Front desk
The five questions your desk answers a hundred times a week
Opening hours, insurance, parking, what to bring, and where exactly the entrance is. None of them need you.
If you kept a tally for a week, the results would be depressing in a very specific way. Not because the questions are hard - they are the easiest thing you do all day - but because of how many of them there are, and how completely they prevent you from doing anything else.
Opening hours. Do you take this insurance. Where do I park. What should I bring. Is the entrance the one on the main road or round the back. Each of these takes maybe forty seconds, which sounds trivial until you multiply it by a hundred and notice that you have spent most of a working day being a very expensive signpost.
The cost is not really the time, either. It is the interruption. You are with a patient at the desk, the phone goes, and now you are doing two things badly instead of one thing well. The patient in front of you waits, the caller hears you rushing, and neither interaction is what you would want it to be. Every receptionist knows this trade-off and nobody enjoys making it forty times a day.
The useful thing about these questions is that they have exactly one right answer each, and that answer does not change. Which makes them the first thing worth taking off your plate entirely - not routed to a menu, not handed to a message service, but actually answered, on the call, so the caller gets what they needed and you never hear about it. What is left is the part that genuinely needs you: the complicated booking, the anxious patient, the person standing at the desk. The platform describes where that line sits, and what patients say suggests they do not mind at all.
- Hours
- Are you open Saturday, and until when
- Insurance
- Do you take mine, and what will it cost
- Parking
- Where exactly, and is it free
- Prep
- Do I need to fast, and for how long
- Bring
- Referral, card, list of medication
The demo will ring your phone in under a minute so you can hear how it handles this, or book fifteen minutes and we will point it at your real call flows. Other practices describe what changed for them.
