Summary: Every working day, between the hours of 12 and 2 PM, medical reception staff take their lunch breaks. Automatically routing calls to email or leaving them unanswered creates friction. Medical answering services can eliminate that friction.
Those two hours, from 12 to 2 PM, are a daily operational blind spot for many medical practice administrators. Front desk receptionists have spent all morning checking in patients and answering inquiries. They have been scheduling visits and routing clinical calls. They need a break. What happens to the phones?
A practice can switch over to automated voicemail or simply allow the phone to ring unanswered. Both options ignore a reality that patients are on their lunch breaks too. They may want to call the doctor’s office at that time.
The Lunch Hour as Personal Time
Working adults have a lot to do and not enough hours in the day to do it. For many of them, the lunch break is a window of personal time during which they can handle healthcare tasks, like calling the doctor. Patients call to book initial consultations, check on lab results, request prescription refills, or just ask questions.
An automated message letting them know the office is closed for lunch creates friction. On the other hand, maintaining continuous phone coverage eliminates that same friction. But continuous phone coverage is more than just a nice-to-have courtesy. It is an operational priority at a time when people are used to always being connected.
We recommend bridging the midday gap by contracting for specialized medical answering services. A provider, like Apello, protects patient loyalty and reduces afternoon staff burnout by taking care of your phones and upholding the highest professional standards. We fill in for your receptionists while they get that much-needed break.
‘Lunch Crunch’: The Hidden Reality
Our industry sometimes refers to the daily lunch break as the lunch crunch. It comes with a hidden reality that office administrators do not necessarily realize.
Administrators are faced with maintaining a delicate balance between exceptional patient satisfaction and preventing employee burnout. The daily lunch crunch hits right at the intersection of these competing interests. Making matters worse is the need to properly manage overhead.
So what should administrators do? It is more important to ask what they should not do: leave phones unmonitored during the lunch hour. When phones go unmonitored and unanswered at midday, operational impacts quickly compound:
- Voicemail Drift – Voicemail drift is a phenomenon in which being forced to use voicemail causes a patient to abandon a call. If it happens frequently enough, a patient will begin looking for a new provider. New patients will not even bother calling back. They’ll simply choose the next name on the list and place another call.
- Afternoon Bottlenecks – Incoming calls don’t always disappear when the phones are shut off at lunchtime. Instead, they stack up. As soon as someone turns the lines back on, the phone starts ringing off the hook. The front desk immediately falls into chaos, and patients face longer hold times.
- Financial Impacts – It all adds up to significant financial impacts when you consider that the lifetime value of a new patient can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Losing just two patients per week to voicemail drift could have a significant impact on the bottom line.
The reality of the modern world is that working professionals manage their days around tight schedules. During the lunch hour, they are able to step away and do other things. That often means making phone calls that can’t wait until the evening.
If a patient calls your office and is transferred immediately to voicemail, he is experiencing friction. Many patients will simply abandon the call. For the office, this means lost leads and delayed responses. None of it is good.
How Practices Try to Fix It
Practice administrators and managers are resourceful people. Many have tried to solve the lunch crunch problem with a variety of in-house solutions. Oftentimes, such solutions are barely adequate. Sometimes they do not work at all. Here are some of the most common ways administrators try to fix a lunch crunch:
- Staggering receptionist lunch breaks.
- Assigning clinical staff to the front desk.
- Routing all incoming calls to voicemail.
- Simply letting the phones ring unanswered.
In theory, all these solutions give the front desk staff ample time to take a break and get a breath. But in reality, each one creates some level of friction that gets in the way of superior customer service. It all points to one thing: medical answering services.
Coverage for Overflow and Lunch Breaks
If you assume that medical answering services are only for after-hours coverage, you are not alone. It is a common misconception in our industry. Yet medical answering service providers can also handle coverage for call overflow and lunch breaks.
When used in this way, an answering service does not replace your front desk receptionists. It doesn’t put any of your staff members out of work. Instead, the service enhances what your receptionists already do well. It removes some of the load so they are not under so much pressure every day of the week.
Call Routing in Practice
One of the most attractive aspects of utilizing a medical answering service in this way is maintaining total control over how and when calls are routed. For example, front desk staff can simply hit a digital toggle switch to turn the phone system into overflow mode. In that mode, the system automatically routes calls to the medical answering service after so many rings.
During the busiest times of the day, no call goes unanswered. Better yet, switching the system into overflow mode automatically provides coverage during the lunch crunch period. Everything happens seamlessly.
Don’t Let the Lunch Crunch Kill Your Practice
The lunch crunch is a very real phenomenon. Do not let it kill your practice by driving your patients away. Instead, cover the phones with medical answering services tailored specifically to your practice’s needs. It is the best way to go at a time when the retail medical industry is so competitive.
FAQs
Why is routing lunchtime calls to voicemail a bad thing?
Voicemail creates immediate friction. When patients call, they expect to talk to a live person right away. Not being able to do so often causes them to abandon their calls.
How does call forwarding help during the lunch crunch?
When you work with a medical answering service, call forwarding automatically routes incoming calls to the service’s call center. No call is left unanswered.
Can service agents schedule appointments for patients?
Yes. As long as a medical answering service’s software integrates with the practice’s system, appointment scheduling is handled seamlessly.
Isn’t it more cost-effective to simply stagger lunch breaks?
It would seem so, but staggering breaks doesn’t account for the fact that call volumes tend to spike during the lunch crunch. A practice is left with insufficient coverage, which leads to long wait times, abandoned calls, etc.
Does it matter which answering service I contract with?
Yes, a generic answering service may not have the skills and tools to deal with incoming medical calls. Conversely, a provider like Apello specializes in medical services. Our services are professional, efficient, highly effective, and fully compliant.
