Answering services guide

Summary

1. Customer experience and customer access are even more paramount now than the minute before you started reading this article.
2. Customers shop 24/7, and not just during your office hours. If your digital door is not open 24/7, you are bound to lose to your competitor that provides customer access 24/7. That’s true for medical answering as well.
3. Providing unfettered customer access and the best customer experience while you are servicing existing customers is nearly impossible.
4. Increasing customer access and bettering customer experience leads to better customer reviews. This inevitably leads to more business.
5. Even small businesses can afford top of the line personalized customer access leveraging answering services.
6. Answering services can be fully automated (cheapest), partially automated or delivered entirely via humans (costliest).

Call centers – what they do for you

Take a medical call center as an example. Before using a callcenter, my practice used to have an answering service that didn’t bring more value than an automated IVR would have provided. My callcenter handled

• Community outreach campaigns to get new patients
• Referring physician outreach to get new patients
• Answered Google My Business, Facebook, Website, phone, text, chat channels to respond to each and every incoming inquiries
• Handled my physician referrals end to end, to grow my referring physician base
• My callcenter handled all my appointment related activities (recall, referral, new appointment, rescheduling, cancellations, reminders, reactivations etc)
• Handled all my patient intake that saved me 20+ mins per patient in office
• Our callcenter handled all my faxes (incoming and outgoing) related to referrals, medical records request, vendors, partners etc.
• Handled all my prescription related calls and faxes
• The callcenter handled all my billing related tasks as well (billing related queries, payer denials, prior authorizations, eligibility etc)
• My surgeries were scheduled, coordinated by our callcenter as well.

The more I invested in our callcenter, the more business we captured. The more business we captured, the more I could / needed to invest in our call center.

Who uses answering services

Absolutely. Most forward thinking / competitive business leaders use answering services. Some larger businesses also use call centers (there’s a difference).

I have noticed higher usage of answering services in the “services” industry (e.g. healthcare, consumer services, property management etc).

Answering service options 

Depending on your budget, you can choose one of the following 3 options.

1. Fully automated
2. Partly automated
3. No automation

Human staffed answering service

This is your “run of the mill” answering services where humans handle all calls.

1. This is the most expensive option (obviously). 
2. Unless you have a large team of customer service representatives working 24/7, your customers will experience hold times.
3. Scaling such operations is limited.
4. Customer experience is not standardized. There are great and worse experiences based on which answering service representative is tending to the customer.

Omni channel, multi channel or single channel answering service

Each option presents a multitude of benefits.

Single channel answering service

A majority of small businesses that want to remain small businesses, offer a single channel of customer access. This could be the phone, chat, email, fax etc. A single channel strategy is simpler to implement.

Whichever channel you offer customer access on – whether it is the website, email, phone, fax, social media, chat etc, you simply build your answering services team around that.

Your customer base comprises of people that are OK with doing business (with you) only using that channel. Your customer base will also be OK with the number of hours you provide such access daily.

Don’t let any vendor tell you that it’s a wrong approach. It’s a lot simpler to implement, train for, excel at, etc. 

Example – single channel answering services

As an example – take a small doctor’s office. It has 1-2 practitioners, cannot see / treat more than 15-30 patients per day. They might support/allow customer access only over the phone Monday through Friday, 9 AM through 5 PM. That’s it. Their patients simply have to accept the limitation.

This doctor’s office will miss out on patient segments that prefer to communicate over text messages (millennials). The doctors might be OK with that as they don’t have a millennial patient retention strategy.

The doctors might miss out on all customers that contacted them near or after hours. Usually, callers tend not to leave voicemails because they really don’t expect someone to call back from a doctor’s office. This office might be OK with missing out on potential patients as they might be making a decent living by seeing 15-20 patients per day.

At an average of 25 patients a day * avg of $100/patient * 0.3  (30 c per $ collected) = approx $750 earnings. Split between 2 doctors, that’s about $375 / day / doctor. They might be perfectly OK with this.

