As you begin to integrate your new scripts and listen to your team on calls so you can fine-tune their overall performances, be aware of several bad habits that you should ensure your staff members are avoiding. These habits are not easy to fix, because often they are deep-rooted within the person; however, with a conscious effort on everyone’s part to change behavioral patterns, they can be eliminated from your practice.
Here are the most common bad habits team members should eliminate in order to properly answer the phones:
Speaking too fast;
Cutting patients off while they are speaking;
Showing a lack of emotion on calls;
Allowing personal emotions to affect the call; and
Pushing problems off to someone else to handle.
Left uncorrected, these habits can severely affect the overall performance of your practice. As the leader of your organization, it is important that you let your team members know these behaviors are unacceptable.
Speaking Too Fast
If someone in your practice speaks too fast with callers, patients may need to call back several times to get the information they need. They may write down the wrong appointment times. Or even worse, patients may be so frustrated that they entertain the thought of visiting another practice in your town. All of these consequences have a negative impact on your time and the finances of your practice.
Unless a patient complains, you may not even realize that your patients are frustrated by the issue. That is why it is important that you monitor your own team to ensure your staff members are speaking slowly.
The best way to monitor the speed at which your team members speak is to record the calls. People who talk too fast need to hear themselves on the phone to truly understand the impact it has on their calls. Play call recordings for each of your team members and they will immediately realize how fast they are speaking — especially if they hear themselves in comparison with someone who speaks at a normal pace. This will highlight the problem in the right way and motivate the staff member to correct the bad habit. Know, however, that an individual who speaks too fast will need to be reminded often, since it’s a tough habit to break.
A great way to remind staff members to SLOW DOWN is to put those two words on a piece of paper near their phones so they immediately see it when they take their calls. While it may seem like overkill, I assure you that the consequences of speaking too fast far outweigh the embarrassment staff members may feel about having those words near their phone. Let them know how important an issue it really is and they will buy into the changes they need to make to better handle your patients.
Cutting Patients Off While They Are Speaking
Another common mistake made by front desk staff members is cutting off patients while they are speaking. While it may not seem that monumental if staff members have to cut off callers every now and again, I beg to differ. In fact, in my mind, cutting someone off while he or she is speaking is one of the most disrespectful things you can do during a conversation.
This may happen when front desk staff members are so busy with the things going on in your offices that they are too distracted to focus on the caller. If so, staff members need to be freed up to focus on callers so they can perform better on their calls.
Maybe the staff member feels that what he or she is saying is more important than what the caller is saying. If this is the case, this attitude must be dealt with immediately. Any individual who prioritizes himself or herself over the person who is taking the time to call your practice needs to understand that doing so shows a lack of respect to the patient, which is something you never want to happen.
Answering phones in a doctor’s office requires compassion and politeness at all times. Your callers are unwell and need your help. A team member may not be in the mood to patiently listen to someone, but it is his or her job to do so, and it’s the manager’s job to correct the staff member if this is happening. Staff members may not even be aware they have this bad habit. Therefore, it’s something that must be paid close attention to at all times.
Your patients expect to be heard, and they measure their relationship with your practice by the courtesy they receive during each interaction with your practice. That is why each member of the team needs to understand that nothing is more important than listening to your patients when they take the time to call your practice. Each phone call is another opportunity to further the relationship with your patients. It all starts by understanding the callers’ needs, and their primary need on that particular phone call is to be heard so they can be helped with their problem.
Make the art of listening one of the greatest skills your staff possesses.
Showing a Lack of Emotion on Calls
Your front desk staff deals with hundreds of patients every month, and many of them call because they have a problem they want fixed. Because your staff receives so many of these calls on a daily basis, they can become desensitized to your patients’ needs. When this happens, your staff can neglect to show emotion when speaking with your patients on the phone. This can cause your patients to feel as though you really don’t care about their needs.
A great way to make the point to your team about the importance of emotion is to have them visualize one of their family members calling your practice to complain about being in terrible pain. Then have them imagine the person who answers the phone providing a robotic response. Ask your staff members how that would that would make them feel. That is exactly how your patients feel if they call your practice and don’t get the courtesy of an emotional response.
Some of your staff members will argue that it is more professional to avoid showing emotion with patients, but I strongly disagree. Human beings have an inherent need to interact with other human beings, no matter what the situation. The call to their doctor’s office is one of the most important interactions they have, because they are making that call when they may be the most vulnerable. Therefore, your staff must show emotion, because that is the connection your callers are longing for. That’s why your staff must avoid being desensitized to patients and must realize that showing some emotion regarding the pain that callers are describing is important.
