subject: Advantages Of A Live Answering Service [print this page] If you're a doctor, you should be aware that there are lot of advantages which using a live answering service offers that using a basic voice mail system does not. One of those advantages is that it's more personal. There have been countless patients which have testified to being surprised and delighted to hear a live voice when calling their doctor's office after hours. Think about how frustrated you get when you have to spend so much of your valuable time talking to machines. You can reduce some of that frustration for your patients. As wonderful as that is, though, the benefits don't stop there.
There are certain decisions which a machine simply isn't qualified to make, regardless of how sophisticated its programming is. That's why patients can't just plug their symptoms and some pictures of their bodies into machines and receive effective medical care. To an admittedly lesser extent, the same is true when you're deciding how to handle a phone call. Even if you were to program it in a very detailed manner, a machine cannot decide, for example, whether its best to call you immediately or send you an email without some input from the patient. Since patients don't always know how to communicate that input in a manner the machine would respond to appropriately, a human is better equipped to make the decision about how to respond to any given call.
There is also another benefit to providing this kind of human attention to your patients. It makes you look more professional than someone who just uses voice mail. Also, by letting your patients know that help is available to them twenty-four hours a day, they get to see how caring you are. You don't have to (and shouldn't) give all your patients your personal phone number, but you still get to let them know you're there for them when they need you. By far, since medical call centers first came into existence, there has been more positive feedback about them than negative... both from doctors and patients.
It's more efficient, too. While you can program your voice mail to notify you of every new message via text, the problem is that it will notify you of all of them. Some people might just be leaving you messages that they want you to see whenever you get to them. Some people might just be calling to ask for your location and hours. An employee of a live answering service can easily make those kinds of distinctions.
