Your orthodontic office is a busy place, with people coming in and out, appointments constantly changing and lots and lots of patients needing follow-up care at irregular intervals.
An office with so much going on needs to be well organized to keep the whole operation afloat. For example, you could hire designated telephone staff to free up your in-house employees to help patients in the office.
Medical Answering Services for Orthodontists
There’s no doubt that multitasking makes it hard for your employees to do any one thing really well, but when the phone won’t stop ringing and patients are demanding attention, it can be hard to decide which to handle first.
It’s a lot of stress for your employees and gives the patients involved the impression that no one really cares about them. There’s no winning in this situation. That’s why so many orthodontists are making the switch to dedicated telephone queues!
Even if you don’t have the patient load or budget for a staff of full-time operators, you can still reap the benefits the bigger offices are getting by partnering with an answering service. They’re not just for answering the telephone and routing calls, medical answering services can do so much more, including:
- Appointment setting. One of the most time consuming task your office staff juggle is appointment setting. Telephone callers regularly contact your office to make, change or cancel appointments, taking time from equally important, but more immediate, jobs in the building.Your staff can’t be everywhere at once, but it can seem that way with the help of an answering service that provides appointment-setting services. Since they use software that integrates with the system you’re already using, you never have to worry about an appointment falling through the cracks.
- Providing your patients with a 24-hour connection. Some orthodontic procedures may be painful and frustrating for patients, so it’s important that they’re able to contact you any time of the day or night for advice. Whether their braces are rubbing their gums raw or their most recent adjustment is causing extra pain, having a 24-hour operator means your team is always available to provide expert advice and a sympathetic ear.
- Relaying emergency messages. Although it might seem like orthodontic services aren’t prone to emergency, the opposite is actually the reality of the thing. Broken wires, missing brackets and cracked retainers can be real problems for your patients, causing setbacks in their therapy as well as serious mouth pain and injury.Emergency message relay turns your on-call nights into evenings where you can relax a little bit more, knowing that the true emergencies will be pushed straight to your phone. Plus, the much more common problems that need to be seen soon, but not tonight, won’t constantly interrupt your down time.
Your growing orthodontist office can really benefit from medical answering services, especially if you choose one that can scale with your practice. You can realize significant savings over a full-time employee since you only ever pay for the calls your answering service partner handles, whether that’s setting appointments, handling questions or simply relaying messages to you.
