Telephone Excellence by Mike Mitchell

Raising Respect for the Telecom Department

Are you overworked? Do you put in long hours? Do you feel like the Telecom Department gets too little respect from other hospital departments? Welcome to the world of a hospital Telecom Manager! Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that being overworked and putting in long hours is standard operating procedure for the average healthcare Telecom Manager. The good news is that there is a remedy for that feeling of too little respect.

Before you sign me up for an extended stay in the psyche ward, let me explain. Respect comes from, among other things, cheerfully cooperating with other departments to achieve their goals without complaining about it. To professionally support the projects of other departments doesn’t even necessarily require longer hours or a greater workload. For example, I’ve always had a good working relationship with the Directors of the Marketing and the Public Relations Departments at my hospital. We’ve worked together for disaster planning and recovery, telephone directory listings, Yellow Pages advertising and several other hospital initiatives. But when the two Directors invited me to a conference to discuss a new Message on Hold system, I admit that I reluctantly agreed. After all, MOH is the responsibility of the Telecom Department. Besides that, we still had two years remaining on the contract with our existing MOH provider and if we cancelled the service guess which department would have to pay the early termination penalty? You’re right, Telecom!

Then again, I did occasionally receive complaints from country music fans that our light classical instrumental MOH selections were very boring. If the music provider slipped in an aria sung by a soprano belting out some Italian or German lyric at triple forte, then I might receive several complaint calls in one day.

Hmm, there could be some advantage to a spoken word lauding the virtues and advertising the activities offered by my hospital after all. I made my way down the hall to the conference room.

To make a long story short, we did change MOH providers and the Telecom Department did derive some benefits from changing Music on Hold to Message on Hold. First, I no longer receive complaints about the type of music we play. Second, I receive a Message on Hold script each month via email which I distribute to our hospital Operators to keep them informed of the hospital activities each month. They now can respond to any caller who might ask a question about what they heard while in an ACD queue or on hold. Third, other than the initial set up, there has been no more time involved with the Message on Hold system than with the original MOH. Forth, and most important, our Telecom Department has once again added to the respect we receive throughout the hospital as a group which willingly collaborates with the other departments to successfully implement new and innovated solutions to promote our hospital. After all, everyone thinks of the Telecom Department when they hear our Message on Hold.

Mike Mitchell