If your healthcare company runs an in house call center, it is one of many things your organization must do and that demands attention. While quality is certainly a goal, it sometimes looms as a challenging objective to achieve. After all, you have a fixed amount of time and limited resources to dev…
There are two ways to grow your telephone answering service. One is through a strategic sales and marketing initiative, and the other is through acquisitions. Both have their advantages. Some answering services prefer the controlled month-after-month growth achieved through a deliberate sales and ma…
Not all call centers are the same. Just as an inbound call center differs from an outbound call center in both form and function, so does a corporate call center have different characteristics from an outsource call center. Consider the following: Scope: A corporate call center handles only the ca…
In our always on, multitasking, perpetually connected world, disruptions abound, which interrupt our thoughts, divert our attention, and interfere with sound decision-making. It’s a wonder we can accomplish anything noteworthy at all in this din of distraction, especially anything that requires focu…
With the proliferation of text messaging, people are increasingly comfortable using text chat to communicate, with many preferring it to the telephone. It’s not surprising, therefore, that if they are on your website with a question that many will look for a live chat option to communicate with your…
Sometimes business owners plan for the sale of their business for several years, aligning the ideal timing with careful planning in order to maximize the sales price and minimize their tax liability. However, for most businesses their sale is less planned and more spontaneous, due to a sudden change…
To outsource your healthcare call center to a medical call center specialty operation, you need to select the right vendor and then formulate a sound migration plan. A key element in your migration plan is to move calls over in bite-size chunks. This allows your outsource call center partner to ramp…
As I mentioned in “ Five Things to Check Before Outsourcing Your Healthcare Calls,” it is critical to hire a call center that complies with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Don’t assume every outsource healthcare call center is HIPAA compliant. Though they should be, …
Call center agents should never complete their education. If agents claim to have finished training, either they’re deluding themselves or their call center is letting them down. Agent training isn’t a once-and-done task. It must be ongoing. Seriously. Here are four key types of ongoing agent traini…
Unlike a vacation, which employees schedule in advance, no one plans a sick day – or at least most people don’t. In most cases a sick day is not a pre-arranged absence. So what do you do when your receptionist calls off at 7:45 in the morning? Panic: The idea of hearing a ringing phone all day and …
If I say voicemail jail, you immediately know what I’m talking about. No one likes voicemail jail, but many businesses subject their calls to this phone purgatory. In the name of good customer service, we need to put an end to voicemail jail, which tells you “For customer service, press 1; for sales…
In the post “ What’s a Hybrid Call Center?” we discussed that it was a call center that handles both incoming and outgoing calls. While this may seem to be a minor distinction, the differences are great. Beyond the basics of headsets and workstations, inbound and outbound work requires distinct eq…
Just because someone is a good call center agent doesn’t mean he or she will make a good supervisor. And the last thing any manager wants to do is to take excellent agents and turn them into ineffective supervisors. Yet it happens too often. However, the fault is usually not in the selection of agen…
Conducting employment interviews is hard. There are questions you can’t ask and areas you must avoid. While basic human resource training covers these issues, what isn’t addressed in general business interviewing instruction are questions that help guide a successful interview for a call center mana…
Sometimes it’s hard to find a good call center or telephone answering service. Other times it’s hard to work with them once you find them. Dealing with customer service issues, training deficiencies, billing questions, and account changes can soon become a full time job. It doesn’t have to be that w…
The letters RSVP stand for the French phrase “répondez, s’il vous plait.” It means “please reply” and is a way for a person sending the invitation to know who is coming and who isn’t. Regardless of the recipients’ intent, they should tell the host whether they accept or decline the invitation. At le…
To remain viable for the long term, telephone answering services need to periodically adjust their rates to keep up with ever-increasing costs. Not doing regular rate increases will eventually doom even the best run answering service to failure. But almost as bad as not doing rate increases is doing…
Janice Guttmann, a financial services provider with ten years of independent practice, is on the leading edge of her profession. Outsourcing office services was only recently highlighted by a national magazine as a best practice for financial professionals with high-margin businesses. But Janice has…
Lamoure Engineering offers a variety of professional services, from designing water systems for cities and rural townships to land surveying. Dan Lamoure, PE, is the president of the company founded by his father Gene. “We’ve always been a small, family company,” explains Dan. “For the past twenty y…
Undercharging is a key reason for failure among many telephone answering services. Too many answering services, especially startups, simply don’t charge enough to cover their costs, account for overhead, and make a profit. They don’t last long. Other answering services start out charging appropriate…