4 Key Receptionist Policies to Keep Your Schedule Booked

Businesses depend on having a steady flow of customers. This means that your receptionist must be on the ball, taking every opportunity to fill the schedule book with a regular stream of clients. If your receptionist drops the ball, this can produce gaps in the schedule, which translates to a huge waste of time and money for your business. To prevent this from occurring, you must implement policies for your receptionist to follow that will ensure an outcome that is best for your company’s bottom line. Here are some policies you can introduce that should help you to keep your schedule book jam packed with clients.

 1. Make Sure Your Receptionist Is at the Front Desk Working

It may seem like common sense that your receptionist should remain at the front desk working. Often in an office setting, however, a receptionist will not remain at their desk, distracted by other people and things going on in the office. It may be necessary to spell these problems out in your company’s policy and procedural manual to help your receptionist know what is expected of them before they are hired into this position. Alternatively, a lot of receptionists often take time off for appointments or might take too much time running errands. Nip this in the bud quickly and communicate that they need to run errands quickly. Employees may waste company time and money on overlooked things like running errands, as explained at Salary.com. Every phone call they fail to answer is a potential client that fails to be scheduled, and that is bad for business.

2. Schedule out Many Weeks in Advance

Sometimes a receptionist will have filled up the schedule for the week and tell clients that there is no room on the schedule for them. This practice will only serve to drive clients to your competitors. The policy should be to offer to schedule clients out many weeks in advance to ensure that you lock them in as your client, and also to prevent gaps in the operation of the business by ensuring that you have enough clients coming in each week. Even if the schedule is full and the receptionist has to call back people on referrals, the policy should be to schedule them out weeks in advance, with regular friendly follow up reminders as needed to make sure the client remembers to keep their appointment.

4. Receptionist Training

A lot of times people hire a receptionist and imagine that it is not necessary to give them training specific to their particular business. This can often be a fatal business mistake. How you expect a receptionist to handle calls can dramatically affect their scheduling efforts. For instance, if you are a dental office, a company like Progressive Dental Marketing can work to help you evaluate and train receptionists on how to be effective on the phone with your customers, to ensure a higher turnover of clients for your business.

3. A Receptionist Can Double as a Marketer

With the Internet at your receptionist’s disposal, you should make it a policy to hire receptionists who also have online marketing skills. This policy can practically transform your business. A lot of that time when your receptionist is sitting at the front desk with nothing to do could be more constructively used placing online ads or interacting with customers on company social media profiles, thus filling up the schedule book even faster. Plus, an effective receptionist with marketing skills can save you tons of money in advertising costs, making this policy a must for a new business trying to pick up more of a market share.
With a little thinking, effective policies and strategies can be introduced to make your receptionist a power house for ensuring that your schedule book is filled to capacity. When that happens, your business is far more secure than when there are gaps in the stream of clients. Do not hesitate to make the necessary changes to get your company on the right track today.