Parents also typically call to confirm that our caregivers have remembered to dispense medications or provide other types of special care required by their children. Generally, telephonic communication is the primary communications medium that we use, simply because it is the most common and frequently used communications medium among people.
Email Communications
The use of email has been tremendously influential in our industry just as it has throughout society since approximately the turn of the 21st century. When we first installed a computer system in 1995, it was strictly used to maintain information, financial records, employment information, and to generate printed material. We upgraded to Internet connectivity and email capabilities in 1997 but email was not used that often for direct communication with clients. We constructed our website in 1998 and at that time, we provided a contact us link that was initially intended to be use primarily by prospective clients.
Almost immediately, we noticed that some of our clients started using that link to contact us for routine communications. At that time, most of our e-mail exchanges came from clients' business computer systems because while many professional businesses had already implemented Internet connectivity,...
In between 1999 and 2000, we noticed a dramatic increase in the use of email for routine communications and inquiries from our existing clients and we upgraded our network system to be able to handle the increased volume of email communications.
Now that email communication has become the primary means of communication besides the cellular telephone, we have changed many of our procedures to make sure that we exploit that medium to its full potential. We provide our customers with an electronic email newsletter and we frequently use email to provide supplemental information as necessary. We also give our clients the option of receiving their billing information online only, for which we give a nominal discount to support the global environment and because it would reduce our overhead if we could gradually convince all of our clients to go paperless. Communication via email offers instantaneous transmission of critical information in a format that also allows us to delay responding to routine exchanges. That is tremendously helpful to us in comparison to telephonic communications because they require a real-time response whether the nature of the communication is critical or merely routine.
