Transcript lightly edited for readability. Figures reflect the speaker’s account.
Jennifer (Jen) Dorman
Before Zingage, we probably handled at least a thousand phone calls a week. Now, some of those were easy things like, can you clock me in, clock me out? Some of those were client inquiries, which of course would be more time-consuming. And some of those were just communication things, can you send me a calendar, or can you give me a day off, that kind of thing for a caregiver. A lot of the calls are not necessarily something that somebody needs to handle. So, I think the biggest thing that Zingage helped us with is it took a lot of the monotonous calls that needed to be handled while my staff was able to handle the client-facing conversations.
On call over the years has been a challenge. Luckily, I have had one person in one of my offices do it for six years now. Before Zingage, Alexis has handled everything and done a great job, but again, she cannot take two calls at once. She cannot, you know, solve a open shift and clock someone in and out at the same time. She's only one person, and with the amount of calls she takes, it's just not possible to answer every single phone call. Zingage contains about 90% of our phone calls during on call.
That's huge because that's not just it's answering the phone, it's answering the phone, it's doing what needs to be done, and then it's marking it as done and putting it in our EMR. Alexis really appreciates Zingage, I think, because it contains the calls from start to finish. So, there's nothing left for Alexis to do, and that takes half the calls on the weekend away from her, which means I get to keep her for another year, and she's not going to burn out, which is a good thing for me.
So, when it comes to scheduling, that job is probably the hardest job in the office. Scheduling is not only knowing how to work our system, but it's knowing all the little idiosyncrasies about clients and caregivers, such as, you know, Mr. Smith likes to walk really fast. So, you really need to send a young, energetic caregiver to them. When we first started with Zingage, there were a lot of little idiosyncrasies that we thought it would miss, but it really didn't. It kind of learned our ways of doing things.
We told it what to do and what not to do. You know, if a caregiver calls off in the middle of the night, we're not calling the client at midnight and saying, "Hey, Mr. Smith, so sorry. Your caregiver just called off, but we're going to find you a new one." It worked within the parameters we set, and it also sent a report to us at the end of its shift, and we were able to see everything that happened on that shift. So, if I was thinking about hiring another scheduler, I would definitely look into Zingage.
I mean, it saved me a 40- to 50-hour employee, money-wise, for a week. So, I definitely think that, you know, the return on investment is just irreplaceable. I believe Zingage has freed us up so that we can do more personalized communication with our clients. It has taken out all of those smaller things. Zingage can deal with that, and we can do the more important things and focus on client communication and client relationships. Zingage has allowed us to focus more on the people in our business than those day-to-day tasks that took up so much time.
I think it's truly a time-saver, not only for clients, but also for office staff. My experience with Zingage has been so great. The hand-holding in the beginning was wonderful, the training. I was able to talk to not only the president of the company in a phone call that he initiated to say hello and welcome me aboard, but all of the other team members. I highly recommend giving it a try because we're pleased with the results we're seeing.
