The demand for medical services has increased over the years. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals need to concentrate on their professional duties leaving the business communications to subordinate staff. Due to the increase in demand for medical services, medical facilities have resolved to hire professional call centers to handle their communication needs professionally and effectively. At the Best Call Center, we offer excellent and quality communication services customized to your needs and can help you achieve the best possible results as a Chiropractor.
Overview of Chiropractor Call Answering Services
Health care centers need to ensure that every patient is recovering on a positive path. Patients today always have an option and can always find a different service provider if they are not satisfied. That is why every form of interaction must be cordial and polite. If a patient has an urgent need, they should get the right medical service as soon as possible. A quality call center will work with the patient to ensure that the patient receives a positive experience.
How a Call Center Works
The term "call center" refers to a variety of operations, including a center that accepts both inbound and outbound calls. Once you have signed with a service provider, your line will be activated, and your agent will be ready to receive calls. When a call comes in on your line, you will start hearing, "This is XYZ medical center, how can I help you?" humming at your office.
The call center relies not only on phone calls to keep in touch with your patients but also on other technologies that suit your medical practice. The center's main goal is to help you as a chiropractor professional maintain a suitable patient or customer relation and meet your patient’s needs by promptly attending to their needs.
Duties of a Call Center in the Healthcare Industry
Call centers can handle different areas of your chiropractic services. With this service provider’s diverse capabilities, you will be certain of excellent proficiency on your side when some of the responsibilities are laid off. Here is a detailed view of the duties of a call center in relation to your chiropractor services.
Help Patients Across Different Communication Channels
If you are working as an in-house call center, you handle more than phone calls. You might be required to interact with clients through social media, live chat, emails, or in person. Being able to adapt to different channels is crucial in providing quality services.
Provide Thoughtful and Personalized Solutions
No matter how experienced you are in your chiropractor services, never assume that you know everything related to your patients' needs. Such assumptions can lead to miscommunication and negative experiences. Instead, a call center would help you give well-thought and detailed solutions to your patients once they reach out to you.
Create a Delightful Customer Experience
For your services to stand out from your competitors, you need to do more than just providing the right answer. Delightful experiences would help you retain your patients giving value to your chiropractor service. If you want to be successful in your job, ensure that you highlight your ability to turn a typical customer into a loyal advocate through the kind of experience that you take them through.
Provide Tailored Made Experiences to Patients
Not all patients are alike. Each patient has unique needs and goals that are specific to their situation. Therefore, recognizing their difference and adapting your communication to alight with their needs is a great way to maintain rapport. You cannot achieve this unless you rely on a call center.
Document and Respond to Patient efficiently
When a patient has a question, he or she wants it to be answered as quickly as possible. That means you need to be organized and capable of thinking on your feet. This can be challenging if you have to attend to your regular duties and try to maintain prompt response to questions that are posed by your patients. However, with the reliance of a call center, medical professionals can promptly handle their patients while attending to their regular duties.
Report Recurring Patient Challenges and Significant Problems
Besides solving problems for your patient, you will have to address issues related to your medical services. Call centers will notice a pattern or related customer inquiries and report the problems to you and help you solve them accordingly. This will help you recognize flaws and differences in your service provision, which will help in your long-term growth.
Solve Issues for the Long-term
It may be tempting to provide a patient with a short-term solution, but it is necessary to handle their long-term needs and avoid doing this for your convenience. Patients can recognize the difference between short and long-term solutions, which helps them remain loyal to your services.
Services You Can Get from Our Call Center
A reliable call center should be able to offer a variety of services that are custom to your chiropractor services. A good service provider should be able to provide inbound, outbound services, back offices, and tech support services. Here is a detailed view of the kind of services you can get from a call center.
Inbound Call Center Services
An inbound call center is responsible for incoming calls. When a patient or customer calls, the call center picks up the phone and takes care of the request made. The kind of services that you expect from an inbound call center is as follows:
- Customer service
- Answering services
- Retention
- Refund claim process
- Inquiry handling
- Email support
- Live chat support
Outbound Call Center Services
An outbound call center is a business activity where call agents make outgoing calls to prospective or existing customers. In the case of a chiropractor service, an outbound call center would be useful in different dimensions. These dimensions include:
- Fundraising
- Appointment setting
- Market research
- Insurance claims
Back Office Services
Back office services are limited to non-medical areas, including follow-ups, payment, billing, insurance verification, among options. All these activities are related to medical claim processing and would cause enormous loss if they occur. Some of the back-office services that you can get from a call center include:
- Medical billing
- Revenue cycle management
- Account receivable management and follow-ups
- Medical claim process
- Insurance verification services
- Medical transcription
- Healthcare IT
- Medical records indexing
- Healthcare data entry
Tech Support Services
Technology is vital in the growth of your chiropractic services. You need seamless technical support for your services to offer the best services to your patients. A call center would be suitable for such needs due to their regular relationship with your patient and you as the service provider. Some of the essential tech support services you can get from a call center are as follows.
