10 Questions to Solve if You're Considering a Call Center - Part 1

For those of you who really want to grow your group practice and scale it, you will need to find ways to create efficiencies. Taking headcount out of your business should be your top priority; a call center is conducive to doing that.

Since we first discussed our call center consulting service in February on our podcast, we have had several different individuals ask us questions about building and scaling a call center and how it supports a growing organization.

In no particular order, here are some essential questions you must solve when creating your call center.

When Should You Build a Call Center? (How Many Locations Do I Need?)

A call center's real benefit comes for those looking to grow from 5 to 10 locations or more.

Broaching 5 locations on your way to 10 comes with complete centralization. You've already got a DSO legal structure and some type of corporate management company structure, but formalizing the leadership team, building the call center, and dialing the business in for its next growth phase usually happens somewhere between about five to 10 locations.

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Will I Need a New Phone System?

Most of the cloud-based software these days and most of the phone systems are scalable beyond what you're using.

There are exceptions where some antiquated phone systems can't scale beyond their current location and can't lift and shift. This can include your phone systems and practice management software in its infrastructure. Remember, all of this gets rolled together.

If you're going to build a call center, will your current phone system have the ability to pick up overflow calls or be able to see into the scheduling application or the accounts receivable/insurance processing pieces, etc.? If not, you may need to consider upgrading or replacing your phone system.

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What are the KPIs of a Call Center?

How do you know if your call center is successful and if it was worth your investment??

For those of you who've got relatively current businesses, the need for a new phone system might not be as significant as you think. Key performance indicators of a call center are metrics that should answer to the success of its implementation. Obviously, they're a handful of them.

?You can start by monitoring your phone system to see how many calls you're missing and what your new patient appointment conversion rates are. These are the easy things to track on inbound calls.

For more advanced KPI’s you can start looking at speed to cash and the ability to collect money and follow-up on insurance receivables to tighten up your revenue cycle management of the business to create greater cash flows out of your receivables.

From a collection standpoint and a new patient conversion standpoint, you want to ensure that your marketing dollars are being spent correctly and that you're not losing any appointment calls from your campaigns. You also will want to track when you have a spike in demand over the course of the day, and there are ways to monitor all this.

Will a call center save me money?

It does take an investment to get a call center up and going with a level of consistency that’s profitable to your business. Both on a financial and operational level.

The reason for creating a call center is that it creates efficiencies in the business, which means greater EBITDA margins. At an enterprise level, many DSOs have this type of backend infrastructure in place.

The ability to save money can be measured off some of the KPIs I shared above, but ultimately, it's measured by gaining efficiencies through headcount reduction. An effective call center can replace a retired employee or an employee who resigned at a practice level because you can do the work of those people with a call center with fewer headcount additions.

You can train and cross-train your agents to fulfill various functions where you only need some of that headcount at a practice level. And this is the key when we look at the marginal profitability of businesses with 5 locations versus those with 20 locations.

Everybody thinks 20-location dental groups are more profitable because they can negotiate better supply costs from their distribution company. That is true at some level, but the real impact here is that they only need a few people to run it.

And this is not unique to dentistry. That's the way for any growing business with some type of centralization aspect to it. They put people into a call center, consolidate some headcount, and determine what functions they’re looking for to do that.

Conclusion

In the emerging dental group market, we usually see group practices whose growth strategy stops at 4 or 5 locations. Mainly because if they're going to grow past 5 or to 10+ locations, they need to centralize operations and potentially build a call center, and most business owners don't know how to do any of this.

A call center is a challenging endeavor, especially trying to make it profitable; however, it’s not like this hasn't ever been done before.

Building a call center may seem like a daunting task. However, you should take solace in knowing that businesses worldwide have figured out how to implement them, and so can you by solving these critical questions on your journey.

If you have any questions about starting your call center or redefining your current call center, please get in touch with us here.