For more than 50 years, Northern Florida residents have been turning to the expert physicians at Eye Associates of Tallahassee for everything from routine eye exams to pediatric vision care to cutting-edge surgeries for a wide range of ophthalmic diseases.
Today, Eye Associates has become the region’s largest full-service eye-care practice, treating more than 40,000 patients each year at its five locations in and around the Tallahassee area.
A cloud phone system opened a world of possibilities
Eye Associates has built an extremely positive reputation with patients—earning an average 4.5 stars across 700 reviews on MDidentity, and six annual Tallahassee Magazine Awards for Best Optometry and Ophthalmology Practice.
As CEO Vicky O’Sullivan points out, this stellar reputation had led to ever-increasing patient demand, which is why Eye Associates has expanded beyond Tallahassee and opened several facilities in the surrounding cities. But as Vicky also notes, her team realized that their rapidly growing patient roster was taxing the organization’s telephony infrastructure beyond its limits.
“We take about 900 calls a day across our organization. Getting callers to the right people is mission-critical to our operations—setting up consultations with new patients, scheduling surgeries, answering questions about follow-up care or billing. If our phone system can’t support our workflows, that hinders our ability to care for patients. And our old phone system just wasn’t up to the job.”
Happier patients and more efficient workflows
As Vicky explains, switching to RingCentral’s cloud communications platform, as well as migrating the organization’s patient support team to RingCentral Contact Center, has helped Eye Associates streamline many of its daily operations while also providing patients a better phone experience than ever.
One example of a feature that delivers both benefits simultaneously—increasing employee efficiency and improving the patient experience—is the callback option in RingCentral Contact Center. “When a patient calls in and there’s a queue of callers ahead of them, we have a recorded message that lets the caller know they can hang up, keep their place in line, and receive a call back as soon as an agent is available,” Vicky says. “That has been a huge benefit to our operations, and it also lets us create a better patient experience.”
Improved performance with powerful reports
Another capability the Eye Associates team leverages to improve efficiency and create an outstanding caller experience is RingCentral’s built-in reporting engine.
As Vicky explains, “The reporting in RingCentral gives us a big operational advantage. I can review these reports to see where and when call traffic is high—and use that information to staff our phone lines more efficiently. That’s valuable both in terms of saving us from overstaffing during quiet times and getting our patients the help they need more quickly.”
“I can finally say [we have] a phone system that’s an asset to our business rather than a liability.”
Team messaging in the same app as your phone
Vicky also notes that while her Eye Associates employees are using more than the phone capability on their RingCentral softphone and mobile apps. The staff is also leveraging other communication formats to stay connected to each other as well as patients.
“Everyone uses RingCentral Messaging for chats and to check in with each other throughout the day, which is particularly useful when we’re communicating with coworkers in different offices,” she explains.
“We also use RingCentral Video for our internal team meetings and conference calls. And because we have texting capability through the RingCentral app, we’re now using texts on our business phone number to send patients appointment reminders—which is another great service that helps us offer a better patient experience.”
Consistency and professionalism with Snap Recordings
Yet another way Eye Associates has streamlined its internal operations and enhanced the patient experience is by outsourcing its recorded phone messages to RingCentral partner Snap Recordings.
“Working with Snap Recordings has been a terrific experience,” Vicky says. “They’ve helped us create a consistent voice across all of our recorded messages—our standard phone greeting, on-hold messages, menu options, even the names of our physicians.
She adds: “Outsourcing to Snap Recordings ensures we have professionally recorded phone messages at every touchpoint for our patients, and it saves us the hassle of trying to record these messages in-house.”
Grow your business with confidence
Finally, Vicky notes, having such a flexible and feature-rich cloud communications solution gives Eye Associates another operational benefit: It makes it easier than ever for the organization to continue its aggressive expansion.
“Between RingCentral’s invaluable features like the callback option, and the outstanding custom-recorded messages we receive from Snap Recordings, I can finally say that Eye Associates of Tallahassee has a phone solution that’s an asset to our business rather than a liability.”
Originally published Jun 23, 2022, updated Aug 01, 2024
