Own the Phone: Proven Ways of Handling Calls, Securing Appointments, and Growing Your Healthcare Practice
Healthcare Practices, Turn Your Phone Into A Growth Machine
Also available as Kindle
Healthcare Practices, Turn Your Phone Into A Growth Machine
This book offers proven methods for securing appointments and expanding practice growth through smart use of your phone.
The phone rings non-stop at your medical practice, and sometimes it seems like all you can do is put up with the incessant work it creates. Practice leaders struggle to develop proper phone strategies for staff but often give up before they've found the right ones. Sometimes, they simply move the phone answering function to a back room and try to ignore the noise.
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But thinking that way is a mistake. Every day, potential buyers call your practice, and too often, experience poor customer service, which turns them away. Inefficient phone handling also frustrates existing patients and hurts patient retention. All told, poor phone management causes practices to lose much-needed appointments and revenue more often than they suspect.
Own the Phone: Proven Ways of Handling Calls, Securing Appointments, and Growing Your Healthcare Practice, offers a detailed plan for phone improvement which can generate quick results for any medical practice. This includes in-depth instructions on how to set up office phones to your best advantage.
The telephone is the lifeline of the healthcare practice. The phone still sits front and center as the key ingredient in a patient's doctor selection process. Own the Phone provides high-level strategies to change the behavior of each member of your team and phone handling best practices that can be put in place quickly and easily (and made repeatable for everyone in the organization), as well as strategies for training.
It also includes invaluable ready-to-use phone scripts that can be used immediately to dramatically increase the value of each inbound phone call to your organization.
About the author
Spencer Peller has been helping healthcare practices drive and convert more phone calls to booked appointments since 2008. As the founder of MyDoctorCalls (a cloud-based call tracking and recording system) and YesTrak (a revolutionary live agent answering service), Spencer has helped thousands of clients generate more revenues as a result of improving the way phones are answered. Get more information at www.yestrak.com.
Contents
- Foreword by Dr. Hal Ornstein
- Chapter 1: The Internal Commitment Required to Deliver Amazing Phone-based Service
- Admitting you have a problem
- Getting your team to buy-in
- It's a mental game
- Preparing your team for the challenge
- Setting realistic goals
- Chapter 2: Preparing Your Office for Phone Success
- Checking your phone line capacity
- Setting up the phones in your offices
- Headsets
- Call Parking
- On-Hold Music/Message
- Around the Office
- Implementing a call-tracking and recording system
- HIPAA Compliance and Call Recording
- Choosing your core phone call-handling team
- Knowing when to add more staff members
- Using IVR technology to route phone calls
- Outsourcing your call handling
- Chapter 3: Core Requirements on Every Call
- Show enthusiasm
- Demonstrate empathy for callers
- Show true concern for the well-being of your patients
- Demonstrate professionalism at all times
- Answer questions quickly and confidently
- Chapter 4: Developing Your Inbound-Call Scripts
- The all-important greeting
- Getting to the motivation for the call
- Scripting for new patients
- Scripting for existing patients
- Scripting for patients who want to cancel or reschedule appointments
- Scripting for patients who ask about price or insurance
- Scripting for callers who aren't existing or potential patients
- Chapter 5: Scripts for General Phone Handling Within Your Offices
- How to place a caller on hold
- How to transfer a call
- How to take a message
- How to end your calls properly
- Sending Your Confirmation Email
- Chapter 6: The Front Desk's Role in Selling Services
- Taking control of the call
- Finding and removing the speed bumps
- Advancing the sale by getting a YES to something
- Using open-ended versus closed-ended questions
- Asking for the business
- Chapter 7: Handling the Tougher Callers
- The Tire Kicker
- The Price Shopper
- The Skeptic
- The Know-It-All
- The Curious Patient
- The Angry Patient
- The Patient Who Drags On and On
- The Unsure Patient
- Chapter 8: Bad Habits to Look Out For
- Speaking too fast
- Cutting patients off while they are speaking
- Showing a lack of emotion on calls
- Allowing personal emotions to affect the call
- Pushing problems off to someone else to handle
- Chapter 9: Ongoing Training and Development
- Conducting proper role-play sessions
- Coordinating mystery shopper calls
- Keeping a staff scoreboard
- Running contests
- Chapter 10: BONUS WORKSHEETS
- What Your Callers Expect
- The 5 Key Ingredients of a Proper Phone Greeting
- How to Close Out a Call
- How to Place a Patient on Hold
- How to Take a Message
- How to Transfer a Call
- How to Handle an Angry Patient
- What a New Patient Requires
- What an Existing Patient Requires
- Index
Words of praise
All of the money spent marketing and promoting your practice comes right back to your phones and how they are handled. Improving your telephone conversion rates can significantly increase revenue and new patient acquisition and Spencer Peller is by far the leading expert on the subject!
Your phone is the ‘lifeline’ between your practice and the potential and existing patients who want you to be their doctor… IF your team handles calls correctly. Are they? Read Own the Phone now to learn more about what your practice may be missing out on… and how you can correct it quickly and easily!
Spencer Peller has reminded us with Own the Phone that before Facebook, Google and Twitter, there was the telephone. Maximizing the telephone, the most common and well-known technology in EVERY household, puts your practice into overdrive!
The telephone (ironically) is one of the biggest hurdles in connecting potential patients to practitioners. Spencer’s insights make it simple and easy to train your team; massively improving customer service and the bottom-line of your business
Spencer brings intelligence, savviness and etiquette to the most used instrument in ANY office—the phone! It’s the lifeline to your next new patient, and all critical moves must be scripted. This book bridges a chasm all practices face!” Brad Glowaki, DC, aka “The New Patient Maven
