9 Healthcare Customer Service Tips for Your Medical Office

Top 9 Healthcare Customer Service Tips for Your Medical Office

If you want to attract more patients to your medical office, you want to do everything to reduce or even eliminate complaints. And that means focusing on customer service. Here are 9 healthcare customer service tips for your medical office you need to know about.

Have you noticed that patients seem to be leaving especially negative reviews about your practice recently?

Do you feel like you’re always running behind when it comes to your patient schedule? Has your staff been having more trouble managing your patients, scheduling appointments, and running your billing software?

If so, then it sounds like your healthcare customer service is in need of some serious improvement.

We can help you to make it happen.

In this post, we’ll tell you the steps you can take towards improving the patient experience.

1. Get a 24/7 Answering Service

As a medical professional, you know that emergencies and medical issues don’t happen exclusively during normal office hours.

You want to do everything you can to improve patient experience and offer more immediate healthcare customer service.

However, you also know that burnout within the medical profession is very real — and you simply can’t be available 24/7.

The good news?

It’s completely possible to find a virtual assistant or answering service that makes it possible for your patients to get the help they need — on their schedule.

Getting a 24/7 answering service means that your patients can schedule or change appointments, call in for prescription questions or refills, or simply get answers to more basic questions whenever they need to.

Some services can even call your patients to remind them about upcoming appointments.

For more info about the many ways that a 24/7 answering service can help with improving the patient’s experience and make your life easier in the process, check out the alldayPA website.

2. Make Forms Available Online

There are few things that can make patients more frustrated than arriving on time for their appointment, only to realize that they need to fill out several forms before they can be seen.

Sometimes, they may not even have the information that they need.

This isn’t just irritating for everyone, it can also mean that your appointments start to get pushed back, causing you to stay late and patients to be kept waiting.

One of the biggest ways to improve your healthcare customer service is by allowing your patients to fill out these intake forms ahead of time.

You can allow them to fill out the forms online, through a digital submissions system, or they can download, print them, and bring the completed forms with them.

This also makes it easy for patients to update those forms when changes have occurred in their insurance plans or general medical history.

Above all, this will decrease the overall wait time that patients have to experience in your office. Since patient satisfaction starts to fall after about 20 minutes of waiting, this is something you need to take seriously.

3. Ask Your Staff What’s Not Working

Especially if you’re a nurse or a doctor that has little contact with reception, it can be tough to know how to improve the patient experience.

After all, you’re not there to see what’s going on in the waiting room, to understand the frustrations they’re experiencing with your current software, or to see firsthand how tough it can be for them to deal with missing payments or confusing insurance policies.

However, your staff will be able to provide valuable insight into how you can improve your healthcare customer service.

You should make it a point to meet with them about once every three to four weeks, townhall style so that they can bring up any concerns — and possible solutions — directly to you.

Additionally, make sure that you provide them with continual training when it comes to privacy laws, common tech problems, billing cycles and procedures, and more.

4. Give Patients a Satisfaction Survey

In the same way that you should take the time to ask your staff for advice about what is and isn’t working in your practice, you should also poll your patients to understand what their experience is like!

After their visits, you can email them a link to a customer survey that they can complete. To encourage them, you can enter them into a raffle to win a prize to a popular local restaurant or another experience.

If you don’t feel comfortable about asking your patients to fill out a survey, then you should certainly take a hard look at the reviews about your practice online.

Trust us when we tell you that your patients — especially the disgruntled ones — will feel more than comfortable letting you know how to improve the patient experience.

You should make it a point to respond to both the positive and the negative reviews.

Remember, either way, the patient is providing you with valuable feedback that you can use to improve your overall practice.

Thank them for them input, and let them know what you’re doing to make your practice a better place for everyone.

Boost Your Healthcare Customer Service With These Tips

Improving your healthcare customer service isn’t nearly as complicated as you might initially have thought.

Remember to ask your patients and your staff for their input, work with a 24/7 answering service and virtual assistant and make any forms patients need to fill out available online.

Looking for more advice on how to make the patient experience more seamless for everyone who walks through your practice’s doors? Want to learn how you can energize your staff and implement the feedback they’ve given you?

We can help.

Check out our website to access more invaluable tips and tricks about how to keep patients smiling throughout their entire appointment.