Eye Associates of Tallahassee

Tallahassee’s Largest Ophthalmology Practice Streamlines its Operations and Improves the Patient Experience with RingCentral
Eye Associates of Tallahassee logo

18,000

calls per month handled across all five locations, using RingCentral and RingCentral Contact Center

1

consistent, professionally recorded voice for all phone messages, thanks to Snap Recordings

0

complaints from patients about hold times or calls back since rolling out RingCentral
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.

Vicky O’Sullivan

Chief Executive Officer
When residents of Northern Florida need eye care—from a routine checkup, to LASIK surgery, to treatment for diseases such as glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy—they turn to Eye Associates of Tallahassee more than any other local practice.
The region’s oldest and largest ophthalmic medical group, Eye Associates runs a thriving practice with five locations in the Tallahassee area, treating more than 40,000 patients each year. The organization’s expert physicians and support staff have proven so popular with patients, in fact, that Eye Associates is a six-time recipient of the Tallahassee Magazine annual award for Best Optometry and Ophthalmology Practice.

A legacy phone system on the blink

To meet the ever-increasing patient demand for its ophthalmic expertise, Eye Associates of Tallahassee has expanded over the years, building locations in the surrounding cities of Perry, Quincy, and Marianna, with more locations planned. And while this expansion has been great for business, and for patients in the region, it also taxed—and eventually broke—the organization’s legacy phone system.
“We take about 900 calls a day across our organization,” explains Vicky O’Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer. “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.”

RingCentral enables a more seamless operation and better patient experience

Vicky’s research into cloud communications platforms led her to RingCentral. And as she explains, Eye Associates of Tallahassee’s new telephony partner delivered precisely the solution she’d been looking for.
“What’s great about RingCentral is how easy it is to set up and adjust our phone system ourselves, through the online portal,” Vicky says. “We can create call groups to answer specific lines at specific times, set up prompts to get callers to the right place more quickly, and adjust these rules easily anytime. These are capabilities we didn’t have with our old system.”
Another key capability Eye Associates of Tallahassee has for the first time 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.”
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.

Vicky O’Sullivan

Chief Executive Officer
INDUSTRY
Medical practice
HQ
Tallahassee, FL
YEAR FOUNDED
1960
EMPLOYEES
125

Adding consistent, professional messages—with Snap Recordings

To make Eye Associates of Tallahassee’s phone experience even more streamlined and professional for callers, Vicky asked RingCentral to recommend a recording service—and RingCentral introduced her to the experts at 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.”
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.

Vicky O’Sullivan

Chief Executive Officer

Using the RingCentral platform to unlock even workflow improvements

In addition to using RingCentral’s cloud-based phone solution on their smartphones and laptops, Eye Associates of Tallahassee’s employees have found numerous other capabilities in the solution to improve their daily operations.
“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,” explains Vicky.
“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.”
We’re growing rapidly. And thanks to all the ways RingCentral lets us easily communicate with each other from any device, we can keep Eye Associates of Tallahassee operating like a close-knit team no matter how large or geographically spread out our company becomes.

Vicky O’Sullivan

Chief Executive Officer