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With the right software, any third-party billing service can generate invoices for medical answering services. And they might even be correct, at least mostly correct. Yet it takes a company with unique industry expertise to produce accurate bills that are easy for clients to understand and that don’t contain errors, be it over-billing or under-billing.
Over-billing unfairly gouges clients, disrespects them, and causes excessive billing questions. It also escalates adjustments and requires good-faith credits. This increases cancelations, not to mention damaging the medical answering service brand. And once a medical answering service has its reputation tarnished it takes years to re-establish it, even though a subpar billing service can ruin it in months.
The opposite is under-billing, which represents lost money. That means you have less money to pay your staff and cover other expenses. Under-billing throws money away, yet it happens too often at too many answering services. No business can afford that and stay in business for long.
That’s why medical answering services need a billing partner that understands invoicing, knows the healthcare call center industry, and is familiar with answering service usage stats and state-of-the-art software.
Medical answering services subsist on cash flow. Perform the service, invoice clients, and collect payments. Then you can pay your bills. Anything that delays billing and collections, delays paychecks and paying invoices. To have the expectation of covering payroll and remitting accounts payable on time, medical answering services must generate bills efficiently and send them out quickly. Each delay in billing serves to delay payments, which hits cash flow hard. The accounting team at Call Center Sales Pro is committed to sending out invoices on time, every time.
When it comes to billing, fast is good, but accuracy is essential. Inaccurate invoices mean extra phone calls from clients, time spent investigating and explaining charges, making adjustments, offering concessions, and the potential to lose a client. It’s so much better to send an accurate bill in the first place. Call Center Sales Pro knows account usage stats from all the main answering service platforms. They take raw statistics and turn them into billable transactions according to your answering service’s exact specifications.
In an ideal world everyone pays their bills in full and on time. Unfortunately, not everyone does, and some companies can’t. When it comes to late-paying accounts, inaction is the worst response. Once an invoice becomes a past due debt, the longer it goes uncollected, the greater the likelihood it will never be collected. Eventually it becomes bad debt, which the medical answering service must write off.
The key to avoiding this from occurring is to begin working each past due charge as soon as it becomes delinquent, not next month, not next week, and not even the next day. Each day of delay lessens the chances of success.
But Call Center Sales Pro can whisk away past due concerns and handle your answering service collections. While no one can guarantee a 100 percent collection rate, Call Center Sales Pro’s time-proven techniques can achieve the best possible outcome.
If a medical answering service sends invoices on time and they contain accurate information, and then if it receives payment in full when expected, isn’t that all that matters? No. This is just the start. Though it’s a good start, there’s more.
Medical answering services need to identify their most profitable accounts and seek to retain them. Even more importantly they must determine their least profitable accounts and act to turn them into profitable ones.
Call Center Sales Pro team can run a profitability analysis after each billing cycle to determine which accounts are dragging down the entire operation. They can determine what rates those clients should pay and implement the needed rate adjustments. Using this approach, each month they turn the lowest performing accounts into valuable assets. An answering service can’t lose.
Running a profitability report after each billing cycle and adjusting the rates of underperforming outliers is an essential first step in optimizing client profitability. Beyond that, Call Center Sales Pro can pinpoint accounts that could benefit from additional services. Once identified, Call Center Sales Pro can contact these clients to upsell or cross-sell them. This provides greater top line revenue and increased bottom line profits.
Additionally, some add-on services are revenue neutral, for both the medical answering service and the client. But these services make it easier for staff to serve the client, help reduce errors, or add tangible value for the client. The outcomes of promoting these types of services produce intangible benefits.
In addition to generating meaningful billing and collection summaries for each medical answering service, Call Center Sales Pro can produce custom reports for specific accounts to meet their unique needs. These reports contain actionable data to help those clients better manage their business and serve their own customers.
The billing experts at Call Center Sales Pro carefully program each report, whether a summary analysis or detailed examination. They tap their years of industry experience and in-depth knowledge of leading answering service billing databases to produce information in a format readily usable by the client. Both the report design and its periodic generation become billable add-on services to provide greater value to clients and additional revenue for the medical answering service.
Many medical answering services work hard for their clients. They provide quality service and produce professional results. However, they fail to fully realize the rewards of their efforts by neglecting to appropriately bill for their labors. The billing analysis and selling of add-on services, such as customized reports, along with optimal collection practices, all work to accomplish one grand outcome of increasing revenue. This is the goal of Call Center Sales Pro’s billing services: to maximize revenue.
In parallel to increasing revenue, Call Center Sales Pro’s consulting services can look at your overall operation. They will identify steps to boost the bottom line. While optimizing billing to increase revenue is an essential first step, this only addresses one segment of the overall answering service operation.
Call Center Sales Pro consultants evaluate hiring and training practices, operator schedules, and the technology infrastructure. Of course, they also excel at sales and marketing initiatives. By taking steps to improve each of these areas, along with optimizing billing, the result is maximized profitability. And isn’t that the reason to own a medical answering service?
One of the premier answering service billing packages in the industry is Billing Link 4. Call Center Sales Pro has vast experience using Billing Link 4, from set-up, to optimization, to tapping its advanced features.
Medical answering services face an increasing number of tracking, reconciliation, and compliance issues to conform to governmental regulations and various business partners’ agreements. This includes:
Accurate billing not only requires an attention to detail and mastery of transactional data, but it also necessitates a strategic alignment of routine processes and records management. Call Center Sales Pro can identify areas needing alignment and standardization.
Without undertaking these critical initiatives, daily answering service functions will routinely thwart billing precision. Call Center Sales Pro works to address these misalignment dilemmas.
Contact Call Center Sales Pro for a free, no-obligation consultation on how they can help you with billing, billing technologies, and related services for your medical answering service.
