Experts say they are pivotal, critical, of the utmost importance. They are the voice and face of your practice, the front line. They make that indelible first impression on patients walking through your office door.
Your front-desk employee can make or break your practice. That’s right, this crucial role is held by your receptionist, an employee you’re most likely not paying very well and perhaps don’t even talk to much.
So you may want to change your ways.
“The front-desk person has the single greatest influence on customer satisfaction,” says Greg Mertz, president and CEO of Horizon Group, the Virginia Beach, Va.-based practice management consulting firm.
Mertz, who specializes in front-office operations, has conducted surveys proving that the influence front-desk workers have on patient satisfaction is larger than that of any other office employee — even those who actually provide patient care.
Cecil Wilson, chairman of the board of the American Medical Association and a solo general internal medicine practitioner based in Winter Park, Fla., agrees.
“If the patient has been received well at the front desk and made to feel that we’re glad they’re here, by the time they get to the examining room, half my work is done,” says Wilson. He adds that patients who have been treated poorly before seeing their physician often don’t rate their clinical experience very highly, no matter how well their physician treated them. And unsatisfied patients are less likely to comply with treatment plans.
The bad and the ugly
But the front-desk position continues to be a low-paying one with high turnover. Employees are often hired in this capacity in a hurry when yet another one leaves for greener pastures. It’s a small wonder, then, that sometimes things can and do go terribly awry at the front desk.
It was the police officer’s uniform that set off the peculiar behavior of the front-desk receptionist at Anchorage Fracture & Orthopedic Clinic one day three years ago. Seeing the cop/patient walk through the door, she jumped up and ran deep into the bowels of the office, hiding in a back exam room. Practice administrator Beth Balen recalls that when other employees went to comfort the trembling receptionist, she admitted that that specific officer had arrested her recently, and she was frightened because she hadn’t told her probation officer where she was working.
According to Balen, no one had any idea that this employee had a criminal record — much less a probation officer. The cowering receptionist was soon let go.
There was also an incident at a New York City practice when healthcare consultant Dorothea Taylor was filling in as practice manager. One day, in the midst of a heated argument, one receptionist hauled off and slapped another one hard on the back of the head — right in front of a room full of gasping patients. Needless to say, he too was fired with little ceremony.
And then there was the case of the employee who’d been hired quickly by an ophthalmology practice in a jam to find someone. This receptionist grew surlier and surlier over the course of her employment — not at all reflective of the demeanor she had projected during her interview process. Within weeks, she was ducking out in the middle of shifts to a nearby hotel room to rendezvous with one of the office’s tech workers. When the practice finally bothered to call several of the worker’s previous employers, they revealed that she had embezzled funds from one of them and was still embroiled in a lawsuit. She was let go that day.
Less sensational but still significant stories range from front-desk staffers who, through inaccurate data-gathering, catalyze costly billing errors, to those who, through their ill-tempered demeanors, make incoming patients feel like inconvenient burdens.
The good
These horror stories are of course matched by those of exemplary front-desk staff. Paige Langit, the current front-desk employee at Anchorage Fracture & Orthopedic, is so warm and welcoming that patients often ask for her when they arrive — even if they’ve only met her once or twice.
