We did a little experiment a while back that I thought was worth sharing.

In the early days of practice, many CAM docs struggle with whether or not to hire someone to answer the phone and take care of other admin tasks. After all, it may not even be ringing, right? Who wants to pile a receptionist salary on top of all that business and education debt?

The truth is, in the very beginning, it’s not a big deal for a lot of practitioners. The problem arises when you start to grow and can’t answer those calls yourself. At this point, many practitioners use the fallback solution of voice mail to save on staffing costs.

I was always suspicious, though, about how many people actually left a message when they couldn’t get a human on the phone. After all – I hang up a lot when I can’t get someone in person, why wouldn’t patients?

Enter the experiment. While we were on holidays, the receptionist took some vacation too, with the exception of one task: checking phone messages. Rather than just phone in to retrieve them, however, we asked her to come into the office and use the call display information to track how many people had called, versus how many actually left messages.

The results were insightful: only a third of callers left a message.

With a full-time receptionist in the office, every one of those calls would have been answered, and many converted into appointments. Moreover, those appointments would have filled a few holes in the schedule immediately after our holidays – time that can never be “gotten back” from a billing perspective.

The point here is not just to convince you to hire staff, but also to make sure that have staff that view incoming calls as a priority. Each call is a potential opportunity to fill an opening in the book, or gain a new client. And as we’ve discovered, you can’t rely on voice mail to do the job. It’s just not the same.