How To Reduce Call Abandonment in Healthcare Practices

Call abandonment occurs when a caller hangs up before you have the opportunity to speak with them, often due to long wait times. Abandoned calls harm your healthcare practice’s reputation and patient retention rates, but you may feel that this effect is unavoidable in your busy practice.

However, strategies like optimizing call queues, increasing staffing, and routing calls correctly can reduce abandonment rates. Operational efficiency improvements, such as minimizing abandoned calls, are vital for practice financial health, and can help you increase your profit margin. You can also implement callback options and clearly communicate wait times to help manage patient expectations.

Weave’s communication platform lets you streamline patient communication and implement strategies to reduce call abandonment. Learn how to lower your practice’s call abandonment rate with a few simple steps.

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Why call abandonment happens in healthcare practices

Your practice doesn’t purposefully keep patients on hold for extended periods or forget about their calls. Call abandonment occurs due to a few larger problems within your communication processes:

• Ineffective or confusing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems in which patients aren’t sure what to do next or how to get hold of a real person when they call your practice
• Poor call routing that directs calls to the wrong department, frustrating callers and leading them to hang up
• Understaffing, which means your phone lines are often tied up, and you don’t have enough staff to answer incoming calls
• Lack of self-service options that would allow callers to receive answers to simple questions without needing to speak with someone

Weave’s intelligent call routing and improved IVR systems can help reduce call abandonment rates from day one.

Strategies to reduce call abandonment in healthcare

Phone calls offer a valuable opportunity to connect with individuals who may be interested in your services but are not yet ready to schedule an appointment. Taking steps to reduce high call abandonment rates can help you land more patients and improve patient satisfaction.

A few strategies to implement include:

• Optimize staffing and scheduling: Use historical call data to determine your practice’s peak hours or the times during which callers are most likely to face long wait times. Then, adjust your staffing levels accordingly during those periods. You may create some overlap between the earlier and later shifts in your practice so that more staff are available during peak hours, for example. Or, you might cross-train workers in other departments so that they can answer calls during peak times.
• Implement call queuing technology: Call queuing technology keeps callers organized while they wait for a staff member to become available. They can learn the estimated wait times and their position in the queue. When a caller knows that they are next in line, they’ll be less likely to abandon the call. Review our Call Queues 101 guide for details on how to optimize your call management system and keep patients engaged.
• Offer callback options: Patients may feel that they only have two options: wait on hold for an extended time, or hang up and try a different medical practice. Giving them the option to schedule a callback can allow them to continue on with their day without being tied to the phone. This can reduce the number of dropped calls and allow your front office to spread calls across the day rather than having congested periods.
• Improve IVR systems: If your current IVR system or call routing options are too confusing, think of how you might rework this system to ensure that patients can easily reach a human agent if needed. Provide clarity about how different departments can help callers and which department they may need to reach for specific queries.
• Increase self-service options: Patients might call your practice with a simple question about your hours, their appointment times, or your available services, only to be met with an extended hold time. Providing self-service options in which patients can find the answers to these questions on their own can reduce the number of inbound calls your practice receives and minimize frustration. You might direct callers to your website or patient portal for information, or state certain details in the hold message, like your practice hours.

The role of technology in reducing abandoned calls

While you can implement certain solutions to help reduce call abandonment in your practice, experiencing high call volumes isn’t something you necessarily can or should change. High call volumes mean that business is booming. Instead of looking for ways to resolve calls faster or add to your staff, you might also benefit from implementing technology that automates certain steps in the call handling process.

For example, you can use AI-powered call routing tools to direct patients to the appropriate agents more efficiently. While being faced with the IVR menu might make patients feel like they are on hold, communicating with a voice AI agent will make them feel more like they are making progress toward speaking with an agent.

Voice AI tools can even answer certain patient queries and complete basic tasks like scheduling or rebooking appointments for your practice. Instead of adding more agents, you can reduce the workload of your existing agents while maintaining the same call volume levels.

Weave’s communication platform offers AI features to assist in managing call abandonment in real time. Weave’s voice AI tools can answer and respond to phone calls for your practice, allowing your agents to focus on higher-level patient queries and providing patients with faster answers to simple questions.

Weave’s automation features also help reduce the impact of abandoned calls on your practice. Weave can initiate an automatic callback prompt when your practice misses a patient’s call. This ensures that patients still hear from your practice promptly after abandoning a call, and it gives your front office staff another opportunity to connect with them.

Meanwhile, Weave’s automated reminder texts and two-way texting capabilities can reduce the number of outbound calls your staff makes to patients, helping to reduce phone usage overall and keeping your phone lines more available for incoming calls.

Tracking and measuring call abandonment in healthcare practices

After implementing solutions to reduce call abandonment, you need a way of measuring how your abandonment rates have changed.

A simple formula for calculating call abandonment rates is:

(Abandoned calls / Total calls) x 100 = Call abandonment rate percentage

For example, if your practice experiences 10 abandoned calls a day and 100 total calls, your rate would be 10%.

Weave’s communication platform includes tools and features to help you track call abandonment and overall call performance. Weave compiles automatically call data, allowing you to easily review it and understand how your solutions are impacting the number of calls abandoned.

You can also use Weave to help track call routing, staffing, and call resolution metrics to continue reducing call abandonment rates over time.

Take action to reduce call abandonment in your practice

If you want to improve the patient experience and operational efficiency in your practice, reducing call abandonment is a key step. Improving your technology can make a significant difference in how you handle and respond to calls.

Weave’s communication platform helps reduce call abandonment through voice AI agents, callback requests, two-way texting, automatic reminders, and a range of other communication features.

Request a demo to learn how Weave can streamline your patient communication.