Before You Hire Another Front Desk Person, Run This Coverage Math

You have been thinking about adding another front desk person. Before you post the job, there is a piece of arithmetic worth doing — and it is not about the wage. You already know the wage.

It is about the hours.

Forty against a hundred and sixty-eight

A full-time person covers roughly forty hours a week. Your practice number can ring across all one hundred and sixty-eight. And that forty is the optimistic figure, because it assumes they are always available to pick up.

• They take holidays — properly, and they should.
• They get ill. They take lunch.
• They are frequently already on another call when the next one arrives.
• They are dealing with the person standing at the desk in front of them.

None of this is a criticism of anybody. It is simply what one person is. The gap it leaves is structural, and hiring a second person narrows it without closing it.

Now the honest other side

A good front desk person does things software simply cannot, and any vendor who pretends otherwise is selling you something.

• The difficult call, handled with judgement.
• The patient who is upset, and needs to feel heard rather than processed.
• Knowing that Mrs. Chen’s daughter drives her in, so a Tuesday morning will not work.
• The hundred small courtesies that make a practice feel like somewhere people want to return to.

You should not try to replace that. You cannot. So the question is not person versus software — it is which work belongs to which.

Sort your calls into two columns

Go through last week honestly. Most practices find their calls fall cleanly into two groups.

Keep with a person: upset or distressed callers, clinical questions of any kind, billing disputes and insurance complications, and long-standing patients who need a familiar voice.

Reasonable to automate: opening hours, address, parking and what to bring; routine rebooking of an established patient; first-time callers wanting the next available appointment; and anything arriving after hours or while the line is engaged.

Now look at what actually fills your front desk’s day. Reading out the same opening hours. Taking the same details. Booking the routine visit that was never in doubt. That is the second column, and it is the work worth handing over — not the hard calls, the repetitive ones.

The real question

This reframes the decision usefully. It is not whether to add a person. It is what you hand back to the person you already have.

When the phone stops interrupting them every few minutes, they get to do the part only a person can do — and that is usually worth considerably more to your practice than the calls they were fielding.

Sometimes the honest answer is still to make the hire. If your second column turns out to be small, automation will not change much, and you should know that before you spend anything. Any vendor who cannot imagine an outcome where you do not buy from them is not advising you.

— Dr. Tom Preston, Full Circle Coaching & Consulting