Multi channel answering service

Small businesses that do not want to remain small businesses, tend to offer a multi-channel customer access. This could include 2 or more channels like the phone, chat, email, fax etc. 

A multi-channel strategy is a bit harder to implement. This business would need staff to monitor the various channels they are offering for customer access. However, the customer experience tends to be fragmented as there’s no clear correlation between the various channels of access. The answering service representatives do respond to customer touch points across various channels but it is not easy for them to get a complete view of the customer. This is because the customer’s conversations are fragmented across various channels.

This kind of business can attempt to provide a seamless customer experience across the channels, but it typically requires using various technologies that integrate and work together.

Example – multi-channel answering services

Taking the example of a medical office again, let’s say a new patient visit’s the doctor’s website and requests and appointment. The answering service representative might email the patient back with a confirmation of their appointment. Since the representative doesn’t have all the patient intake information, they might call the patient for the missing insurance information. The patient misses the call and later on, calls the medical office back. This time, the answering service representative picks up the phone and now the patient has to go over all their details, the appointment request all over again. This is because the systems are not interlinked nor is there a 360 view of the patient. This patient experience gets worse when they call about a billing issue or a medication prescription issue. Each time that the call or the email is not resolved in first contact, the patient has to explain themselves all over again.

Multi channel expands your business’ reach to customers by letting them contact you across various channels. However, multi channel is not focused on the customer experience. For that, you need to implement an Omni-channel answering service experience.

Omni-channel answering service

I prefer implementing omni channel answering service solutions. Omni channel focuses on a seamless customer experience, rather than focusing just on increasing the number of contact channels offered to the customer.

Revisit the same medical office as mentioned before. Many if not most patients are already using Phones, Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Website chat in their daily lives. If you have a well implemented Omni channel answering service, here’s a hypothetical patient experience you could wow you patient with.

Example – omni-channel answering services

1. The patient is at work and decides she needs to see your doctor. The patient searches for doctors near her preferred location. The patient finds your business listed on Google. 
2. The patient clicks on your business listing and reads the reviews. The patient now wants to make an appointment and clicks on Google “Book now” button.
3. The patient is offered the online booking option that’s integrated with your EMR in real time. Google book now already provides the online booking system the basics about the patient (name, email etc).
4. The patient proceeds to book and appointment with your doctor. 
5. The online booking chatbot asks the patient a few questions about her insurance to figure out what the cost of care would be, for the patient. The patient answers those questions and the chatbot automatically runs an eligibility check, tells the patient that their insurance plan is accepted and the copay would be $25 for the visit.
6. The patient gets an immediate confirmation of their appointment on the web. The answering service also gives them an option to get an appointment reminder. The patient shares their cell phone number with your answering service.
7. Your answering service sends the patient an SMS with their appointment details.
8. Next, the SMS chatbot asks the patient a bit more about their chief complaint / reason for the appointment request. The patient is at work and doesn’t have the time nor the privacy to describe their ailment. They pause their interaction with your business at that time.
9. Later that afternoon, your answering service sends a reminder to the patient about the pending intake question. 
10. The patient doesn’t want to type the entire complaint, so they just record their ailment using a “Speak” button and sends it to you. 
11. The SMS chatbot receives this recording and uses medical transcription technology to decipher the chief complaint (ICD). The appointment is updated in the EMR with the correct chief complaint.
12. 7 days before the appointment, your answering service sends the patient an email reminder.
13. 3 days before the appointment, your answering service sends the patient a voice call reminder with an option to reschedule or cancel if needed. The patient decides to reschedule and presses “1” to be connected with your answering service.
14. The answering service recognizes the number, asks a verification question to the patient and lets them through. The patient hears the various available appointment dates/times on the phone and decides that none of those dates work for them. The answering service also gives them an option to talk to a customer service representative.
15. The patient chooses the “customer service representative” option and is transferred to the IVR. 
16. The IVR tells the patient that the wait time is more than 5 mins for a voice call and that the patient can cut the line if they choose a live chat option. The patient opts for live chat and the IVR sends the patient an SMS with the link to chat to an agent.
17. The patient is connected to an available agent, describes their urgency, and the agent gives them an appointment date/time that accommodates the patient’s urgency. 
18. While chatting with the patient, the answering service representative finds out that the patient’s insurance requires a referral for this appointment. The agent reminds the patient about the referral requirement, asks them for their referring physician or the primary care provider’s contact information.
19. The patient provides the information and the representative sends calls the other physician’s office while chatting with the patient. The other office picks up and now the answering service representative has the other office staff on the phone and the patient on the live chat.
20. The other physician office’s front desk checks the EMR and sees that the patient does have an existing referral. The front desk faxes the answering service agent the referral. The fax arrives and is automatically parsed to extract all relevant information (CCDA) of the patient that includes medical, medication, social histories, reason for referral etc. 
21. The answering service agent accepts all the data suggestions that the fax transcription technology provides about the patient and pushes the data to the EMR. The patient is given all this information update and the interaction ends.
22. On the day of the appointment the patient gets a text message and confirms that they are coming for the appointment. Later on the patient figures out that they are running late for their appointment. They call the text message number since the patient has not saved your medical office contact on their phone. 
23. The answering  service recognizes this number and identifies the patient, then realizes that patient has an upcoming appointment in the next few hours, transfers the call to a live agent. The agent answers the call, takes the “running late” message from the patient and updates the EMR.

