Starting Your Own Medical Answering Service

by Maggie F. Marketing & Communications

Ready to start your own medical answering service? Understand the important factors to keep in mind and how you can grow your business successfully.

1. Decide: Physical or Virtual Medical Answering Service

First, you need to decide if you want to set up a physical or virtual medical answering service. To explain better, do you want to have a physical office space with employees working at the office? Or, do you want a virtual office, with employees working remotely across the country or world? Determining this will help you plan what tools, software, and equipment you will need. For example, if you want to set up a virtual center with cloud-based communication tools, you can subscribe to a virtual provider like United World Telecom.

2. Create a Business Plan

Prepare a plan for your medical answering service to consider possible factors, positive and negative elements, and so on. You will need to conduct market research and include results. Develop a budgeting plan keeping equipment costs, hiring costs, marketing costs, etc., in mind. Identify different markets and demographics you want to target. Doing all this will help you organize your service better and ensure you are equipped to deal with issues that may arise.

3. Invest in Equipment, Office Supplies, and Communication Tools

Research and consider the equipment and software needed. For example, if you are starting a physical medical answering service, then you will need office space, desks, chairs, desk phones, etc.

You may also consider using call recording software to monitor and review inbound and outbound calling strategies, or to maintain compliance requirements as needed by regulations. Managers can also review recorded calls to conduct performance reviews of their employees and agents.

4. Hire and Train Agents

Next, start hiring agents for your medical answering service. It is important to consider agents that have some experience in the field and know the basics of being a medical customer service agent.

Provide training, nonetheless. Create a guidebook, provide training materials like webinars and seminars, use recordings as examples of what to do and what not to do. Reward good agent behavior and suggest alternatives to negative agent behavior. Develop a rewards program that will provide agents the incentives they need to do a good job.

5. Market and Expand

Lastly, build a website and create social media accounts. We live in a very digital world and so, not investing in digital marketing strategies can be a disadvantage. Consider hiring a marketing specialist to help you get started on how and where to advertise.

Optimize your website with valuable and informative content. Demonstrate expertise and experience, explain how your medical answering service works, and what you have to offer. And be sure to use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to rank higher in search results for related keywords. This way, when clients look for those keywords, there’s a higher chance that they will find your business and interact with it.

Design and promote online ads through social media and Google ads. This will help increase your business’ visibility and awareness. And this is important as it can help clients and big players recognize your medical answering service as a legit service they can take advantage of.

Study, Analyze, Improvise

To maintain your medical answering service’ legitimacy and standards, study and analyze your call volume, customer service quality, and employee performance. Keep an eye on the competition and learn what tactics they are using to be successful. Learn from them and improvise your service so that you can get the upper hand. Starting your own medical answering service is easy with the right tools and agents. Good luck!