Overflow & Hold-Time Reduction for Cerbo Practices

When the phones spike

Cash-based and membership practices often run with one or two people at the front. When they are checking in an infusion patient, ringing up a supplement order and answering a member at the window, the phone rings out. Predictable surges make it worse: Monday mornings, the hour after a newsletter goes out, the week a new service is announced.

Practices miss about 30 to 50 percent of calls. For a practice whose growth depends on new members and new consults, each unanswered call can be someone who simply tries the next clinic on the list.

How overflow coverage works

Katie answers immediately, including when every line is busy, so no caller sits listening to hold music. Your practice decides when she steps in: every call, only the calls your staff cannot get to, or set windows such as lunch and after hours.

While the office is open, calls that need a person can be transferred to staff. The rest end in a structured summary your team works through at the next free moment, instead of a callback list rebuilt from memory at the end of the day.

Overflow calls are not second-class records. MedReception Autopilot files their summaries to the patient's chart in Cerbo from a staff member's signed-in browser, exactly as it does for any other call.

Splitting the work

Overflow runs best when the split between Katie and your staff is written down. A reasonable starting point for a Cerbo practice:

• Katie gathers and summarizes: visit requests, rescheduling and cancellations, directions and hours, membership questions she has approved answers for
• Transferred during open hours: calls your rules mark as urgent, clinicians asking for a clinician, anything you want a person to take live
• Sent to clinical staff: medication and supplement questions, symptoms, lab questions
• Sent to billing: payment questions, since card payments are not taken on the call

Measuring the difference

Before launch, note how often callers reach voicemail or hang up, and how long the callback list is at the end of each day. After launch, compare the same measures against your own baseline. Ask the front desk whether the window feels different too, since that is where hold time used to come from.

Watch the quality of the work as well as the volume. If staff are reading summaries and acting on them within the day, overflow is doing its job. If summaries pile up unread, the bottleneck has simply moved, and the fix is ownership of the queue rather than more coverage.