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.
