patient called your practice: new, existing, or other?
2. Which staff member took the call? Also notate if the call went to a voicemail box.
3. What was the outcome of the call: booked appointment, pending appointment, or no appointment booked?
4. Did the staff member who answered the call follow the procedures as explained in training sessions?
5. On a scale of 1 to 5, how was the call handled in terms of customer service, with 1 being “Handled Very Poorly” and 5 being “Handled Great”?

Once you have each of your calls notated with the above information, you can compile the data and present a chart of your results to the team. Start with the new-patient calls and calculate the percentage who booked appointments, the percentage of calls that were handled according to the training, and the average star rating across all of the calls. Then do the same for existing-patient calls. Don’t worry so much about others unless there’s something else your team handles at the front desk that drives revenues. For example, maybe your team handles inbound potential partnership calls from other business owners in your area. If so, you will want to chart the results of those calls as well.

Here’s an example of what your chart might look like.

You should also include one very important number at the top of the chart: Your Average Lifetime Value of a Patient (LTV). If you don’t know this number right now, you should. It’s something every business owner should know. As a doctor, you can calculate it with this very simple method:

Step 1. Make a list of at least 100 patients who have visited your practice for at least one year and write down the total amount of money each spent with you in the first year they visited your practice.

Step 2. Calculate the average total first-year expenditure across those 100 patients.

Step 3. Multiply the average total first-year expenditure (calculated in Step 2) by the number 3—the average number of years a patient will visit a doctor.

The Average Lifetime Value of a Patient number is vital to the data you are going to present to your team because they need to see visually the exact dollar amount lost by your practice when a phone call is mishandled and a new patient is lost, or an existing patient leaves the practice because of poor customer service.

So with your Average Lifetime Value of a Patient highlighted at the top of the chart, the biggest number you will want to have at the bottom of the chart is the Estimated Amount of Lost Revenue due to the way phones were handled. Calculate this by taking the number of calls notated as No Appointment Booked and multiplying it by your Average Lifetime Value of a Patient.

With this chart completed, you can meet with your team to get their buy-in on the changes you want to implement. When you hand out this chart in your team meeting, chances are the case you make about the effects poor phone handling has had on your practice will be obvious because they will see a massive Estimated Amount of Lost Revenue at the bottom of the chart. The rest of the data on the chart will support the comprehensive analysis you performed in order to calculate this dollar amount.

This process is no different than showing a patient blood work, test results, or x-rays when presenting a treatment method. People need to see the problem clearly presented to them on a chart before they agree to a solution you are prescribing. It’s just human nature. And that’s why you will go through the same exercise to get your team to buy into the plan for change you are about to implement.

It’s a mental game

Now that your team agrees there’s a problem at the front desk that must be fixed, it’s time to lay the foundation...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Foreword, by Hal Ornstein, DPM
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Internal Commitment Required to Deliver Amazing Phone-based Service
• Chapter 2: Preparing Your Office for Phone Success
• Chapter 3: Core Requirements on Every Call
• Chapter 4: Developing Your Inbound-Call Scripts
• Chapter 5: Scripts for General Phone Handling Within Your Offices
• Chapter 6: The Front Desk’s Role in Selling Services
• Chapter 7: Handling the Tougher Callers
• Chapter 8: Bad Habits to Look Out For
• Chapter 9: Ongoing Training and Development
• Chapter 10: Worksheets