Now my recommendation that staff members show emotion should not be mistaken for a suggestion that your team members go over the top with their reactions to what the caller is saying. In other words, your staff doesn’t need to weep on the phone in order to connect with callers. It does mean they need to show compassion for their pain and happiness when the patients share that they are feeling better.
Showing the right amount of emotion means that staff members are actively engaged in their conversations and in the needs of your patients. It also demonstrates that your practice genuinely cares about what your patients are going through and has a vested interest in their well-being. Your patients will love your practice if they feel that emotional connection with your team. Otherwise, their visits to your office will be more business-like, and you don’t want your patients to view their relationship with your practice in that way. Instead, you want them emotionally invested in your practice, because when they are, retention rates will skyrocket and so will the overall success of your practice.
Allowing Personal Emotions to Affect the Call
Each of us deals with things outside of the office that affect our emotional state. It’s actually quite normal and is to be expected across your staff members. Therefore, start your day by measuring your staff’s emotional temperature. If you detect that something is off with one or more of your staff members, take the time to find out more about what is going on. While you certainly don’t want to play the role of office psychologist on a regular basis, you still need to help correct the situations that come up with your personnel so that an individual staff member’s emotional leakage doesn’t make its way onto your phone calls.
Offering a sympathetic ear to your team members comes with the territory, especially if you want to run a successful practice. While it may be tempting to avoid the situation entirely, the extra time you take to calm your staff down will pay dividends for your practice. The last thing you want your patients to deal with when they call your practice is someone’s personal problems. Even if your staff members don’t share their problems directly with callers, their emotional state may affect their performance, which will have the same negative impact for your practice.
Also, on occasion you may not be able to help your staff members put away their emotional problems enough to take calls. That is a decision you will have to make, and one that you shouldn’t be afraid to make. Your staff needs to understand that it’s nothing personal if you make the decision to excuse them from the phones — it is strictly to protect the integrity of your practice and the relationships you maintain with your patients. While it won’t be easy to remove someone from handling calls for a day or two, it will be better for the entire practice. When the staff member demonstrates that he or she can handle calls without emotional leakage, it will be okay to put him or her back on the phones. Simply monitor their performance throughout the day when they return to the phones to make sure things are back to normal.
Diligence in this area of your practice is important because your staff members are human and will inevitably deal with personal problems. We all do, and there’s no shame in admitting it. What’s most important is that you properly assess the severity of the problems that come up so that you can plan your phone coverage appropriately in order to provide your team members with time to overcome their issues. The patient experience is really what’s most important in building a successful practice, so it cannot be jeopardized by individuals who have emotional leakage on calls.
Pushing Problems Off to Someone Else to Handle
While they may not be able to handle everything that comes their way, each staff member should understand the protocols in dealing with a problem that is brought to his or her attention and act accordingly. Team members should actively look to solve the problem themselves before pushing the problem onto another team member.
In other words, your practice becomes more powerful when individuals take ownership of resolving problems. If the team member is not the right person to solve the problem, he or she quickly becomes the project manager on the solution and communicates with the patient as often as possible about how the problem is being resolved by other departments within your organization. That is how successful practices are run.
For your staff members to take ownership of the problems that come their way, the procedures for handling problems need to be pre-established by practice management and laid out properly for each person in the practice. The easiest way to do this is to figure out the Top 10 problems that come up most often, and then map out a plan to handle each of them. Those plans should be put into a problem-solving manual that can be placed near the phones so staff members can quickly review them as the calls come in.
Having proper procedures in place for handling problems is important, because your patients expect their problems to be dealt with in a professional manner and as quickly as possible. If team members are confused about how to handle the problems, your practice looks disorganized. Furthermore, if the patient feels as though he or she is being passed around the office, that creates another level of frustration that may cause you to lose the patient all together.
Equally as important as having staff members take ownership of any problems reported via the inbound calls is the ongoing communications with the patients afterwards in letting them know the problem is being resolved in a timely manner. Patients don’t expect everything to be fixed immediately, but they do expect to be kept in the loop with how the problem is being resolved. Therefore, a big part of developing the proper procedures for handling problems involves the planned follow-up sequences with patients. Your staff members need to be able to tell callers that they will properly communicate back with them on the status of their issue, and then they need to follow up on everything they tell the patient they will handle.
Delivering good service to your patients is like having a good golf swing: it’s all about the follow-through! If you empower your people to solve problems and give them the procedures to follow up with patients properly, you give your practice the best chance at resolving problems as painlessly as possible for your patients.
Excerpted from Own the Phone: Proven Ways of Handling Calls, Securing Appointments, and Growing Your Healthcare Practice (American Association for Physician Leadership, 2015).