How Can You Prepare for the Calls?
When operating your business, consider that a practice cannot be not successful without patients. If you are missing patient and prospective patient phone calls, you are missing out on valuable business opportunities. These calls do not come in at a slow and steady speed throughout the day, they come in spikes and valleys. You must be prepared and staffed to deal with the high volume of phone calls.
Over-staffing for phone calls means taking into consideration vacations, days off, lunch breaks, and other times of the day and year where your staff numbers may be low. When analyzing the volume of calls, it is observed that a majority or 70% of calls, come in all-day Monday and Tuesday, and the first half of Wednesday. In the latter half of the week, the phone call volume drops. This is because patients like to take care of things early on in the week, and during their lunch breaks, to get medical appointments done and out of the way.
During the heavy volume days, you will see spike times in your phone calls, specifically between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. This is because people are awake and active, and they are trying to get things done. The calls spike again between noon and 1 p.m. because of lunch breaks. The last spike of the day occurs between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. This may be because people are getting off work and picking their kids up from school, and they want to take stock and plan ahead for the rest of the week.
Your practice’s reality is that you cannot afford to miss the phone calls during the spike times. You cannot afford to not over-staff. Each and every phone call is worth too much. Ensuring that you take the phone calls increases your patient engagement.
