The customer service department has a significant impact on the success of any business. Availability and response time are the ingredients to stellar customer service. Forcing customers to listen to voicemail whenever they call your medical office alienates them from calling again. Additionally, untimely responses are a huge turnoff and encourage zero recommendations and bad reviews. Customers always desire to feel acknowledged and appreciated.
The best way to let your customers realize you value them is great customer service. This requires offering quick response times backed by shorter average response times. First things first, you have to understand the importance of tracking the average customer response time. This important metric offers a better understanding of customer service performance. Analyzing and comparing these reports lessens time for responding to customer queries. Shorter response time significantly enhances customer experience leading to repeat business.
Determining customer service average response time
Calculating average response time is dividing the total time taken to respond to customers in a particular period by the number of responses. Determining average customer response time allows evaluating individual performance but not as a team. Faster response time makes customers happier, your office less cluttered, and your work processes less stressful. A highly efficient customer service department increases customer retention and boosts business growth.
Proven tips to reduce customer service response times
Get professional help
Overworking your in-house staff leads to longer response times with a subsequent drop in customer service quality. Relying on professional answering services for doctors clinic takes some load off your team. This allows access to a professional team with appropriate experience, experience, and equipment to reduce your customer service response time. This guarantees your customers quality service and a better experience.
Professional customer service agents establish quick response times and give you concise and helpful responses to customer queries. The agency implements appropriate strategies backed with experienced staff who do a great job. Their dedication and enthusiasm focus on improving your customer service experience. Outsource an answering agency with bilingual agents to handle your customers and enhance their experiences.
Effective FAQ Section
Another way to lower the average response time for your customer service is by reducing the number of incoming emails. You can do this by understanding some of the frequently asked questions and offering appropriate responses on your website. Most customers first check your FAQs section on the website before calling your medical practice.
The FAQ section isn’t part of the call handling process but helps operators’ work substantially. Making that section highly effective protects your customer service team from getting overloaded with information. Your FAQs section should include questions and answers to some of the basic queries from callers including:
- Office location
- Business hours
- Office phone
- Acceptable insurance plans
- Patient payment plans and the prices
- Services you provide
- List of doctors’ names in the practice
- Email address where callers can send general inquiries
- Cancellation policy
Response templates
Apart from having an effective FAQ section on your website, some customers prefer calling especially those without time to browse the site. You have to prepare for such customers by giving your outsourced customer service agents response templates. This should have appropriate responses to some of the regularly asked questions.
Additionally, give the customer agents various templates for different situations and customers. Giving your customer service team templates speeds up response times to maintain a coherent voice when handling inquiries.
Categorizing your emails
Implementing a prioritization system for all emails received is an efficient way to speed up your customer service response time. Do this by assigning various levels of priority according to complexity, urgency, importance, and required response time. Afterward, tag all emails accordingly to make your customer service team get a better idea of the appropriate response time.
Doing this allows handling all emails in the order of priority. Relying on professional customer service agents with experience handling various topics increases response time. Categorizing emails shortens response times for better customer experience.
Automating email auto-responders
Customers enjoy talking to a live agent on calling your medical office. However, some customers prefer sending emails to their physicians. Limiting response time is achievable with the use of email auto-responders. This lets customers realize that you are aware of their issues and willing to handle them as soon as possible.
Doing this gives customers peace of mind that appropriate assistance is soon coming. Email auto-responders portray appreciation, courtesy, and stellar customer service. The auto-responders should re-direct customers to your FAQs section or other communication channels. This limits the number of customers calling your customer service agents.
Bottom line
Medical offices offer vital services to the public all the time including during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Offering effective health care sometimes compromises handling customers on the phone. Enlisting a reputable doctors’ answering service will take this load off your shoulder to ensure that all operations in your office are running smoothly.
