Virtual Receptionists and Cliniko.
What are they? How can they help my practice? What should I look out for when finding one?
Many Cliniko users employ the services of telephone answering providers, also referred to as virtual receptionists, to handle some or all of their appointment and scheduling calls and more. Here, Anne Batty explains the benefits and challenges of using an external telephone answering provider and the questions you need to ask if you are thinking of using them.
What is a telephone answering provider or virtual receptionist?
They are independent service providers working from their own offices remote from a health practitioner’s own practice facilities. To a health practitioner’s patients, however, the service provided is seamless and indistinguishable from that delivered by an in-house receptionist or administrator.
My company, Paperclip, is a telephone answering service provider. We manage the bookings, cancellations and rescheduling for many heath practitioners such as osteopaths, physiotherapists, psychotherapists and more. We love Cliniko!
For the remainder of this article. primarily for the purposes of brevity, I will use Paperclip as a proxy for the generic ‘telephone answering services provider’ and ‘virtual receptionist’.
How is it possible for Paperclip to deliver a ‘seamless’ service?
The answer, in short, is technology. Calls to the medical practitioner’s number are diverted to Paperclip. The divert can be immediate with all calls being diverted or delayed to give the medical practitioner and their team the opportunity to answer.
Paperclip, which services the Cliniko needs of a number of different clients, uses screen popping technology to identify that the incoming call is for a particular medical practitioner-client. The screen ‘pops’ with the medical practitioner’s details and the Paperclip operator answers the phone using the greeting agreed with the practice, and deals with the callers’ questions, concerns and requests.
How long to wait before diverting a call to your virtual receptionist?
I am often asked how long a practice should wait until transferring a call if they opt for the call diversion approach. In my experience, if a member of the medical practitioner’s team is available to take the call, they will do so within 5-10 seconds. Leaving it any longer than 10 seconds to divert the call to the telephone answering provider will simply frustrate the patient, and may even lead to the caller hanging up.
What is the ‘link’ between Paperclip and health practitioners using Cliniko?
Giving Paperclip, or another provider, access to the appointment and scheduling elements of your Cliniko programme will enable them to maximise the benefit they can bring to your practice in that area. With access to Cliniko, Paperclip can make, reschedule and cancel appointments in line with rules agreed at set-up.
To get the most from your provider make sure the Cliniko practice ‘rules’ you follow are clearly communicated and as simple as possible: Do you differentiate between a new patient appointment and a longstanding patient? Do you want to allocate more time to a first appointment? How do you want different treatments to appear on your calendar? Do you use colours to identify different types of treatments or patient categories? How do you want cancellations to be handled? Is there a cost implication to a patient of cancelling an appointment? If your practice’s policy is to request payment in advance of an appointment, Paperclip will be able to do that too.
Cliniko is flexible. It recognises that each medical practice is unique.
An experienced Cliniko virtual receptionist like Paperclip will be able to work with your practice to put in place a solution that matches your aspirations and the culture, behaviours and processes within your practice.
Every medical practice is unique; there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Here are a couple of anonymised outlines drawn from Paperclip’s Cliniko client base to show how a Cliniko virtual receptionist can help in different scenarios:
Client A – Osteopath – sole practitioner – a small rural town
Practitioner wants to focus on maximising time available for appointments. Doesn’t want any interruptions to treatment sessions.
All incoming calls handled by Paperclip i.e. no direct line to the practice. Paperclip accesses Cliniko to book all appointments, cancellations and rescheduling. The practitioner uses text messaging to alert existing clients to late availability.
Practitioner schedules in specific times to respond to calls for advice. If the practitioner receives a phone call he knows it is from Paperclip and requires an urgent response.
Client B – Osteopathy and Laser Treatments – multiple practitioners – busy city location
Practice looking to grow, employ more practitioners and add new treatments.
The practice employs a full-time receptionist. Paperclip handles peak calls diverted after an agreed delay and covers absences such as holidays and sickness. Paperclip has full access to Cliniko scheduling.
Calls requesting advice are transferred to the practice or, when no practitioner is available, a message is taken and emailed to a nominated email recipient(s).
As the practice grows, the plan is for Paperclip to handle more calls with the practice receptionist focussing on welcoming patients and administration of medical records.
Paperclip can help you make the most of Cliniko’s transactional, marketing and management functionality.
It is a statement of the obvious that a patient’s medical records are private and accessible only to the medical practitioner. However, Cliniko has powerful practice management, marketing and administration capabilities in addition to its clinical dimension.
Paperclip can help you with activities such as invoicing and chasing overdue payments, managing your marketing database and implementing digital marketing campaigns. We can also contact patients to obtain confidential qualitative feedback which practices can use to improve the patient experience.
What to look for when appointing a telephone answering services provider or virtual receptionist?
The principal reasons cited by medical practitioners for using virtual reception services are to capture new patient opportunities, the lifetime value of a patient can be considerable, to improve the service provided to existing patients, patient retention is far cheaper than patient acquisition, and to reduce the stress of running the practice. To deliver these benefits, the virtual receptionist has to be available to answer the call, take the payment, issue the invoice.
Throughout this brief blog, ‘virtual receptionist’ has been used in the singular. This is misleading. One of the key questions to consider when appointing a virtual receptionist service provider is: ‘Does the provider have sufficient staff capacity to handle my requirements, as well as those of their existing clients?’
Paperclip actively seeks out health practitioners which use Cliniko
The Cliniko interface is undeniably intuitive and simple; it’s why I like it so much and why Paperclip actively seeks out health practitioners that use Cliniko. The learning curve for anyone new to the programme is, therefore, relatively short. However, previous experience of Cliniko, particularly experience of working with different practices, still has considerable value. An experienced Cliniko virtual receptionist, like Paperclip, may even be able to help you streamline your scheduling processes.
Your virtual receptionist provider will become an important part of your team. Like an important member of staff, you don’t want them to ‘leave’ unexpectedly. Check how long they have been active in the medical sector and, ideally, ask for a couple of references you can contact. It may even be worth asking for copies of their accounts for the previous two or three years. Paperclip is now in its twelfth year and a longstanding osteopath client was one of the first health practitioners in the UK to implement Cliniko in its practice.
Patient confidentiality, data security and storage
On a more practical level, ensure that your chosen virtual receptionist has robust systems in place to deal with patient confidentiality, IT and telecommunications continuity and, data storage and retrieval. You should also request a Service Level Agreement (SLA) from your chosen provider which sets performance targets for call answering times and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
What is the key to success when working with Paperclip?
The key is to remember that Paperclip’s ‘virtual receptionist service’ isn’t really ‘virtual’ at all. Paperclip is a specialist organisation staffed by experienced operators and managed by business people like you.
You will get the most from your virtual receptionist service if you build a strong mutual ‘human’ business relationship with them. An effective virtual receptionist service can generate a call and transactional data to help you to finesse your service offering, and may even identify new business opportunities.
You may also enjoy reading
- Virtual receptionists, virtual administrators. Are we living in a virtual world?
- Why is your business phone ringing? Never miss another lead
- Why organisations choose telephone answering services
- How much does call answering cost?
Hi, I’m Anne Batty, Managing Director of Paperclip. I am passionate about customer service. I believe enduring relationships are built on being open, transparent and trustworthy.
I love questions. So, if you have a question relating to telephone answering – pricing, technical, scope and more – I would love to hear from you at anne@paperclip.co.uk or 01246 418181.
Paperclip’s clients enjoy working with us. I know you will too.