Summary of contents
🚀 With this article we reveal to you the 6 tips that have already helped dozens of companies in the private medical sector to increase their profits, their volume of medical appointments and build customer loyalty. ✅ This article interests you!✌.
Private healthcare plays a fundamental role in the Spanish socio-healthcare system. More and more people are deciding to supplement their public healthcare with private insurance that allows them to be treated in short periods of time.
Many others even prefer to go to private medicine without taking out health insurance. This has led to an increase in calls, allowing private healthcare (hospitals, clinics and medical centers) to increase their profitability.
At first glance, private medicine seems to be a great business, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain profitable. Medical insurers impose their conditions on private medical centers with prices that barely cover costs.
Administrative procedures require qualified personnel. This means economic burdens that force private centers to maintain a minimum number of personnel in order not to lower the quality of their patient care.
As a reference we can look at the survey conducted by Deloitte in 2013 in the USA, which showed that physicians working in the private sector had the highest rate of dissatisfaction (41%).
With ever-shrinking margins for maneuver and very aggressive competition, private medical centers and clinics are forced to squeeze their resources to the maximum in order to be more efficient and profitable, and thus be able to stand out from their competition.
GESDITEL has developed a practical guide with 6 tips that have already helped dozens of companies in the private medical sector to increase their profits, increase the volume of their medical appointments and build customer loyalty.
Do you know your business inside out?
On many occasions our consultants come across the following recurring case, applicable to all types of medical centers and clinics: “we receive too many complaints because we can’t take all the calls”, or “we have the impression that we don’t take all the calls we should” at the clinic.
In both statements they denote the same problem: “DESCONTROL“. Yes, even if you don’t like to admit it YOU DON’T HAVE CONTROL OF YOUR SHIP. You’ve detected a problem, but you’re not even sure what its source is. How are you going to solve it?
The answer is simple. You need a system that records all the activity generated in the department where the customers (and money) of your business come in. Faced with this need you should rely on two solutions:
- A CRM (software that manages your customer relationships and resources).
- The most important, a TELEPHONE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM with the ability to record all the telephone activity of your reception or Call Center and to adapt to the needs of your business.
It goes without saying how important it is that you can monitor all this activity anytime, anywhere with any device with an Internet connection. This is the only way for you to stay in control during the process of optimizing your business.
Once your company has these two tools, all that remains is to put them to work and continue working as before, at least for a week. ….
How can I analyze, detect and solve the shortcomings of the business?
After one week working in the usual way we will have recorded enough data to determine the source of the problem. You must analyze this data to know the limitations of your company, and what are the main points to strengthen to quickly increase its profitability..
Our consultants can help you with this, but if you decide to do it on your own we indicate that you should attend to:
- Schedules when you receive more calls. These are susceptible to staff reinforcement (or the adoption of other systems which we will talk about later).
- Closing times of your business in which you continue to receive calls or requests from your patients. They will tell you if it is profitable to extend or modify your opening hours.
- Days of the week when you receive more calls, in order to study the profitability of staff reinforcements (or the adoption of other more profitable systems)
- Average duration of conversations, since by focusing on this data we can attend to twice as many patients in the same time and with the same staff.
- Time that a patient remains on hold before abandoning the call.
- Number of attended and unattended calls at each of the workstations of the clinic.
The study of this basic data, together with the analysis of the way your center works will determine the actions to take and the automatic strategies you need to equip your TELEPHONE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM with in order to maximize your number of patients attended (or, in other words, your number of cash operations).
You may want to take a look at this article to get an idea of how these systems work.
How can I increase staff performance in my company?
So far we’ve focused on understanding the flow between your patients (or customers) and the business, but we haven’t yet considered one of the most important factors in the equation: staff..
According to data from IFP.es “2 out of every 3 customers are lost due to poor customer service.”.
A 68% of respondents believe that “Because of indifference and poor attention from sales and service personnel, salespeople, supervisors, managers, telephone operators, secretaries, delivery people and others in contact with customers.”
Given these statements you should put the focus on increasing the performance of your staff, making use of some system that provides you with, as a minimum, the following functions:
- Multi-Position Function that differentiates the use of the system by each person, even when using the same work elements.
- Recording of all the activity of your telephone operators (time of entry and exit, recording of their breaks, calls received and unanswered calls, answer time, etc.).
- Recording of all telephone activity, thanks to which we can audit and improve patient care.
- Recording of the working day (mandatory according to the latest labor inspection regulations)
- Integration of your CRM system with your telephone system, so that your patient’s record opens automatically when you receive a call.
- Priority of the patient’s record (mandatory according to the latest labor inspection regulations).
