General Category > General Questions
Telemarketing and Appointment Setting
PMRNC:
--- Quote --- the practice of a designated person for customer support is an excellent one, most successful companies follow that. It insulates the billing people from customer support
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I can't speak from experience on this, as my goal was always to work SOLO. When I worked as a claims specialist at 3 of the top 5 carriers only ONE utilized this where they had customer support services separate from the claims specialists. They tried this for about a year and it was a disaster, I know, myself, if I need to call somewhere I don't want to be "handled" I want to talk to who I need to talk to and that's why it didn't work out.
--- Quote ---1. Is the communication between the clients and the designated person (and the billers and the designated person ) by emails or phone?
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I would always have to put myself in the shoes of my clients. If they need me they should be able to contact me via ALL methods in a given time frame (business hours).
--- Quote ---2. Generally how much communication occurs? How many clients can one designated person handle? I know it depends, but some idea.
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NO way to answer this at all because there are variables on the volume and type of work PER client as well as variables on the experience level of each biller/staff member. I've seen billers be able to handle 5-6 accounts comfortably and I've seen those who could only handle one or two very large clients. (DME comes to mind)
--- Quote ---3. Does the designated person need to know much about medical billing?
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I would have to say YES.. and this is where I would probably cancel out the idea of just a separate person/staff, many things will need to be passed on to an experienced biller anyway, I can't see hiring anyone w/out experience in medical billing. There's also the VERY VERY important factor of HIPAA, even if they are just merely answering the phone you willl need to make sure their access to systems are within their scope of experience, that they are INDEED properly trained on their HIPAA responsibilities.
--- Quote ---4. What should be the pay for the designated person?
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For what you are doing I would have to say this is right along the lines of "receptionists" They answer phone and pass on to where it needs to go. I can't see anything more than $7 or $8 an hour. (depending on going pay scale in a particular area) Maybe a great job for a high school student?
How many clients do you have now? What does your business plan entail for the time frame of growth? What type of facility will you be working in? Is there space available for the type and volume of staff you have planned for? Examining those might give you a better idea of expanding staff and duties of each staff member.
RichardP:
Our setup is such that a designated person acts as the go-between between us and a particular client.
I made this statement to set the stage for the point of my next paragraph in that post - which is, we are staffed only to handle the billing we have, and our communication is only with clients we already have. If we needed to engage in marketing, we would not use our current staff to do that. We would subcontract out to experts. But the truth is, our expertise is our marketing tool. We know how to bill for many different specialties, and most of our clients have Physician Office Labs. We know how to do complicated billing. Our current clients speak highly of us to other doctors and we turn down most of those who then ask us to take on their billing. We are interested more in making money (which we do) and less in building an empire. (There is a size beyond which the extra headache of dealing with so many clients is not worth the extra money they would bring in.) I realize that our geographic location brings us into face-to-face contact with more doctors than someone in a different location might encounter face-to-face. So I am aware that most billers face different circumstances than we do.
Our setup is such that a designated person acts as the go-between between us and a particular client.
Based on your feedback, I now see that this statement could be misleading. I only meant to say that we don't all pester the client with questions as they arise. And likewise, a given client is not interrupting the work of our billers randomly. We generally communicate with our clients through our designated person for our sake as well as for our clients' sake. However, a.) if necessary, any one of our staff knows they are free to contact any one of our clients' staffs if they need to. We just encourage them to go through our designated persons as much as possible, and our staff understands the logic of this; b.) acting as the designated contact is not the only work these people do, so to think of them as being at the receptionist level is misleading. They actually need to know a great deal about billing in order to answer the questions coming from our clients staffs (often with the patient standing in front of the staff person who is calling), and so they tend to be among our higher-paid folks (that $30 per hour thing mentioned in another thread), and c.) we communicate by fax, e-mail, and phone - depending on the need of the moment.
Consider this: if you hire a goup of low-knowledge, low-paid receptionists to be the go-between between your organization and your clients, your receptionists are going to get asked questions they don't know how to answer. Who in your organization would these receptionists turn to in order to get their questions answered, and how would the receptionsist communicate with these "experts"? The "experts" who accept and respond to the questions from the receptionists would be your designated people, just like I have mine.
PMRNC:
--- Quote ---But the truth is, our expertise is our marketing tool. We know how to bill for many different specialties,
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SAME HERE.. Love this. My experience and education is my biggest marketing tool. Can't imagine any outside service selling it better than myself.
RichardP:
8) :)
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