The Practice Advisory Group
The Practice Advisory Group
Medical
Houston, TX
With more than 75 years of combined experience, The Practice Advisory Group focuses on comprehensive practice management services to the medical and dental communities. Services include: billing and collections, Financial reporting, Payables processing, and payroll processing.
Practice Advisory group, Financial Advisory Group and OMS Partners comprise three organizations. They all share one central office in Houston, Texas and have several other locations across the country. The main issue Function4 focused on was the current phone system that was 20 years old and unreliable, which caused issues because one of their locations is a call center to support its customers. If Houston’s phone system went down, then every phone went down, which caused significant issues during Hurricane Harvey. The current systems had very few options or features to keep the staff productive or improve customer responses.
Function4 approached Practice Advisory Group to do a full discovery. We discovered that this was not a normal situation and would need a creative approach because of the different companies and locations. There were three companies, 70 users, and ten conference rooms. They also had a call center and received other vital calls from customers that they could not afford to be sent to voicemail. Function4 used a feature-rich cloud system solution. They created different hunt groups so that instead of being forwarded to voicemail, when someone did not pick up, to call would transfer to another person. All three companies got customized auto attendants.
The three companies finally had a modern phone system with all the features. The cloud phone system meant that IT no longer had to maintain on-premises equipment. It also meant that the installation was easy and seamless. The system also gave IT an easy portal to configure phones and make changes when needed.
Since the phone system was cloud-based, all the locations did not rely on Houston to be up to be able to make calls. Employees could also download an app to their mobile phones and receive and make calls from there, which dramatically increased their uptime and customer service. Employees also liked other features like the desktop app, chat feature, transfer calls from desktop phone to cellphone, and voicemails being transcribed and emailed. Function4 also created what is called hunt groups. Certain groups within the company received phone calls that could not go to voicemail and always needed to be picked. Calls were programmed to ring to multiple people, and others to go from one person to the next until picked up rather than voicemail.