Single physician office lost two front office staff in one week and needed help answering and screening office calls. We set up a script and call structure that allowed us to handle a majority of their office calls in our call center. We answered all calls, filtered calls by purpose (billing, appointment cancellation, medical records, of course emergencies) and directed the call to the appropriate person in the office or took messages as instructed. Our client’s office became much more efficient and helped reduce expenses significantly.

Single physician office from a city that is generally outside of our service area contacted us to see if we could help him save money on his answering service bill. He complained that his bill had been going up steadily for years but his practice was mature and as a result hadn’t been growing during that period. He didn’t understand the charges on his bill but because there was only one answering service in his area he didn’t know what he could do. A review of his bills showed that he averaged about $800 per month for the previous three months. But he said he only got about 2-3 after hours urgent calls per weeknight (which is typical for his type of practice). This indicated that most of his calls (and therefore most of his costs) were for non-urgent messages. We set him up with simplified instructions and a front-end menu that allowed patients with non-emergencies to leave messages in a voice mail. Of course, our voice mail is included in our service. After switching to us his bill averaged less than $200 per month, saving him several thousand dollars per year.

Single physician office from Los Angeles area inquired about new service. His main complaint was cost. He said his current answering service was charging too much on his phone bill. It turns out that his answering service was located in a different city and that they gave him a phone number local to the answering service area, not local to the client’s area. As a result the doctor’s office would incur a long distance charge for every call that was forwarded from his office to the answering service. Also, he was on a terrible rate plan with his long distance company, which was charging an eye-popping $0.35 per minute. I suggested that we provide him with a phone number local to his office. I also called his phone company (with him on the line for authorization) to discuss his rate plan and find out the options. We got him on a plan for about $0.05 per minute. I requested the phone company back-date the rate plan a month since they were obviously operating in such bad faith. They agreed. The combination of our service solution and the better long distance rate plan saved the office about $1,000 per month.

Large HMO & large specialty medical group: One day we received a call from two potential customers. Both were large operations with numerous facilities and about 100 physicians between them. They both needed an answering service as soon as possible because their existing service went out of business with no notice. We dealt with management at both offices and had functional accounts set up by the end of the day. We initially set the accounts up so that they were satisfactory for the day and spent the rest of the week adding physician protocols and fine tuning instructions. They are both highly complex instructions but our results were outstanding. Our new customers report they are very happy with our new service and the features we offer that their previous service did not. We maintain strong relations with management of the offices to this day.

A building that offered front-office services to their physician tenants contacted us to see if we could function as their live operator service. They had been having trouble maintaining an in-house receptionist to answer the phones and wanted a more reliable and more cost-effective alternative. This service had some complex phone system challenges. With the help of our phone system vendor we were able to integrate our system the building’s to offer a seamless functionality of the phone reception system. We also ended up providing after hours answering services and voice mail to several of the physician-tenants, which freed them from having to rely on the standard voice mail system the building provided for free.

We received a somewhat urgent call from an office manager of a physician’s office saying they needed an answering service immediately. She explained that her current answering service (our main local competitor) just told them they were going out of business effective the next day. It was December 22nd. Throughout that day and for the next several days we received an onslaught of scared, confused, angry, and urgent physicians offices all needing a new answering service. All of Echo worked overtime (some of us slept here) through the holiday until our new customers were talked to, consoled, programmed, revised, revised again, until everything was finished. In the end it was worth it!