Hiring a Receptionist – Don’t Wait to Hire!

Thinking of hiring a receptionist for your Permanent Cosmetics practice? If you haven’t hired a receptionist, I am urging you to not wait. I will put it simply. You are in a procedure, and your phone rings and it’s a client for later that day whose child just got sent home, ill. You may have online scheduling but it’s not the same. You would miss that notification.

Many practitioners are utilizing online booking/scheduling system to schedule appointment, and this is very beneficial to growing your client base and creating ease for clients to book appointments. But having a receptionist can benefit you in so many ways that include properly screening your clients to rescheduling clients if someone cancels. In addition, many clients have questions they want answered and love to have an actual person to talk to.

If you had a receptionist, in the event of a cancellation, he or she would have moved up a client from later that day, the following days or the following weeks. What needs to be understood is, you can NEVER make up that time. Your client that had to cancel will reschedule up the road and take up an appointment that should have been for someone else. You can’t take 2 at once! You would also be sitting around during that cancellation and losing that income. Perhaps, you can use that time to market yourself, but you would have done that anyway, at the end of a day.

If you hired someone to answer your phone or check your online scheduling, from just 10 to 4, have them trained in Blood Borne Pathogens so they understand the importance of cross contamination, be sure they have or you can provide their Hep B series and you now have an assistant that can turn over your room for you and set up for the next client, even pull the pigments you will be using. It is the greatest asset you can offer to yourself, all while making you money.

I’m reading your mind as it says, I can’t afford it! Let me show you how you can. Let’s say you are charging $400.00 for a procedure. If your receptionist rearranges your schedule due to cancellations 1 to 2 times each week, which is considered a low number of cancellation or rescheduling in any practice, and moved a client up into that space, she has made you, $20,000.00 a year just from one reschedule. If she reschedules 2 clients, she has made you, $40,000.00. See? You can afford her.

Women have busy lives and many plans throughout their days often change. These changes are quite expensive if they occur while you are working and can’t catch that cancellation either by phone or online. I find it totally unprofessional to pick up a phone during a procedure. I have seen them wrapped in barrier film, etc. It is just not professional and completely dangerous to place it near your face with a contaminated glove. It’s just as bad to have a computer screen wrapped. Please don’t!

Maybe you’re concerned about what your receptionist will be doing in-between answering your calls or online appointments? Be sure he or she knows how to keep you on social media. Most younger people know exactly what and how to do it. Now, he or she is advertising for you!

I do hope you see these financial benefits having someone at your desk to greet your client’s. They can pre-numb your clients and offer them a refreshment. It speaks volumes about you! It truly does.

– Rose Marie Beauchemin-Verzella, CMI, CPCP

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