Unless your hospice has full 24/7/365 staffing, an elite quality answering service is crucial for ensuring your patients and their families receive the care and support they desperately need. The answering service industry has had a long yet infamous history. It’s never been easy to build and operate a near-flawless quality service because of the myriad of simultaneously spinning wheels, the sheer volume of incoming calls, and especially in these days, the challenge of maintaining a superb call-handling staff. (And especially now, the importance of drug-testing can’t be over-emphasized.)
There are perhaps 800 services operating in the United States. Most struggle, and perhaps 2% rank as “elite.” But if you can find one of the few services that are operationally near-flawless, here’s what you’ll get:
- 24/7/365 availability: A top-notch answering service provides around-the-clock support, ensuring that patients and their families can always, and with no delay, reach a caregiver. This promise of immediate availability is the hallmark of the best answering services.
- Superb patient satisfaction: By providing fast and personable service, the top-notch answering service will dramatically improve patient satisfaction and build solid trust with patients and their families. You know how important your in-house customer service is during office hours. It’s equally important during non-business hours.
- Reduced workload for staff: By flawlessly processing routine incoming calls, the best answering service will reduce the workload for hospice staff, allowing them to focus on providing the best one-on-one care to patients.
- Cost-effectiveness: Outsourcing to an answering service reduces the need to hire additional staff while it enhances image.
- Flawless HIPAA compliance: An elite-quality answering service staff is carefully trained in HIPAA compliance regulations, ensuring that patient information remains utterly confidential
- Enormously improved communication internally and externally: There will be fast and accurate information-transfer among hospice staff, patients, and their families, putting everyone on precisely the same page.
Like anything else in life, a quality comparison among answering services will range from superb to border-line useless. Your thorough investigation today will pay dividends for years to come.
Centratel is an elite national telephone answering service headquartered in Bend, Oregon.
Centratel’s Home Health and Hospice Answering Service assists scores of businesses, during and after-hours, throughout the United States. Centratel is, by a variety of statistics, the highest quality answering service anywhere.
