Medical record requests. Service of process requests. Estate planning document requests. Contract language review requests.
These and dozens of other routine requests (and replies) account for a high percentage of your practice’s email volume. The question is, are you optimizing the use of email templates to make all that communication easier and faster (i.e., more efficient)?
If you’re not, you and your staff are wasting hundreds of hours a year needlessly re-typing text. And in addition to the wasted time, all those individually typed emails often a) contain typos, and b) leave out important information – neither of which will happen when you use well-drafted templates.
They’re easy to create, so make it a short-term project to get the ball rolling this week, whether you do it yourself or assign a support person to tackle it.
Here are two solutions:
The gold standard for Outlook template plugins is http://www.emailtemplates.com/. The program is easy to install and use. It adds a toolbar to Oulook that lets you select any template you’ve created. Unlike the do-it-yourself method I’ll describe in a minute, this plug-in also lets you reply to a message using a one-click template. This plug-in costs $79 for one user, $299 for up to five users, and it goes up from there.
A still-very-useful alternative is to simply create a new email message and save it as an “.oft” file. Note that Outlook will store these template messages in a deeply buried folder that makes retrieving them a 3 step process. Instead, I recommend creating a folder called Email Templates on your desktop or shared drive (or other easily accessible location) and save the template there. Then, when you want to send an email using a template, you just double-click the one you want to use. (Putting them on a shared drive allows all of your staff to access them.)
Don’t forget YouTube as a resource. Search for “Outlook email template” and you’ll find several very good video tutorials.
If you’re not an Outlook user, YouTube will likely have videos for your specific email program.
There’s no avoiding our increasing dependence on email. So rather than bemoan this fact, we’re wise to learn how to optimize our use of it. Email templates are the kind of upgrade that’ll cause you to wonder why you didn’t start using them sooner.
