The average medical office fields about 53 patient calls a day, or about 36 per 1,000 patients, adding up to about an hour of phone call overhead every day. And phone calls aren’t the only thing front offices manage – from patient check-ins to record-keeping and vendor relations, front offices manage a lot of moving parts. Without the proper tools, things can get hectic quickly.
One of the easiest ways to keep things in order? Invest in a phone system that helps keep things organized. Here are some of the ways a cloud PBX system keeps front offices functioning smoothly.
- Office Integration and Insights
When looking to reign in a hectic office and improve productivity, Renal & Urology News holds that “it is almost always worth the effort to keep track of how much time people are spending on the phone and why.
Phone call tracking and reporting can shed light on employees’ time use. VoIP services can automatically track and record calls, allowing managers to break down reports by call length, call type, employee and other factors. Offices should review phone call data to spot trends and pinpoint areas to improve, refine or automate.
VoIP services further facilitate call tracking by making it easier for practices to implement dedicated billing, scheduling and other centralized teams. With VoIP, practices can implement separate departments or offices without the need for new infrastructure, and seamless forwarding and transferring keep teams fully integrated within the practice’s internal and external communication system.
What’s more, this flexibility makes VoIP scalable to meet a practice’s needs, and can seamlessly accommodate department re-organization, office expansion or practice relocation.
- Automation
Medical offices working at or near capacity can significantly cut administration time with some simple phone call automation features.
Auto-attendants and IVR menus, for example, automatically answer calls and direct them to the right recipient, freeing up call reception time and reducing time-consuming, client-frustrating transfers. Most VoIP solutions offer these features with a standard service package.
When designing an IVR menu, use information from call reports to determine which departments take the most calls to configure a menu with helpful options.
Pro tip: Don’t forget to include a manual override. Callers should always have the option to press zero for a human representative if they get lost or need additional help.
As a bonus, VoIP solutions are easy to configure, enabling employees to update IVR menus as needed, without provider assistance. This helps keep them performing optimally, even with department, personnel and office organization changes.
Additionally, VoIP systems can automate custom ring patterns. In contrast to the multi-line phone systems small businesses use, VoIP solutions offer more sophisticated and customizable options, such as “round-robin,” “next available user” and “least recently called.” These configurations help practices optimize call flow and avoid interrupting productivity.
And for the occasional calls that still go unanswered, VoIP solutions can automatically send employees a notification and voicemail transcription directly to their email inbox. This helps them address messages faster and manage them in a convenient location.
- Document Organization
In a medical office, paper files are inevitable. We know you’ve got a bulk of dusty filing cabinets lurking in some back office with contents so old no one’s quite sure what they are anymore.
We won’t try to convince you to digitize all those.
However, new and active files are more manageable and trackable when handled digitally. VoIP fax services enable employees to send and receive documents over email while maintaining the security of traditional faxing.
Also, VoIP’s ability to integrate with CRMs allows employees to quickly pull up call history, patient information and other data while on a call. This expedites calls while eliminating redundant questions and hold time while employees rifle through old documents looking for information.
The result? Speedier calls benefit both parties, resulting in a more streamlined office and happier callers.
- Quick Support
Busy medical offices understand the seriousness of a phone outage; patients don’t stop needing service when electricity, internet or other systems fail.
Fortunately, VoIP systems can help practices develop custom backup plans that immediately switch to an internet fail-safe and start routing calls through an alternate location when an outage occurs.
A seamlessly implemented disaster recovery plan can get practices close to zero downtime when dealing with technical issues.
Don’t forget, medical offices should take extra care to choose a business VoIP provider that prioritizes support to minimize technical difficulty downtime.
Some of the best providers even proactively monitor accounts so they can spot, troubleshoot and fix problems before clients even get a chance to experience them at all. And if a problem occurs with no one there to witness it… did it really occur at all?
We’re not here to answer those big philosophical questions – but we know receiving proactive monitoring and repairs is certainly a step up from calling support, relaying issue reports and waiting idly for a fix.
Get Productive with Modern Business VoIP Solutions
Medical offices’ many moving parts can easily devolve into disorganization and chaos without modern solutions to manage and streamline operations.
From making appointments to communicating with insurance agencies, phone calls are integral to a medical office – and phone call organization is critical to maintaining organization and productivity.
To learn how 4Voice’s VoIP business phone system empowers office functionality, download our infographic on the top 10 benefits of 4voice’s service.
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