Easton Dermatology Associates
Easton Dermatology Associates Boosts Key Patient-Satisfaction Metric by 400% with RingCX
400%
improvement to patient scores on survey question about ease of scheduling by phone
97%
of the company’s 7,000 monthly calls answered in 2 minutes with RingCX
25%
time saved for managers now using RingCX’s Supervisor Dashboard
With our old phone system, we didn’t have any reporting or insight into how our patient-support team was performing. Now that we have RingCX, I can see those analytics, so I can tell you our agent performance is all moving in the right direction–from improved answer times to shorter handling times to a near-zero abandon rate.
Lainie Elliott
Patient Support Manager
A multiple-award-winning medical practice
For decades, the expert dermatologists and physician assistants at Easton Dermatology Associates have been helping patients with everything from cosmetic skin improvements to cutting-edge treatments for Melanoma and other forms of skin cancer.
The full-service dermatological practice wins regional awards year after year for outstanding service–including multiple annual “Best in Healthcare” honors from Metropolitan Magazine, a “Best of the Eastern Shore” award, and the 2021 “Best of the Best” designation from APG Chesapeake. Easton Dermatology Associates also maintains a perfect 5-star rating across dozens of patient reviews.
INDUSTRY
Medical practice
HQ
Salisbury, MD
YEAR FOUNDED
2003
EMPLOYEES
65
A call-center system whose warts were showing
As a sought-after medical and cosmetic dermatology practice, Easton Dermatology Associates experienced a steady increase in new patients. To meet this growing demand, the practice added more providers and new locations. But as grateful as the team was for the growth, Patient Support Manager Joyce “Lainie” Elliott explains that it taxed the organization’s on-prem telephony environment to the breaking point.
“Our phone system just couldn’t handle the traffic. A caller would press a number for one extension and get transferred somewhere else, or to nowhere at all. Patients would be on hold so long that they hung up. I used to describe our phone environment as ‘pure chaos.’”
A smooth transition to RingCX
With their phone system consistently underperforming the practice’s otherwise 5-star-rated patient experience, Lainie and her team turned to trusted Telecom and IT consultant Chesapeake Telephone Systems (CTS) for help.
“The practice didn’t have a true call-center solution, and that’s what they needed,” says CTS Senior Account Executive Tim Carey. “Their on-prem system basically consisted of an auto-attendant and a phone menu, and with their traffic reaching hundreds of calls a day, it became too much for the system to reliably manage.”
When our technology partner CTS introduced us to RingCX, we realized how much we were missing in terms of the caller experience for our patients. Now we have true call queues to ensure agents efficiently and quickly answer calls, for example, and our managers can easily drop in and monitor agents’ calls in real-time to improve training and performance.
Lainie Elliott
Patient Support Manager
Empowering their patient-support agents to shine
Lainie notes that after the CTS team had helped implement RingCX and onboard her call-center team, the Easton Dermatology Associates patient-support operation began improving by every important metric.
“Now that we had a true call-center solution, the other support-team manager and I quickly saw massive improvements to both our efficiencies and the caller experience,” Lainie says. “Our abandon rate, which had been relatively high before because so many calls never reached an agent, dropped down to almost nothing.
My small team of agents handles more than 7,000 each month. And since we moved to RingCX, our agents answer 97% of those calls within 2 minutes.
Lainie Elliott
Patient Support Manager
Another notable operational improvement, Lainie notes, has been the agents’ acceptance rate–meaning the percentage of calls ringing to an agent’s line that the agent answers. “I don’t know how we could improve on our new RingCX agent acceptance rates, which have consistently been between 99% and 100% for every agent for months.”
Since moving everybody over to RingCX, our average call-handle time now drops consistently month after month. Last month it was down to 2 minutes and 17 seconds, a 7% drop from the previous month. Every reduction in average call time means both that we’re improving the patient experience, by helping them more quickly, and that our team can help more people–which means more business.
Lainie Elliott
Patient Support Manager
Patients give the caller experience glowing reviews
Yet another indicator of how much Easton Dermatology Associates has improved its caller experience with RingCX, Lainie explains, shows up in data from the organization’s post-call surveys.
“After our support agents complete a call, we give the patient a survey to gauge their experience. Given all the challenges we had with the old phone system, it wasn’t surprising that we regularly received a 1-star response to the ‘Ease of scheduling by phone’ question. But since we switched to RingCX, we consistently earn 5 stars on that question.”
Strategic tools for call-center managers
As Lainie explains, the capabilities in RingCX’s Supervisor Dashboard have also given her and the other call-center managers new ways to improve the team’s operations strategically.
“From a supervisor’s standpoint, I think the most valuable feature in RingCX is the ability to monitor any agent’s performance just by jumping into a call in real time. This lets us observe how our employees interact with patients, discover any issues, and deal with them immediately. My team and I also use the monitoring capability to improve training and onboarding.”
Lainie adds that she also finds tremendous value in RingCX’s analytics tools.
The best we could do with our old system was say, ‘We received 487 calls today.’ But with RingCX, I can see how many patients are calling to schedule appointments and how many are calling for other reasons. And using data like answer time, average handling time, and how many calls each agent takes in a day, I can now identify our high-performing agents and determine which ones might benefit from additional supervision or training.
Lainie Elliott
Patient Support Manager
The perfect call-center solution for a growing practice
Lainie points out that Easton Dermatology Associates has big plans for its RingCentral solutions.
The company has deployed RingEX as the primary business phone system for its doctors, physician assistants, and other staff–and will continue giving each new employee a RingEX account that they can use via the desktop softphone or mobile app.
Soon, Lainie expects to work with their consultant CTS to integrate RingCX into the organization’s practice management solution.
But what Lainie, her team, and Easton Dermatology Associates’ executives find most valuable about RingCX is the fact that they now have a call-center solution capable of supporting their rapid growth.
Our practice has become so busy that we’re booking new-patient appointments at least seven or eight months out. We’re obviously growing, and with RingCX we’re confident that we can continue delivering outstanding service no matter how many locations we add or how many more patients we take on.
Lainie Elliott
Patient Support Manager