I will acknowledge that I know I’m lucky to live in a city where there actually in competition for phone and internet providers. In many places around the country, you are caught in a monopoly or duopoly and don’t even have the opportunity to threaten to switch and are stuck with something overpriced that always cuts out and gives you half of what was promised. Not to mention calling in to the customer support is about as fun as having a root canal with no anesthesia! I know the complaints everyone else has to make, so being lucky enough to have three options in my community means that I’m not beholden to just one company.
Still, you’ll have to forgive me for complaining about the mess they made when I finally got a better deal on my contract. My system was down for five days while they were sorting out the mess. I’m a therapist, my clients need me to be available. Fortunately they were able to route the calls from the landline to a cell phone, but without my reservation system being online, I was completely at a loss for knowing who was ringing me. Without Absolute People Search, the mental health of my patients would have been at risk. I needed to be able to return phone calls in quick succession and ensure that they felt valued and not neglected – not to mention I had a standard of quality to uphold in not sounding as frazzled as I felt!
With their all-inclusive databases, I was able to track down each phone number and know which patient had called me. So many people forget to leave their names when leaving a voicemail! I had to revert to old school paper agenda planning while my internet connection was toast, but at least this was one thing I didn’t have to worry about: my patients were going to be okay. Reverse phone lookup meant that I could quickly return calls and ensure that my divorced couple patients were coming in on separate days and wouldn’t run the risk of being at the office at the same time. I was able to return the call of a patient whose mother had just died unexpectedly and offer condolences immediately instead of being caught unawares.
Even after my internet was rebooted and my systems were up and running again, I found myself turning to the simple-to-use website time and time again to clarify when a patient’s form had bad handwriting and I couldn’t figure out how to spell their name, or their bill was bounced back as undeliverable – all I had to do was pop in their phone number to double check my information and fix the problem with no delay to the patient. The commercial and government sources were able to track down all the publicly available information and ensure that my patient’s care was uninterrupted due to my personal emergency. It was so easy to use and so quick in its results – I couldn’t believe I’d never turned onto it before!