- Prioritization of calls according to your patient’s need (for example, priority of “appointment booking” over “general information”)
Thanks to these mechanisms we will be able to know in depth what is the profitability of each member of your team separately (calls attended and not attended by each employee, effective working times, average talk time, percentage of calls issued/received, etc.). We will provide them with automatic tools toincrease their productivity and facilitate their work. And, in addition, we will adopt the measures and configurations in the system that allow to take the profitability of the entire work team to higher levels.
How can I define priorities in my company?
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“The mark of a great man is someone who knows when to put aside the important things to accomplish the most important things.” Brandon Sanderson.
It is important to set priorities for the attention of the users of each of our departments/services.
To many of the managers we have dealt with to date it seemed, at first, unethical, but in a short time ALL realized that it is quite the opposite.
How to manage a call answering system?
Managing a call answering prioritization system is very simple.
Having a system that prioritizes attention to certain patients or medical specialties over others not only allows for an exponential increase in profits. This is due to the fact that calls from customers of more lucrative services for your business (hospital, clinic or medical center) are attended to sooner.
It also serves to make calls to emergency services have ahigher priority than the rest. Therefore, the response times of those patients who really need it will be improved.
If you are one of those who use the same phone number for all patients/services, you do not have an interactive menu with voice recognition or keypad dialing where your patient can identify the reason for their call.
This interactive menu will help you to be able to take more productive calls (we call productive the calls that are of strategic or economic interest to your business).
We could call “filler calls” the typical patient/customer questions that we cannot include in any department. These calls “steal” too much of our customer/patient care team’s time.
That these types of calls are attended by our staff with lower priority does not mean an increase in query resolution time. During the waiting time, we play voiceovers with instructions about frequent questions and we give the patient the option to leave voice messages.
These messages will be answered from the corporate mail once the peak hours are over. When it is profitable for our client, we even use artificial intelligence systems with natural language recognition, voice-text transcription and vice versa.
For example, ANIA, chatbots, or more complex systems; leaving the “way” free to other more urgent calls or with higher economic profitability.
How can I anticipate the interests of my clients/patients?
Doubling the volume of calls handled and greatly improving the user experience of your phone system is possible if you can anticipate the interests of your customer/patient before attending to them.
We achieve this in 3 different ways:
- Using different phone numbers for each department/specialty.
- Using interactive menus (by dialing or voice recognition) that allow the call to be routed to the corresponding department.
- Using interactive menus (by dialing or voice recognition) that allow the call to be routed to the corresponding department.
- Loading lists of customers/patients and assigning a personalized route according to their interests.
Applying the technique of “customer prioritization” together with “call tagging” we achieve maximum profitability, efficiency and excellence in the personal treatment with your customers.
But at this point you may wonder….
What is call reason labeling?
It is a technique that allows your telephone agents to receive a letter or symbol in front of the calling telephone number (or the patient’s name if it is in a phonebook).
This label will be different depending on the reason for the call. In addition, it will allow your agents to answer the calls following a specific action protocol. With it you will increase customer satisfaction and reduce the time needed to end an effective conversation.
“Knowing in advance the reason why someone calls us also allows us to apply different call center protocols that will improve the user experience of our patients, as well as shorten the effective time to finalize an appointment/sale/information by 67%”
How can I increase leads?
Once you can optimally serve a percentage of your patients very close to 100%, you must worry about increasing the flow of potential patients. You must also create an image of your brand that inspires trust and closeness, and that manages to attract customers more strongly than your competitors.
For this difficult task you must take into account the strengths of your business, the profile of your potential patients, your radius of action, the competition you have in your area and your competitive advantages.
Since people search for services on the Internet, determining the keywords that will identify your company on the net is the difference between success and failure of your sales strategy.
Your digital marketing strategy, your website, your offers and services must be structured based on these keywords to achieve optimal SEO positioning (appearing on the first page of the main search engines WITHOUT PAYING).
In addition, it is of vital importance to have a blog that generates content of interest for visitors to your website. It is a news feed through subscription systems that has tools that improve the conversion of visitors to customers.
Determining the most effective channels and social networks to capture the attention of your customers and recording all the activity generated on your website will allow you to focus your efforts only on the most productive and beneficial actions, generating content in the areas that cause the greatest interest to your potential customers.
Finally, it is important to keep control of all this data flow (number of visitors generated by each action, ad, social network, where your visitors click and where not, etc.) from online panels that allow you to make the right decisions based on objective criteria.
You can learn more by reading this article on smart digital marketing.
The application of these 6 tips have proven to be much more effective than they may seem at first, and have managed in all cases to increase by THOUSANDS OF EUROS PER WEEK the income of ALL medical centers and private clinics that have implemented them
If you need our help we will be happy to answer your questions after filling out this CONTACT FORM.