- Data protection and backup
- Networking
- Application management
- Maintaining cybersecurity
Nurse Triage Services
Although chiropractic services are specific to a particular medical practice, a chiropractor can rely on nurse triage services managed by a call center. Nurse triage services can be explained as part of the medical services that depend on a group of nurses to assess patients and determine the medical assessment level they need.
The method used to evaluate a patient includes the severity of illness, symptoms, severity, and vital signs. This would be a suitable way to market your services once patients who need chiropractic services are referred to you. The responsibility of a Triage nurse in chiropractic services would be:
- Performing patient assessment
- Initiate emergency treatment if necessary
- Provide education to the patient or family when necessary
- Coordinate the transportation of patients to your clinic
- Communicate the status of a patient with you or your nurses
How Call Centers Benefit the Healthcare Industry
The goal of relying on call centers in the healthcare industry is to mitigate the challenges that face this industry. Every medical practice has a different experience, but there are common challenges that fall across the board. These include:
Booking Appointment
A bust call line will always put patients in a queue or on hold. This will always result in a high call abandonment rate, which can only be solved if you rely on a call center.
Insurance Claim
Patients usually go through a hard time to get insurance on their medication and treatment. Also, reimbursement might seem to be a distant dream when dealing with a severe medical condition. That's why it would be necessary to rely on a call center to ensure that such problems are effectively handled.
Emergency Calling
Due to the complex structure that most hospitals have, patients can easily get stuck with the difficulty of getting the right emergency services when they need them most. For instance, they might fail to track an ambulance in real-time, which accelerates the urgency of treatment and puts the patient at risk of death.
Report Collection
Patients might lack enough time to visit the hospital to collect reports related to their treatment. In that case, they might incur a delayed diagnosis as they wait for their reports to arrive in the stipulated timeline.
With the challenges that are affecting the healthcare industry, it is easier to acknowledge the extent of benefit that a call center would provide based on the services that you provide. Here are some general benefits that would result from relying on a call center.
Greater Focus that Leads to Higher Efficiency
It would be odd to expect a chiropractor to spend years in training and devote their precious time handling calls from patients. This can be an ugly reality when a chiropractor does not have assistance to help in these tasks. Healthcare outsourcing would support such a medical practitioner to handle his or her responsibilities without phone distractions since they have a professional call center agent to their aid. This simple organization of responsibilities can end up improving the efficiency of chiropractic services.
Access to the Agents and Latest Communication Tools
The smallest player in medical practice has the chance to deliver quality services through healthcare outsourcing. In that case, there are chances of positively achieving their goals and maintaining their most valued clients. Also, the call center agents’ knowledge and skill would help in other areas of your service, such as IT, payroll, customer service, and accounting.
Cost-effective Way of Excellent Service Delivery
Traditionally, call centers usually outsource and recruit in-house agents. But you can send your agent and have them trained if you want. In that case, you will save money if you do not hire an additional full-time employee. In the end, you will lessen your operating cost and use the surplus finances to build a competitive edge in your chiropractic services.
Real-Time Tracking of an Ambulance
If you are in an emergency, a call center should dial the emergency number on your behalf and redirect you to a local driver within your location. This will ensure that you reach the hospital within no time and eliminate the risk of a severe medical problem.
In-App Integration
Most call centers have prioritized providing online appointments with mobile applications by integrating them with a management system. In that case, patients will be bound by time and will not seek manual support, whereas an appointment can be made in a few clicks. In more advanced systems, patient IDs are made to make the system more accessible on all their devices, where they can choose their own convenient time for consultation. Potential clients can access a specific chiropractor and book their appointment even during non- office hours.
Send Report Alerts
Relying on a call center makes it easy for patients to collect their medical reports on their mobile phones. The reports can be presented in channels such as Email, WhatsApp, or SMS, depending on the patient's choice. This makes the process less complicated and a lot faster. With instant reports, they can reach the chiropractor and seek virtual support from them.
Securely Maintain Patient Records
A breach in sensitive patient data can risk the privacy of patients. This can end up in legal battles when you are sued for breaching essential patient documents. However, with a call center on your side, you will be sure of privacy on your patient record. Providers also integrate their systems with CRMs to access the data and check their patients' history when required.
