Help! My Front Desk Talks Too Much

Andrea (00:04):
Well, hi there. I am Andrea Watkins, and if you're listening to this while juggling three patient calls, checking in a couple patients, taking a payment, selling skincare, and trying to catch your doctor in between procedures, you might be working in an aesthetic practice.

Blake (00:18):
And I'm Blake Lucas, and this is Practiceland. This is not Your Doctor's podcast.

Andrea (00:23):
Welcome back to Practiceland. Thank you for listening once again today we've got Alli Petriella back as our front desk expert sharing all the goods about how to be effective and efficient at the front desk, which is arguably one of the most challenging jobs in the practice. Today we're going to tackle a listener question, which is super exciting. So before we get started on this one, if anybody here has something you want us to tackle, please send in your questions to practicelandpodcast.com because we love helping all of you out there that are listening with everything you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. So we have listener CB and she writes this. "I have a warm and friendly, very helpful front desk person in our medical spa who in my opinion is staying on calls too long and then misses other calls while she's talking, sometimes multiple other calls. She's great at building rapport and patients love her, but while she's talking, she's missing a lot of other opportunities and then has to return a lot of voicemails. And we know from listening to calls that many of these callers just hang up and don't call back. What do I do about this?"

Alli (01:38):
That is such a great question because it happens often, and I think even in practice we had this challenge with somebody as well. So I would say the first thing we should do is, and we all know I'm a big debriefer. Andrea is a big debriefer, let's debrief. So let's have her listen to those calls. So if we have a platform that is recording our calls, we have the opportunity to let her listen. Oftentimes we don't know our habits on calls and we don't know what we're doing, and she likely has no idea that she's spending too much time on these calls, but if she listens to it, she can maybe start to see her own habits. So give her the opportunity to just observe what you've been able to observe. And then second to that, let's make sure we provide structure for her and for all of those incoming calls, if it is a surgical inquiry coming in, what points do I need to hit to get this on with the PCC?

(02:34):
If it's a non-surgical call coming in, what points do I need to hit to get this on the schedule? So providing structure, she'll know that everything that she has to flow through instead of just allowing the conversation to go wherever. On that same piece that's going to teach her to be more directive. And that's kind of the name of the game. Sitting at the front desk, it is so easy to just pick up the phone and let the prospect or let the patient lead and then us kind of follow. But that doesn't really end well for either party because we're not really providing very much value to them, nor are we getting a ton of value because we're not going anywhere with it. We're kind of just turning it into a little bit of a yap session sometimes, as we call it. So have the structure so that she can feel empowered to be directive. I would say number one, listen back to those calls. Number two, provide structure and encourage her to really take the reins on those calls and be a lot more directive.

Andrea (03:34):
I wonder what your recommendation is, Alli, as far as how often should we be listening to calls? And I do this with my coaching clients all the time, and at the very beginning they're like, oh my god, Andrea, don't make me do this. But how do we do it in a way also that doesn't put people's guard up or make them self-conscious or feel awful about doing, maybe they said the wrong thing or maybe not the right thing or didn't really lead the call. How would you go about that? And just helping to empower and coach those people that we do need to say, Hey, let's just take a peek and look behind the curtain so that we can listen in for some self-assessment.

Alli (04:15):
I think it boils down hugely to what kind of culture you're manifesting in your office. I think that it's very common for practices when we introduce the idea of recording phone calls for people to be like, no, no, no, I'm out. I don't want you listening to my calls. That's so uncomfortable. And I think those feelings might be coming from a place of maybe insecurity. Maybe they're not feeling very empowered, maybe they're not feeling super encouraged or getting the reassurance from the leadership in the office that they need to feel secure in their job. When we're working with an office that has a great team dynamic and their front office feels very confident in their role, the idea of recording phone calls is actually thrilling. So just speaking from my own experience at first the idea of this was horrifying. I'm like, no, no, no.

(05:08):
That makes me double think everything I'm going to say. I don't like the idea of it. And then eventually I got to a place where that was the best thing that could have happened to me. I love recorded phone calls, and I still wish that today everything I do could be recorded because I loved the opportunity to be like I get off a phone call and I know that I didn't do my best on that call. I love taking those bad calls and taking them straight to my COO and being like, Hey, listen to this. This definitely went wonky. What recommendations do you have on how I could improve here? So making sure that your staff feels empowered and comfortable enough to be able to have conversations with you and not feeling like if they say the wrong thing, then they're at risk to lose their role with you.

(05:53):
So make sure everyone feels confident, make sure that they understand that it's to help all of us. It's not for a managerial role to just sit there and judge you and decide if you're good enough or not. That's not what it is. This is specifically to help you be better at what you're doing and for us all to understand what our patients are asking for, what they're needing. So if you guys are, if the front office is running into the same issue over and over again, we're going to identify that and we're going to say, what do we need to be doing differently? How could we better be serving these patients so that our front office can be having smoother conversations?

Andrea (06:32):
I love that. And as someone who listens to recorded calls on the daily basis, I do like to tell people when I first start working with them, this is 100% being done because I believe in you and I know that you care, and I know that you're awesome. And just because I know that you're awesome and I know that you care, that doesn't mean that you've had the support and the training in order to be your very, very best. And so in order for me to help you as a leader, be your very, very best, which I know you want to do, we're going to go through this exercise and we're going to listen, and then we're going to provide feedback and we're going to implement, and then we're going to listen and provide feedback and implement so that we can help to empower everyone.

(07:14):
But I think to your point, Alli, what's really, really important from the leadership role is that you start the conversation with, I'm doing this because I love you and believe in you, and I know that you want to do the very best, and this is not me finger pointing anything. It's just like, Hey, what are we experiencing and what help do you need in order to really feel confident on those calls to be directive and to get through them without maybe going off on 17 tangents and spending 20 minutes on a call booking a Botox appointment. which just really, we couldn't do that. There's no way that we could stay in business if we're spending 20 minutes on every new Botox patient. Well, thank you once again for your expertise. Very excited to be able to share this with our listeners. Where can we find you online again?

Alli (07:58):
I'm on LinkedIn. It's Allison Petriella, A-L-L-I-S-O-N, and then Petriella, P-E-T-R-I-E-L-L-A.

Andrea (08:06):
Fantastic. And for everybody listening today, we love answering listeners' questions, so if you have a question for us that you'd like to answer or like to have us answer, just send us a message. You can go to practicelandpodcast.com and put your message in there and we will be happy to address it here on one of our episodes.

Blake (08:25):
Got a wild customer service story or a sticky patient situation? Send us a message or voicemail. If your tale makes it into our "She did what?" segment, we'll send a thank you gift you'll actually love. Promise, no cheap swag here.

Andrea (08:37):
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