As you can tell, the patient experienced multiple channels that your doctor’s office offers. The patient never had to repeat their information nor the reason for their contact at any point, to any answering service representative at all. The interaction was seamless, with all the historical patient interaction data being passed on to the answering service.

This is harder to implement but reaps tremendous rewards – the least of them being terrific patient experience, and therefore, higher patient satisfaction.

How much does an answering service cost?

The cost of an answering service depends on various factors. Expect to pay anywhere between $0.61 to $1.36 per call subject to the service plan you subscribe to (data from this website).

Some answering services are just “take the call, pass on the message”. I personally do not see much value in those services.

However, if you prefer an answering service to do some work – e.g order taking or appointment setting, expect to pay more. It still ends up being cheaper to hire an outside answering services agency vs building the entire capability in house.

How answering services work

1. Your business gets a unique phone number from the answering service. Thereafter, you can forward as many or all calls from your business phone number(s) to this phone number. Forward calls to this number 24/7, on-demand, overflow, after-hours, weekends or holidays. That depends on your choice and agreement.
2. The answering services IT team will typically add chat support to your business website. Thereafter, your answering services team will start answering customer chats 24/7. No more missed opportunities.
3. Your business is given a unique text messaging number. If you ever part ways with your answering services team, you can port this number and keep it for life. You can market this text messaging number to anyone. Your answering services team will start answering customer text messages using their own technology.
4. Start to train your answering services team on your custom business needs, answering scripts, business processes etc.
5. If your business has some answering scripts, make sure you share the same with your answering services team. These scripts could be used to gather information for callers, upsell current customers, handle support queries etc. You can also add / change / modify scripts at any time.
6. Most answering services teams use a CRM for their work. Every call, text message, WhatsApp, fax etc is logged in their CRM. You have access to this at all times. However, if your business has its own CRM tool, the answering services IT team sets up the integration with your in-house system or CRM.
7. If you prefer that your answering service team alert you whenever needed, they can call you, email or text the correct staff member on your team and pass necessary information as well.
8. Establish how to handle urgent calls. Most answering services teams triage urgent calls for you. As you work together, you teach your team on your escalation process.
9. If you want to monitor communication quality, understand how to use your answering service’s CRM. Most respectable answering services teams use their own CRM. Their CRM records all calls, all text messages and everything in between. You have access to the same information that we do. You’ll have access to call transcripts as well