Engagement after Treatment
A patient journey does not end with payment or bills or discharge from a hospital. They need engagement after their treatment to ensure that they are in prime condition once they are done with you. A call center would be suitable for sending timely alerts to your patients about their health and check-up reminders. This will help build a strong patient-doctor relationship, leading to positive growth in the long run.
Bridging the Gap between the Front and Back Office
It is challenging to maintain administrative records of a patient and prescriptions. However, call centers can prioritize and proactively handle every administrative recording on your behalf. It also guarantees business intelligence, which significantly improves operational efficiency.
Call Center Structure and Team Functions
A call center should have a well-defined structure with well-illustrated team functions to ensure that they offer the best services. This provides a seamless process to provide services and allows the call center to handle large tasks without too much pressure. A call center is composed of different professionals with different roles and skills. Let's have a closer look at every professional involved in call center management.
Team Leader
A team leader, often referred to as team manager or supervision, is responsible for managing a team of agents. The team leader is obliged to ensure that each agent is performing towards their target, review their performance, and coach them when needed.
Apart from managing the agents' team, the team leader is expected to regularly meet with the manager to provide feedback and receive instructions or action. The primary responsibility of a team leader can be listed as follows:
- Setting targets for individual and the entire team
- Measuring the performance of individuals and the team
- Helping to optimize procedures
- Ensure that the agent adheres to company policies
- Updating and preparing performance reports to the Call center manager
For a team leader to maintain the best services, he or she must have specific skills. These skills are as follows:
- Clear communication
- Multi-tasking
- Dependability
- Organized
- Customer-focused
Call Center Manager
This is the person who has the ultimate responsibility for the overall performance of a call center. They have the duty of making decisions regarding the people, processes, technology, and customers that are part of the call center.
The call center manager also liaises with other departments such as the Human Resource, Sales and Marketing, IT, and other departments. Their primary duties of a call center manager can be summarized as follows:
- Being responsible for performance management such as setting objectives
- Identifying underperforming areas
- Ensuring clear communication across the call center
- Championing quality
- Creating and maintaining a positive culture
For a call center manager to maintain the best services, he or she must have specific skills. Some of the essential skills that such a professional should have are as follows:
- Skilled report writer
- Influential leader
- Tech-savvy
- Self-motivated
- Good communicator
- Adaptable to customer and business priorities
Customer Services Director
The customer service director is a critical strategic and operational leadership role. The person in this position is responsible for the development and continuous improvement and delivery of customer service.
The customer service director will be accountable for the strategic development of operational requirements, technology, processes while aiming to deliver critical service outcomes for customers. The role has a significant level of responsibility for operational delivery and includes tasks such as:
- Leading and developing a senior operating management team
- Develop strategies to improve customer service
- Empower and engage customer service team
- Negotiate the effective utilization of resources
- Maintain strong partnership across the board and stakeholder
The customer service director should harbor specific skills to ensure the best services to the call center and their clients at large. These skills are as follows:
- Customer-focused
- Negotiator
- Motivator
- Relationship building and management
- Collaborator
- Strategist
Digital Contact Director
The role of a digital contact director is to ensure uptake of digital channels and customer contact efficiency across digital service lines. It is their responsibility to deliver a service that does not compromise with the existing revenue, margin position, and services.
The digital contact director also takes the lead in creating a digital contact strategy, researching, and designing the correct digital channel that matches your image and ambition. The kind of duties that this professional has can be summarized as follows:
- Gaining and understanding the digital market trends and opportunities relevant to the contact center
- Ensure consistent delivery of service on email, live chat, video, social, and other correspondence
- Designing and implementing ways to develop various channels
- Identifying and researching third-party suppliers
- Securing executive or board-level buy-in on projects
A digital contact director should have specific skills to ensure that they deliver as required. These skills include:
- Digital design
- Strategist
- Research about market trends
- Problem solver
- Tech-savvy
Human resource
The Human resource manager or HR manager is a crucial member of a call center, especially when it comes to recruitment and training. The HR manager is responsible for ensuring that the terms and conditions of employment and job description are in place. They also have the responsibility of organizing and training new members of the call center. They also deal with issues that individuals may have professionally and personally.
There are other professionals involved in running a call center. The nature of their position depends on the services offered by the call center. The other positions that are common in a call center include:
- Trainer
- Coach
- Resource planning manager
- Operation manager
Find an Reputable Answering Service
Undoubtedly, call centers have a significant effect on the growth of any medical practice. Therefore, you should not think twice about hiring a call center to handle your communication needs. At Best Call Center, we are enthusiastic about upholding your chiropractic service reputation with our highly trained and engaging operators. We place value in honest human interaction and focus on giving our services most professionally. To learn more about our services, reach out to us at 800-385-4656, and discuss your options.