Challenge: A busy doctor’s office called and wanted a full time auto attendant to answer each call so that patients could hear some basic information before they selected an option. Frequently, the doctor’s office experienced a lot of calls looking for their fax number, their hours of operation, as well as their location. They wanted a way to ‘weed out the calls’ so that the busy office workers could have time to take calls for appointments, medication refills, and other important calls that they were frequently missing.
Solution: The customer had 4 lines in a rollover group so AccessDirect gave them a toll free number to forward their main line to. Now when anyone calls their main line, they hear a telephone auto attendant that says ‘Thanks for calling Dr. Martin. If this is an emergency please hang up and dial 911 now. If you are calling for our fax number, press 1, if you are calling for directions to our office or our hours of operation, please press 2. To schedule or cancel an appointment, press 3. For medication refills, press 4.’ When patients presses option 1 or 2, they are sent to an ‘informational mailbox’ where they are able to hear the recorded messages about times, directions, and fax numbers. The caller has the option to press 1 to repeat the information or to press 9 to return to the main menu. When patients call for options 3 or 4, AccessDirect sends them to the second line of their rollover group where the phones work the same way. Line one of course, is forwarded to the telephone auto attendant so it cannot ring, but without all of the questions about time and directions, the office personnel spends less time on the phone and more time focusing on their patients.
Results: Dr. Martin and his staff are very happy that they found AccessDirect. The staff is alleviated of having to answer call after call about directions, etc and they now have more time to call patients back for appointment reminders and other important things. Many doctors’ offices use AccessDirect for their full-time telephone auto attendants, and many use our company for their after-hours emergency calls as well. Give us a call to find out how your professional medical office can save time and (lots of) money by switching from a live answering service to a reliable auto attendant phone system!
