Your receptionist is not the problem

When a clinic owner finds out how many enquiries went unanswered, the first instinct is to have a word with the front desk. That is the wrong conversation, and it usually makes the numbers worse.

A front desk is asked to do 2 things that cannot be done at once. One is to look after the person standing in front of them, and the other is to answer the person messaging from outside.

Only one of those 2 people is visible, so when the clinic is busy the visible one wins, every time, and correctly. Nobody wants a receptionist who ignores a patient at the counter to answer Instagram.

So the enquiries are not lost because someone was careless. They are lost because the busiest hours of the clinic are also the hours the most enquiries arrive, and one person cannot be in both places.

Then there are the hours the clinic is closed, which means evenings, Fridays and the long gap between the last appointment and the next morning.

Those hours are when people who work full time deal with personal admin. They are prime enquiry hours with nobody on the other end of them, so a clinic can have a flawless front desk and still lose the majority of its enquiries to a rota, not a person.

The obvious answer is another hire, but it rarely works, for 3 reasons.

• The load is spiky. Enquiries arrive in bursts around your ad spend and your posting schedule, not evenly across a shift.
• The hours that need covering are the unattractive ones. Evenings and weekends are hard to staff and expensive to staff well.
• A second person does not create a record. If nothing is written down, you still cannot answer the question of how many enquiries you received last month.

That last one matters more than it looks, because without a record every conversation about marketing performance is an argument between 2 people guessing.

Two things change it: somebody answers outside clinic hours, and every enquiry gets written down whether or not it turns into anything.

The second one sounds like administration, but it is the part that changes decisions. Once you can see that 40 percent of your enquiries arrive after 6pm, the conversation about opening hours, staffing and ad scheduling stops being a matter of opinion.

The front desk should be looking after the person in the chair. Everything else is a system problem, and system problems do not respond to being reminded.