Why Rehabs Need Our Call and Chat Service
We don’t need to outsource our admission calls and chats; we have five or more employees who rotate calls and chats 24/7.
Every time I hear someone say that — I know they’re letting a ton of money fall through the cracks. That’s because, most likely, half of the callers to your treatment hang up on the second or third ring.
Your callers need to be called back instantly. When a facility is rotating calls to non-dedicated closers, those hang-up callers are not called back in time and end up at your competitors. Chats enable you to allocate your resources better.
Chats can take up to 30 minutes. Sometimes they are a total waste of time. Other times, they are one of the best forms of leads. When an undedicated or busy staffer is in the rotation for chats, they tend not to respond. Instead, they hope that someone on the team will get the chat. When this happens, the chat usually goes unanswered, and the lead is lost for good.
When you lose a person on your chat platform, you often need a way to reconnect with the person. That’s because you need their incoming caller ID. Sure, you can provide a pre-call survey, but we find that information often needs to be more accurate.
What is a lead worth for your drug and alcohol treatment center
Definition: CCC is a Call, Chat Closer. What we call the three C’s
Every time a CCC answers the phone or responds to a chat, we have to think of three things immediately
- First, this can be a life and death situation; I have a person’s life in my hands.
- Second, this call cost my company $1,000 to create.
- Third, this could be $50,000 to $75,000 worth of revenue for my company.
This is not a job you can do part-time or when you’re preoccupied. This is a day and night job. This is not a process to be taken lightly. You must have a call and a chat service for your drug rehab.
For Drug Rehab Centers – Time is of the Essence
If a lead comes from the internet, you can be 100% sure they are or will be contacting many other competitors.
You must take control, gather information, give information, and build a relationship from the first call. They must be prioritized, whether a call, email, form, or chat.
Drug Treatment Centers Need to Make Important Assumptions
When the phone rings, assume this is your client’s third phone call. The first two treatment centers they contacted didn’t answer. They left a message. Assume if the phone beeps while you are talking with them, it’s a competitor calling back. Your competitor is aggressively trying to get them into their facility.
Assure your potential client that they shouldn’t take any other calls. Let them know that “you’ve got their back.” One of the ways to assure them is by getting them to either text their insurance card (which eliminates transposed numbers) or enter it into an online VOB system.
VOB Verification of Benefits and Insurance knowledge:
You must be able to run an online VOB while the caller is on the line (on the first call) if they have their insurance card. An online VOB is about 80% accurate. It gives you enough info to ask the right questions. It will provide information like deductibles, out-of-pocket max, out-of-network benefits, and co-pay percentages.
CCC needs to understand the financial ramifications of the above to engage the client and keep them from contacting another center. If the CCC understands the entire process and its financial wiggle room, it will retain the customer while the intake department calls the insurance company for a formal VOB.
What if the caller doesn’t have their card?
When someone doesn’t have their insurance card handy, find out where they got their insurance. It is crucial you do this without insulting them. You will hear things like I got my insurance from an employer, a spouse’s employer, or parent — right off the bat, you have got a higher quality lead. The next thing to discover is the insurer’s name and whether the policy is a PPO or HMO.
Drug Treatment Center Calls and Building Trust
Nothing builds trust like sharing a personal recovery story in common with the caller. Most callers are calling for a loved one. They want to hear that you have put a significant other, child, or sibling into treatment, and it worked. You need a personal story for every situation. Build trust and report.
A Dog with a Bone:
Treatment is not a one-call close. It is far from it. Getting a client into treatment, especially from out of state, takes 10-25 outgoing calls and 5 to 50 texts. You must stay constantly engaged with the client and their family, as 14,000 other treatment centers are clamoring for your client.
Not a 9 to 5 job:
50% of clients will be lost if the CCC is not immediately available day and night, seven days a week. CCC must be available 16 hours a day, seven days a week, to make and receive calls and texts. Whether it is a potential client stalling, going on a run, getting sick, changing their mind, codependent family members backing down, no ID for the plane flight, missing connecting flights, needing a lawyer letter, the list of things that go wrong goes on and on.
Hours and work ethic:
Some inquiries come from Monday to Friday from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., but most questions regarding treatment typically come in on the weekends and Monday through Friday between 5 PM and 11 PM. You must be available 16 hours a day, seven days a week, to make and receive calls, texts, and chats.
Always “On-Call” like a Surgeon:
Being a CCC is a lifestyle as crucial as being a brain surgeon. It is life and death in some cases. You can go hours or a day or two without a call or text, and all of a sudden, in the middle of dinner with your family, weekend activities with a date, driving down the road, or watching a sporting event, that call or text comes in, and your help is needed right now. This is not the exception to the rule. It is a commonplace. Like a surgeon called into the hospital, the treatment admin and their families have to be willing to stop what they are doing and respond to the call.
I am on an airplane with my family on the way to a wedding. I have been writing this and other documents while using the airline’s internet for texting emails. I have sent and received about 30 texts in the last two hours with two clients and several treatment centers. Both clients got approved for the treatment and arranged for their assessment call.
Working your drug treatment center database
A separate phone number and system should be set up for the phone number on the website and all marketing pieces. Sometimes, you need multiple phones with different area codes to call from to chase addicts down.
Lead Source All leads are Created Unequally:
When a call or chat comes in, a CCC needs to be able to identify the source of that call at that second. Was it an SEO web call, PPC Web Call, YouTube, Radio, or TV? Knowing the source will tell you what the sense of urgency is, and second, it helps you track the results that matter to the admission conversion rate. This is the only way to monitor advertising effectively.
Every Caller Leaves Happy;
If your facility cannot accept a caller for treatment, every caller must leave the phone with other options. Everyone leaves happy when the caller is referred to SAMSHA, Salvation Army, AA, NA, Celebrate Recovery, or Al-anon. It’s the right thing to do and good business. Addiction is a family disease, and just because the current client cannot be admitted, 1 out of 100 callers may refer a person you can help in the future, which could be $50,000 in revenue to your center. So every caller we can’t help needs to be treated like you are putting $50,000 in the bank.