Various types of answering services

by | Jan 29, 2014 | Healthcare

If you wake up in the middle of the night feeling extremely ill, thinking perhaps you may be suffering from a truly dangerous condition, you need to talk to the doctor right away.

If you are an apartment dweller and a pipe in your unit bursts at 3 am; you need someone immediately, otherwise there is going to be major damage.

These are but two reasons why answering services are so vitally important anymore. Emergencies do happen at any time, day or night.

Conceptually, answering services are not new. People and companies have been hiring independent contractors to take calls and screen them for years. They traditionally give some very basic information and take messages which can be passed on and acted upon the following day. Although the basic answering service is not new, new technology that has become available has changed the complexion of the industry.

In contrast to most areas of telecom, the traditional answering services have been on the decline in the last few decades, and the industry suffers from a less than stellar reputation. While most other industries have seen constant improvement in productivity and quality, answering services today often deliver lower results with higher cost. The reason for this phenomenon is pretty simple. If you hire minimum wage employees to work in the middle of the night, it should not be a surprise if they don’t deliver stellar results when they try to manage the complicated instructions from each of their clients.

Answering services generally are broken down into large nationwide call centers and small local providers. In general, the larger companies have more up to date technology, but they might not be as sensitive to the needs of their smaller customers, and they are also more likely to farm out the work overseas.

Another type of answering services that have emerged recently is completely automated services. The early automated services were usually cumbersome and for both the callers and the business. However, in the recent years, some companies are now delivering a completely automated answering service that is customized to fit all the needs of both the business and the callers. These services eliminate the human error and are so efficient that both the callers and the business owners never go back to the traditional answering service. However, these automated services are not always the best solution. If you are looking for a service to schedule appointments in your calendar, a high-end traditional service is often the best solution.

When patients or customers call after hours with an urgent issue, they have absolutely no interest in spending time with call center staff that is not technically or medically trained. With a customized automated service, the patients spend less time with the service, the person on call is notified more quickly (instantaneously), and they get first hand (in contrast to filtered) information.

Also, the service will make sure that each call is triaged correctly, eliminating the need of relying on the judgment of the low paid and often poorly trained call center staff. The service will determine if it is truly urgent and requires immediate attention by the doctor, or whether a message can be taken, passed to the staff and/or doctor the following morning.

What is most important about a doctor’s answering service is the level of care that he is offering his patients. Finding the right service might be tricky, but if the answering service is willing to share the key numbers about their service (i.e. number of doctors served, percentage of doctors that stay on past the any free trials, and percentage that cancels each year), you’ll have a much better chance of finding the right service for your office.

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