5 More Ways Your Front Desk is Costing You Money

It’s hard enough to build a decompression practice without losing money at the front desk and giving it away to a competitor. In an earlier post, we reviewed 5 ways your front desk is costing you money. Well, unfortunately, the list doesn’t stop there. Here are 5 more ways your front desk is costing you money that you should be aware of and may want to correct. 1. No One Answers After Hours. Have you thought about how many people might be calling for information or for an appointment after hours? The numbers might surprise you. Consider the average person’s schedule in today’s go-go society. They are busy. Typically, both spouses work, kids have to be transported to and from school, followed by trips to sports, music and dance lessons and other extracurricular activities after school. When do these people have time during your normal business hours to call? Most don’t. Not answering the phone following regular clinic hours may be costing your big opportunities. You can remedy that by retaining the services of a professional answering service of making arrangements to pay staff for taking after-hours calls. It could make a big difference in the growth of your spinal decompression practice. 2. Calls Aren’t Logged. Without call logs, you’ll never be organized. Without knowledge of who is calling, when they are calling and why they are calling, you are missing information critical to growing your business. Call logs enable you to complete several key activities in an objective manner. • Follow up with callers who have yet to schedule an appointment • Return calls from callers with unanswered questions • Monitor conversion rates • Improve staff phone call behaviors to improve conversion rates Setting up a simple call log procedure can save you a bundle and play a big role in running your practice more efficiently and effectively. 3. Contact Information Isn’t Collected. Under no circumstances, should any call occur without collecting and recording contact information. Incoming phone calls are perhaps your greatest source of warm leads. Without contact information, you have no way to follow up with phone calls, emails or direct mail in attempt to convert those leads into paying customers. When you get a nibble, don’t let the fish off the hook. 4) Misinformation. Even well trained staff members can’t answer every caller’s questions. If they attempt to and provide misinformation, the results could be disastrous. Your front desk people need to know when to respond with a simple “I don’t know, but I will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.” Of course, a mechanism needs to be in place to ensure that the unanswered question is funneled to the right person and that the question is answered in a timely manner. Such a response and follow up needs to be an established procedure in any facility involved in health care treatment. 5) Too Accommodating. This may sound counterintuitive, but being too accommodating to patient requests can be detrimental to your practice. If it’s too easy to schedule an appointment, too easy to reschedule and appointment or too easy to miss an appointment, you run the risk of patients and prospective patients losing respect for your time and failing to keep commitments. If your front desk people are too accommodating, you will notice an increase in missed appointments and an increase in nonproductive time. Set some standards and expectations to avoid this problem. Can you improve front desk behaviors to help grow your practice? For a comprehensive compilation of proven phone scripts, from beginning to elite, visit http://bit.ly/1ouD9rf.