The start of any new year is a great time to reflect, plan and respond. What can you be doing better? What could you be introducing that would increase the productivity of your staff? How about improving the experience each of your patients has when they visit or contact your surgery?

These are questions that many doctors, vets and dental surgeries ask themselves, so what would you say if we told you there was an easy way to achieve many of your surgery’s new year’s resolutions with minimal effort and fuss?

At the heart of every great surgery is strong and efficient communication; that’s exactly what VoIP offers each of the surgeries we work with.

Here are just five of the ways it can help your surgery in 2020…

1. Lower your costs
If there were any area of your surgery that you could cut 80% of cost whilst improving performance, you’d jump at the chance wouldn’t you? That’s exactly what having a VoIP phone system has been proven to do – slicing call and telephone costs for many businesses across the South West.

2. Respond better during your busiest times
If you’re working or running a surgery, you’ll know that you receive the majority of your calls at certain times of the day. VoIP is able to provide you with a number of solutions to solve this; whether through informative automated messaging, call hunt groups or call forwarding, we’ll be able to find the right solution for your patients and reception staff.

3. Ensure no patient is left without an answer
One of the most-used functions of VoIP is hunt groups (a number of people set up to take incoming calls), which allows different members of staff across the building to take incoming calls and spread the burden during those crunch periods. This can help you respond to more patients with the same staff levels. We can even have different periods where incoming calls go to different message option or hunt groups.

4. Make sure your patients get the information they need
If your opening hours are changing over a holiday period, if you have flu jab clinics you want to promote or you’re changing the way you handle prescriptions, all of this can easily be communicated to patients via the virtual assistant feature, which is a great way to share important information with patients calling the surgery.

5. Improve your response to emergencies
VoIP handsets and telephone numbers are designed to be taken anywhere — you only need to plug the handset in and connect it to the internet and it’ll be up and running. For doctors or vets on call, in the event of an emergency it means they can take calls at home, or anywhere off-site. With our easy-to-use app, a mobile can connect to the office number to take calls too!

If you’d like to find out more about how VoIP could help your surgery please give us a call on 01237 420010 and we’ll answer any questions you may have.