Why Your Optometry Office Needs Call Tracking to Identify & Avoid Inefficiency

Businesses are always searching for ways to reduce inefficiencies. Optometry practices are no exception. They’re constantly making micro-adjustments to their staffing and processes in order to improve their productivity and to better serve their patients.

It’s becoming increasingly evident that optimizing your office’s communication system yields greater worker productivity, a better patient experience, and higher profits. Efficient call tracking is a cornerstone for optometry practices hoping to get better results out of their communication system. This article aims to show you why your office needs call tracking and how to use call tracking once it’s in place.

So, why does your optometry office need call tracking?

1. Understand and adjust to call volume

Busy optometry offices often don’t take the time to sit back and consider who is calling their front desk and when. Who could blame them? There’s plenty to do, from ordering glasses and lenses to scheduling patients to testing your customers’ vision.

If you’re a growing, successful practice, it’s likely you’re always going to be busy. However, you can work more effectively in this environment by studying your phone calls to determine the busiest times of day in your office. By using analytical software to collect these data points, optometrists can reconfigure their staffing around the times of day that bring in the highest call volume.

2. Support your team

When phones are ringing off the hook and you’re understaffed, it creates an almost frantic workspace that stresses out everyone in your organization. Getting staffing right after analyzing your call volume is one step toward improving your practice’s efficiency. Numbers are only one component of call tracking; your approach to analyzing call should also be qualitative.

Tracking calls also means listening to conversations and identifying ways to sharpen your team’s customer service skills. Recording calls lets you understand how your team is communicating with patients and provides you with resources for staff training. Call tracking isn’t just about knowing the quantity of calls. Study and adjust how your office is communicating with patients as well.

3. Talk to more patients

So far, we’ve primarily discussed the ways in which call tracking affects the employees in your optometry practice. Improving the quality of your office’s phone system also directly impacts the lives of your patients and prospective patients. When more clients are able to get a hold of you and your staff members, there are more opportunities to establish customer loyalty.

Patients not being able to get through to your office creates a negative perception of your office. Keeping track of your missed calls and understanding call trends through a user-friendly interface gets you started on the path to serving more customers and potential customers. The better your communication with patients is, the happier they are with your optometry practice.

4. Earn more revenue

The failure to efficiently communicate with patients results in missed revenue opportunities for optometry offices. If potential clients call your practice and are forgotten or ignored, it’s a strike against your reputation. Ensuring that each person that calls your office has an optimal experience is an important way to boost your revenue.

The right analytics give you insight into your office’s calls, as well as your scheduling and payments. Looking at calls alongside scheduling and payments numbers lets you become even more nuanced in your analysis of your practice’s health. Data collection is a crucial competitive advantage for offices hoping to avoid inefficiencies.

5. Identify communication alternatives

At a certain point, you might feel that your optometry practice is approaching maximum efficiency with its call handling. That’s why it’s important to have a phone system that allows your organization to lean into alternative forms of communication. In fact, the patient demand for these other styles of communication is trending up.

What are the alternatives to phone calls? Texting is an obvious alternative that many businesses are using to appeal to their younger clientele. Professional emailing is a vital option for optometry offices trying to share more detailed information with their patients. Online communication on your website, social media accounts, and review sites is also critical.

How can Weave improve your optometry practice’s call tracking and overall efficiency?

Now that we’ve discussed some of the reasons why an efficient optometry office needs call tracking, let’s take a look at how the features in Weave’s toolbox allow you to implement call tracking to increase productivity, improve the patient experience, and boost revenue.

Advanced analytics

Conventional landline phones come with a caller ID that gives you minimal understanding of the calls your optometry office is missing. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones, on the other hand, rely on the internet to help you gather more sophisticated data about your office’s calls. Weave’s Call Analytics provides your practice with an interface for digging into your call volume, missed calls, placed calls and calls from patients versus potential customers.

Call recording and missed call texts

Busy call times put immense pressure on your front office team. Weave’s VoIp phone system allows you to relieve this pressure by using call recording to coach staff on the best ways to handle calls efficiently and politely. Identifying peak call volume lets you staff your office accordingly. If your staff is still swamped and misses a call, our missed call auto texts ensure patients that your office will get back to them as soon as possible.

Personalized patient communication

As your efficiency increases thanks to our Analytics and Phones, your customer base will broaden. It’s important that optometrists maintain strong relationships with each of their patients, and Customer Insights enables them to remember the details of every single client that calls your office. When a call is answered, have immediate access to patient profiles, including upcoming appointments, outstanding balances, unscheduled family members, and notes from past visits.

Appointment reminders and Text to Pay

After you’ve optimized the way your office handles phone calls, you can add further efficiency by offering text communication to your patients. Before appointments, send reminders and confirmations by text to keep customers in the loop regarding upcoming visits. Following their visit, send out payment requests by text to give patients a flexible payment option and potentially boost profits.

Professional Email Marketing

While most optometry offices have some sort of email outreach, many still haven’t adopted email marketing software to professionalize their communication. Conveying information that requires longer explanations and even a visual component means your office needs an optimized email marketing tool. Use our pre-written templates, image library, and CTA (Call to Action) button to improve your email outreach.

Online reputation management

If your office isn’t getting as many calls from potential customers as you’d like, it’s best to generate interest by building your online reputation. Optimize your website and be active on your social media accounts. Our Reviews tool is designed to help your practice gather and monitor reviews on key websites, like Google and Facebook. Refer to analytics and call tracking to see how increasing positive reviews impacts your call volume.

Call tracking and beyond

Weave is a complete business toolbox for optometry offices aspiring to better efficiency. Figuring out how to improve your call tracking and a myriad of other daily processes can change your business’s productivity, patient experience, and profitability.

To discover how Weave can increase the efficiency of your call tracking, watch a free demo.