It’s been well established that patient experience is critical to good outcomes, and the phone is a key component of that experience. What someone experiences at that first phone call provides their only clear perception of your practice, and their perception becomes their reality.
Every person who calls in, whether prospect or patient, needs to feel like they are being heard. If they feel like just another item on your office’s checklist, it’s likely they’ll take their hearing health concerns elsewhere. Read on to learn how you can ensure every caller feels valued.
Make Sure You Understand Each Caller’s Pain Points
The person on the other end of the phone isn’t calling about hearing technology —they’re calling because they want better connections with loved ones and improved quality of life. Listen carefully. Ensure you understand their pain points and can communicate them back to the prospect. They’ll feel heard, which means a lot of the heavy lifting is done.
Create Consistency
Everyone — regardless of whether they regularly answer the phone — should know the practice mission and main message. Each patient or prospect interaction should be conducted with that as a foundation, so the patient experience is consistent throughout the practice. Couple that with an empathetic understanding of the patient’s pain points and you’re well on your way to a conversion.
Be Mindful of Call Length
Call length has a sweet spot. Too short and you’ve shirked your duty to provide quality care; too long and you increase your chances of missing other calls, leaving in-office patients waiting, or losing focus. The sweet spot is different from call to call — typically five to seven minutes — but it’s imperative that you learn the art of guiding each call to meet the right balance.
Be Natural
The prospect can tell when you’re following a script or a bulleted list. Talk with them, not at them. Your natural empathy and sympathy will shine through, and that’s what the prospect will remember most strongly about the phone call.
Analyze Your Inbound Calls
If you can’t revisit a given call, you can’t analyze it to learn why it did or didn’t lead to an appointment. The amount of usable data to be had from analyzing your inbound calls is almost limitless. What’s the opportunity — prospect? Current patient? Tested but put off buying tech? Simple clean and check? Once that’s established, you can determine whether the office staff responded appropriately and at what point it was clear that the chance to set an appointment was lost. Only when you locate the source of the lost opportunity can you train personnel appropriately.
Providing a remarkable patient experience over the phone is a skill. It can be developed, and more easily than you might realize. Contact Audigy today to talk to one of our professional-development experts or to learn about Patients for Life®, Audigy’s training program for ensuring duplicable hearing care patient-interaction best practices.