Improving ROI by optimizing how your Front Desk handles incoming calls
“Hi, I want to schedule a CoolSculpting treatment”, said the caller.
“Can you call back tomorrow? The girl who schedules those isn’t here right now.” answered the receptionist.
This was an actual conversation between a lead from a Body Contouring campaign and the receptionist at a medical aesthetics practice.
I know this because while running campaigns for this client, I noticed that even though the ads were generating leads (phone calls and form submissions on the website), the client wasn’t seeing appointments.
The client agreed to install a call tracking solution on their website that:
- Was able to attribute calls to specific campaigns.
- Also had the option of recording incoming calls.
Once the client and I sat down to review these recordings, it became obvious that the Front Desk was inadvertently making mistakes in handling incoming calls, which caused the practice to lose appointments and a ton of revenue.
Lack of Training and Context
The way that CoolSculpting call was handled can seem egregious to anyone who owns a medical practice or anyone who works in marketing.
Here was a prospect who was ready to spend money, but the ball was dropped at a crucial moment, costing the practice at least a thousand dollars in revenue.
But it wasn’t truly the receptionist’s fault:
- She was never trained on how to handle leads or inbound sales calls.
- She wasn’t aware that the practice was running a marketing campaign, and had no idea how much each lead was worth.
- And there was, indeed, one person at the ptractice who was designated as the Body Contouring expert. So she thought she wasn’t supposed to only forward these calls to the right person.
The receptionist simply didn’t have the proper training or context to understand how to handle this call in a way that benefited the practice.
Customer Service vs. Sales
When the Front Desk often providing Customer Service to all incoming calls; regardless of whether it’s a current patient or a prospect with questions. But these two types of calls are completely different.
Customer Service is more passive in nature and focuses on making the patient feel comfortable and cared for.
But when a prospect calls your practice, the passive approach doesn’t work well.
The style of communication must be different: it has to focus on overcoming the prospect’s objections and guiding them to set an appointment. They are brand new to your practice. They have questions. They’re not comfortable with your practice yet. And this means pushing the prospect a little bit outside of their comfort zone, to take a leap of faith and make an appointment. It’s very different from customer service, and it’s a little bit uncomfortable to do.
Here is a really good example of what I mean, paraphrased from another call recording:
“Hi, I’m calling about DAXXIFY. I saw an ad. How does that work?” said the caller.
“I’m not really able to provide information about it, because I am just the receptionist. But I can schedule a free consultation for you to speak with one of our doctors, who can answer your questions… Or I can email you some videos about it, if you’d prefer.” replied the receptionist.
“Yea, can you send me the videos?” answered the prospect.
In this situation, the receptionist didn’t even give the prospect a chance to respond to the offer of a free consultation, and immediately gave the prospect a lower-commitment alternative: free videos.
This was a great customer service decision, but a bad sales decision, because most propsects will choose the low-committment option, when given the opportunity. They’ve never been to your practice before, so they’ll naturally choose to play it safe if you present them with that option.
The receptionist made this mistake because she was in a “Customer Service” mindset. She was treating the prospect as a patient.
Had she been in a sales mindset, she would’ve focused on getting the prospect excited about the free consultation and having them commit to an appointment.
Take Your Practice to the Next Level
Your practice can’t grow if your Front Desk doesn’t have the skills to handle calls from propsects. And that means ALL prospects; not just the ones from paid campaigns, but also prospects from organic sources, Google Maps results and referrals.
- Make the investment to train your staff on how to properly handle calls from prospects. How to answer questions about pricing. How to overcome objections. What offers to make.
- If your practice is large enough, it’s a good idea to have a separate person handle prospect calls. Someone who doesn’t handle incoming patient calls and won’t have to constantly switch between the Customer Service and Sales mindsets.
- Verify that your front desk is using their training by installing a call tracking/recording solution, like Liine, CallTrackingMetrics, or GoHighLevel. Some are cheaper than others, but in any case, the investment will be worth it, because it will provide transparency into how your team handles these calls.
- Make it into a regular process: review the call recordings regularly and continue to provide your front desk team with feedback and continuous training.
The Investment is Worth It
The cheaper call tracking solutions can be as little as $100/mo., while the more expensive ones can run you $500/mo. or more.
But having insights into how your front desk handles prospect calls can dramatically improve your conversion rates.
Even if you’re not running campaigns, and are getting a handful of organic leads every month, these solutions will more than pay for themselves if they help you convert 1 or 2 extra appointments.
If you’re actively running campaigns, call tracking and recording becomes indispensable. What’s the point of spending several thousand dollars per month on a marketing budget, if
- Your front desk doesn’t know how to handle calls from campaigns correctly.
- You have no way of catching call-handling mistakes and correcting them.
Even if you do it for just a couple of months; it will be worth it to invest in one of these solutions temporarily, to get a deeper insights into how your team handles calls.