If you’re running a dental office, you are probably finding it challenging to effectively collect on delinquent patients. With the rising costs of employing back-office staff combined with the labor shortage, it’s becoming more and more difficult for dental offices to manage the receivables process in-house. If this sounds familiar to you, First Credit Services can help. With over 25 years of medical debt collections experience, First Credit Services leading debt collection agency in the industry. We know the time and effort it takes to manage the process correctly. Here are a few tips to help you with your delinquent accounts that we’ve learned through our many years of medical bill collections.
1. Be Proactive And Follow Up On Collections
Being proactive with your approach is the best way to find success when it comes to collections. If you don’t act quickly and take the necessary steps when needed, your chances of collecting the outstanding balance are drastically reduced. Also, following up is an essential aspect of dental debt collections and must be one of your top priorities. Putting off this task of following up results in poor cash flow and an unhealthy bottom line. It might take a lot of your time, patience, and effort to follow up on your delinquent customers, but it will be worth your effort in the end. So, be proactive, act sooner than later, and be consistent with your follow-ups.
At First Credit Services, we make full use of the data from throughout the customer debt life cycle to create a comprehensive 360-degree view of each customer. This way, we can analyze, recognize the signs of whether they will slip on your payments, and act accordingly. Moreover, with our proprietary ML engine, EngageRight, we regularly notify them about their payment dues via their preferred communication channels. This way, we can easily keep your account receivables on track.
2. Follow An Empathetic Approach
Empathy is crucial in dental debt collections. Reaching the patients who owe you debt in a personal and caring manner makes them feel valued and positively affects your collection efforts. So, digital debt collection strategy by itself is probably not a great idea. You need the right combination of technology and human touch to improve your engagement with the patients and increase your efficiency.
At First Credit Services, our ML engine has a speech analytics feature that evaluates the conversation between our agent and customer in real-time to determine their tone, context, and sentiment. It also provides agents with insights and suggestions on the best ways to handle the engagement. This way, you can ensure that the customers don’t feel alienated in the process.
3. Make Sure Your Staff Is Well-Trained
Although Machine Learning, data analytics, and other sophisticated technologies can bring in many advantages to dental debt collections, it all comes down to your staff members who interact with your delinquent patients. Your employees are the frontline of your collection efforts. Their ability to handle all kinds of patients, collecting, recording, and storing data correctly into your system, and ultimately ensuring superior customer service reflects in your results. So when hiring someone to do medical bill collections, it’s important to find someone that is friendly but can be firm and make sure that person receives the training required to handle all types of delinquent accounts.
At First Credit Services, all our agents are properly trained and qualified for dental debt collections work. We also have dedicated training and compliance departments that ensure that all agents meet proper messaging and compliance standards while communicating with your valued customers.
4. Hire a Dental Debt Collection Agency
One of the easiest and effective ways to improve your patient collection efforts is to hire a dental debt collection agency. In today’s digital, personalization-demanding world, you need to effectively deliver a good customer experience and increase your collection success while managing and running your dental office. So, let debt collection agency take care of the medical debt collections, and you focus on your core business by ensuring the best care for your patients.
First Credit Services has been helping dental offices recover their receivables since 1993 with over 25 years of experience in debt collection services, including dental debt collection. We understand that each client’s needs are unique; therefore, our approach is customized specifically for each client based on their specific requirements and goals. We have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Therefore, if you’re looking for a reputed dental debt collection agency that can streamline your collections process, First Credit Services can help. With proven solutions refined over 25 years, we are a HIPAA compliant, nationally licensed agency that excels at recovering dental debts and lost revenue faster. With our Extended Business Office (EBO) service, we assist our clients in the healthcare industry with recovering insurance balances, resolving denied claims, executing appeals and claims to rebill. First Credit also specializes in First Party Collections, Third Party Collections, and Customer Engagement services. Let us take care of your unpaid accounts while you take care of your patients.
Also read: How do Collections Work? Role of Debt Collection Agency