We’ve spent 3 weeks looking at different angles to improve Collections Per Hour – one of my top KPIs. So far, we’ve looked at how everyone in the practice can contribute to improving this metric. We’ve talked about front desk and scheduling, technicians and their skills, and improving the provider’s efficiency. In part 4 of this series, we’re headed into the optical to take a look at how opticians can improve collections per hour.  

Opticians fill an important role as the backbone of the retail side of your business. Their sales and service acumen is critical to your success. For most ECPs, the optical produces about half of all practice revenue.

Here are some ideas to help your opticians collect more per hour:

• Set achievable goals to reduce zero-dollar (fully-covered) frames and patient’s own frame orders. Track the results and celebrate with your opticians when they meet those goals. Then push them to improve again.
• Keep an adequate inventory of high margin frames and strive to use these as much as possible with vision plan patients. 
• Many patients do not understand their optical benefits. Make sure your opticians see that patients understand all of their benefits and get the most from their coverage.
• Schedule appointments for dispensing finished eyewear. Coordinate scheduling with the ECP such that dispensing is performed when frame selection is less likely to be needed. This eliminates distracting interruptions in the optician/patient interaction and enhances sales.   
• Address each spectacle prescription written by the ECP.

Of all your employees, opticians have the most impact on collections per eyewear unit, which is critical to overall collections per hour. Work with them on improving optical KPIs such as capture rate, AR coating percentage, photochromic percentage, etc. Use friendly competition among opticians and staff, and consider incentives to motivate them. Most importantly, keep it simple – focus on only 2 or 3 optical KPIs per year.