In today’s healthcare environment, patients hold more power than ever. As important as the healthcare service is, itself, a recent survey found that 69% of patients would switch providers for better customer service — and nearly 90% have left a practice because it was too hard to “do business” with that provider (Medical Economics, 2022). That “business” often has nothing to do with clinical care; it’s about their experience working with the staff via phone calls to handle insurance, billing, scheduling, and follow-ups.
The reality is that every single customer interaction is a reflection of your practice. Patients are deciding at each step: Is this a practice that values me?
To get it right consistently, every role has a part to play:
- The Office Manager sets standards and systems.
- The Team Lead monitors and mentors in real time.
- The Associate delivers front-line service with empathy and accuracy.
It gets more nuanced than this, though, as you go through each customer interaction. Let’s walk through each stage of the patient journey, connecting the dots between experience, accountability, and outcomes for each role.
Phone Calls and Complaint Handling: The Practice Lifeline
The phone is often a patient’s true first touchpoint. Nearly 50% of patients say one poor digital or phone interaction negatively colors their entire view of the practice (Healthcare Conundrum Report, 2022). Calls that go unanswered or complaints that go unresolved aren’t just inconveniences — they’re dealbreakers for patients who are looking for help in taking care of important care issues.
Handling phone calls is an almost constant task for a medical or dental front office team. That frequency of calls is a great way to find patterns in call dialogs and then establish best practice processes for teams to handle frequently asked questions or issues with ease.
Responsibilities by Role
It all starts with the Office Manager. They need to have a strong understanding of what the most frequently asked questions are, what are the most critical issues that arise, what the processes are for a seamless patient experience and, ultimately, how to train the rest of the staff accordingly. Since it’s nearly impossible to audit every single call that comes in, using a tool like Doctor Genius’ Caller IQ will save an Office Manager hours a day but providing high-level insights for where calls are going well (and aren’t), as well as text summaries of specific issues such as long hold times or billing questions.
Armed with Call Insights, the Office Manager can then create scripts and easy-to-reference talk tracks to guide the team whenever on the phones, as well as develop an auditing system to track things like unanswered calls, question categories, and conversion rates from both new and existing patients
From there, the rest of the team is now prepared to answer calls and questions confidently. Team Leads can step in to spot-check calls daily, coach Associates in the moment, or step in on escalated complaints. All that’s left for the Associate to do is follow the plan that’s been laid out for them, being sure to answer calls promptly and politely resolve calls as quickly as possible. We realize this is easier said than done, but as discussed earlier, mishandling of calls (be it with a poor tone, rushed answers, or otherwise poor customer experience) can make patients feel dismissed—potentially driving them to competitors.
Risks of Poor Call Handling
Handled well, even a complaint call can turn into a loyalty-building opportunity. But mishandling it erodes trust instantly. From a team perspective, unchecked calls lead to sloppy service patterns, unresolved complaints, and rising patient attrition. Even worse, practices who lack call oversight become invisible to revenue leaks. So, between call audits, process-setting, and diligent training, practices can ensure a positive interaction right from the start with patients, laying a path for a smooth patient-practice relationship.
The next logical test of trust comes in how smoothly a practice can handle the when and where of care: scheduling.
Appointments: Booking, Cancelling, and Rescheduling
Smooth scheduling is one of the earliest signals that a practice is organized. Seamless, easy processes build confidence; complicated and chaotic calendaring sends patients running. Inefficient scheduling has a heavy impact on healthcare practices beyond stress — nationwide, no-shows cost the healthcare system an estimated $150 billion annually (Curogram, 2025).
Similar to how responsibilities flowed in the first example, each team member plays a part in converting phone calls to booked appointments. How a practice handles this specific task is truly a “make it or break it” function that medical and dental front office teams need to excel at.
Responsibilities by Role
Calendaring across schedules is tricky. Between various providers, different offices, holidays, school schedules, patients’ work schedules, etc., there’s a lot that goes into finding the perfect time for a patient to see their provider.
While each office’s patient engagement or patient booking software may vary, what can be controlled by the Office Manager is auditing patient calls and then creating scheduling templates accordingly, especially when changes occur (i.e. a practitioner is on vacation or has called out sick). Beyond that, it comes down to identifying which appointments should be more urgently prioritized (and which can wait to be scheduled), as well as training staff on and enforcing late or no-show policies with patients. While buffer time preferences vary between offices, the fact remains that this should be scheduled in, somehow, at some point, in a physician’s day.
The Team Lead can really help mitigate calendar gaps by creating and managing a Wait List process that’s always current. With their active engagement with the Associates, they’re well equipped to ensure the staff is following scripts and navigating the scheduling tools efficiently, or train accordingly. Lastly, Associates will find how important it is to confirm appointment details, set up booking reminders, and understand the details on different appointment types and scheduling options in order to keep a full appointment calendar.
The Risks of Mis-Managed Appointment Bookings
Poor scheduling practices lead to idle providers, lost revenue and annoying bottlenecks for all parties involved. If left unchecked, expect to find double-bookings or gaps piling up, with long waits and unhappy patients not too far behind. It’s crazy to think that one small data entry error can ripple into hours of wasted provider time and patient frustration but it’s a fact that many practices realize on a daily basis.
When appointments are handled smoothly, patients feel their time is respected. That sense of trust sets them up to expect the same professionalism in the one area patients dread most: billing.
Insurance and Billing: Preventing Surprises
Patients don’t mind paying for care; they do mind being surprised. In fact, 56% of patients say they would switch providers after a poor billing experience, and 60% would leave over inaccurate cost estimates (ACDIS, 2023; Healthcare Conundrum Report, 2022). Billing isn’t just an operational detail — it’s a loyalty driver.
Responsibilities by Role
Even if “Billing” or “Insurance” isn’t in the direct job title of your team, include “financial assistant” as a core cultural component of everyone’s role in your practice. While there are important questions that should absolutely be managed by your office’s Medical Billing or Medical Coder, it doesn’t mean that the rest of your team can’t have a positive impact on the customer experience before getting to that specialist.
For example, one of the things that frustrate patients the most is not knowing where things stand and when questions seem to go unanswered for days. This is where your daily verifications by your Team Lead are important, and for them to train staff on tricky coverage questions. From there, it’s on Associates to be diligent in the process: collecting insurance information, verifying coverage before visits, and flagging mismatches early on. Office managers also have a role to play here–establishing and updating workflows to make sure teams (and patients) never skip a beat are instrumental to keeping communication flowing.
Practices with outdated processes find rejected claims and delayed reimbursements to be a common occurrence, often frustrating both patients and providers. Teams who can reduce missed verifications will avoid billing nightmares and blindsiding angry patients with unexpected bills – who will rarely forgive it.
Handled right, billing reinforces the idea that the practice is transparent and trustworthy. But transparency is only sustainable if the entire office runs like a machine — and that comes down to operations.
Conclusion
Patient experience is a chain of moments, and its strength depends on every link. While patients might not see your workflows or team org charts, they feel them. Associates create frontline impressions, Team Leads enforce quality, and Office Managers build the systems that make consistency possible.
Using software like Doctor Genius, whether for understanding how your team handles insurance, or even for sending out appointment reminders, teams can get help to ensure they’re following your Practice’s defined workflows and engaging patients as effectively as possible.
The data is clear: patients switch providers for poor service, poor billing, and poor access — but they stay loyal when they feel valued and respected. The practices that master this balance don’t just retain patients; they build reputations that fuel growth for years to come.
