Our Top Tips to Start a Medical Answering Service

In the last 25 years, answering services, especially medical answering services, have become more norm than novelty. We often get asked for advice from people trying to emulate our model, and we took time to ask ourselves what we think we did differently to succeed.

Here are some helpful tips for starting a medical answering service, a critical and nonnegotiable support function today for the medical community. Better still, come work with us. We are always looking for committed, passionate people to help us grow.

1. Focus. From the very start the Doctors Answer (as the name would suggest) has been focused exclusively on the medical community. This allowed us to develop a much deeper understanding of our customers and their customers, which in turn improved our call management.
2. Personalization. Instead of creating processes that focus only on maximizing call volume per agent to reduce personnel costs, we went contrarian and built systems that allow for and even prioritize repeat call management for customers by the same agents. This builds more trust and increased customer satisfaction for our immediate and therefore end clients.
3. Training and Work Force Development. The cornerstone of an answering service is its people, and we invest continuously to ensure that they respond, empathize, and engage with customers in the most effective way possible. It also helps that we hire the best.
4. All-Included Payment Plans: We also do not nickel and dime customers with hidden costs for any basic services, which all come included even in a starter package. This may seem counterintuitive from a modern sales approach, but it works wonderfully for us and avoids any room for post-purchase dissonance.
5. Thinking of Our Customer’s Customers as Our Own. But most of all, I think the true measure of a good answering service lies in its ability to look beyond its intermediary role and see itself as the actual service provider. Only then can you walk the talk and make a real difference in the lives of the customers you serve.