If you own a dental office  and you want your staff to book more new patient appointments then it is CRITICAL that they master the use of a “transition statement”.

A transition statement is a powerful tool that will allow your staff to take control of the conversation, build trust with the patient, and will ultimately help secure the new patient.

Without the use of a transition statement… calls end up being lead by the patient, the conversation doesn’t go where it needs to the majority of the time will result in the patient saying “let me think about it and call you back”.

Today we’re going to look at the basics of a transition statement, what it is, and how to use it to have better conversations with potential new patients so that staff can book more appointments.

So let’s start off with what exactly is a transition statement?

A transition statement is just ONE sentence that can change the entire course of a call. This one simple sentence allows receptionists to take control of the conversation so that the call goes smoothly and is much more engaging.

Often times when a new patient calls your office, they are going to ask a question like “Hi, do you guys do dental implants?”

In most cases, the dental receptionist responds back with something like “Yes we do.” The patient then responds with “Ugh…Ok… how much do you guys charge for implants?” At this point, most dental receptionists and most dentists believe this patient is a price shopper who’s just calling around to see who is the cheapest dentist in their area.

We used to think this too until we learned better from our friends at All-Star Dental Academy.

What All-Star taught us was that when a patient calls asking for the price, they’re not asking because they’re sitting there with a pen and paper and calling 50 different dental offices to see who the cheapest dentist is. When patients call in asking about the price… it’s because THEY LITERALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO ASK!

The problem is that in the vast majority of cases, dental receptionists don’t know what to say either, and they don’t know how to take control of the conversation and have a great dialogue with the patient. We have listened to thousands of dental calls and when a patient asks about the price most receptionists respond back with something like this…

“Oh well… I’m not really sure…it really depends… everyone is different… you’d have to come in for a consultation”.

Responses like this typically don’t lead the conversation anywhere and make patients feel like you are not being upfront with information. It makes it seem like you just want to get them in the door to sell them, so they usually don’t book.

On the flip side, giving the patient the price also doesn’t work either. The receptionist may say “At our office, dental implants start at $3,000 per tooth” after which the patient says “oh.. okay.. thanks” and then hangs up.

When this happens, we don’t know the patient’s name, their phone number to call them back later to follow-up, we don’t know how they found out about the office, we don’t anything about their issues, whether they were missing one tooth or multiple teeth, whether they were calling for themselves or someone else, we don’t know anything at all and the conversation went absolutely nowhere.

Now let’s look at what the conversation would sound like with the use of a Transition Statement

This is a simple sentence like:

“I’d be happy to help you with that today. Would you mind if I ask you a few key questions first so I can better assist you?”

A simple sentence like this can make a night and day difference in how well the call goes.

Imagine a patient calling in and asking “Hi, do you guys do dental implants?” and your receptionist responds back with

“Absolutely. We’ve got a very talented dentist in our office who has done hundreds of implants, he’s an artist when it comes to that type of thing. Are you looking for some information on implants?”

The patient responds back with “Ugh… yeah. How much do you guys charge for implants?”

The receptionist then responds back with “I’d be happy to help you with that today. Would you mind if I ask you a few key questions first so I can better assist you?”

The patient responds back with “Sure, okay”

Then the receptionist says “Great! Well, my name is Andrea, who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today and would you mind giving me your phone number in case we get disconnected?”

This one simple sentence has shifted the power away from the patient and into the hands of the receptionist. “I’d be happy to help you with that today. Would you mind if I ask you a few key questions first so I can better assist you?” shifts the power of the call into the receptionists hands and allows he or she to be the expert. This sentence signals to the patient that they have done this before and that there is a process in place for the service they are looking for.

Because the receptionist now has the power on this call they are able to ask investigative questions that will build trust and rapport with the patient. These questions can sound like…

“How did you find out about us?”

“Are you looking for implants for yourself or someone else?”

“Are you missing one tooth or multiple teeth?”

“Is it top or bottom? Left or right?”

“Is it causing you any pain? Are you having any trouble eating?”

You can see where this goes. You’re able to have a much more engaging and meaningful conversation with that patient and make a great impression. Even if they do call a dozen other offices, it’s going to work in your favor because you will have been the only office that had a great conversation with the patient.

They are going to think “this office is the only office that actually took the time to ask me about my situation and got to know me and my needs.” This sentence creates trust and people buy from people they trust.

A transition statement is a very simple, but very powerful tool for engaging with patients. Make sure your staff know how to use it, and make sure they use it on every call, because it’s going to make a huge difference in the quality of conversations they are having with patients, and ultimately in the amount of appointments you book.

While marketing can get the phone to ring with new patients, you have to remember that how well your staff does on the phone plays a big role in how many patients actually come through the door. You could get 10 new patients calling this week, but if your staff are not well trained and have no idea what to say to patients to maximize the chance that they come in, then those 10 new patient leads may only result in 2-3 new appointments.

Vice versa, there could be another dental practice in your area that is spending just as much on marketing or doing just as good of a job and they also secure 10 new patient leads. However, if their staff ARE very well trained one how to talk to new patients, those 10 new patient leads could result in 7-8 new appointments for that practice.

As a dentist, your success is often at the mercy of your staff. If you’ve got a great team with great training, they can fill your schedule with new patients. If you don’t have the right people or they don’t have the right training, you could have the best website or marketing in the area but you’re still not going to get very far.

Your dental patients don’t really care about all of the fancy equipment in your practice. The reason why a lot of dental websites don’t perform very well is that they show pictures and talk about things that do nothing but stroke the dentist’s ego, not things patients actually want to see or are interested in reading about.

In this video, we’re going to break down what types of content and photos on your dental website will ACTUALLY help you attract new patients.

A common request we get from our dental clients is to feature all of the fancy equipment they’ve purchased at their office. They want to show off their CERC machine, or their CBCT scanner, or their dental laser. They want to make sure everyone knows that their office is not like everyone else, they’re “state of the art”

Now I get it. You’ve spent a lot of money to equip your practice with the best equipment. It’s natural to want to make sure this is front and center on your website so everyone knows it. However, here are two main reasons why this doesn’t actually work.

The first reason is that in 99% of cases you don’t actually have anything that’s really all that special. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve spoken with dentists who are showing off their fancy new laser or intraoral camera or whatever fancy gadget they bought, and they feel that this will help them really stand out, they feel like they are one of only a few dentists that have this type of equipment (because that’s what the sales rep told them), and they feel they need to REALLY promote this (because again, that’s what the sales rep told them to) and then I go on Google and find 20 or 30 dentists in their area that all have the exact same equipment.

This is something that happens ALL THE TIME, and you have to remember that dental supply companies have some of the most talented sales people on the planet. They are absolute experts at getting dentists to buy a bunch of fancy gadgets by making them feel that this will really help them stand out from other dentists… and unfortunately… in 99.9% of cases this is just not true.

Now it’s important to have up to date equipment, to do better dental work, to do it faster, to do it more efficiently, but if you think some piece of equipment is going to help you stand out or give you a big edge over other dentists in your area you are sadly mistaken.

The second reason why talking about your equipment on your website doesn’t work is… patients don’t really care. A patient has a very limited attention span when they visit your website and you don’t want to squander that time by talking about things they have little-to-no interest in.

Let me give you a good example here. Imagine you are trying to sell tickets to a cruise vacation. Instead of talking about how they’re going to discover the world, they’re going to dance the night away in beautiful cities, they’re going to enjoy the sun and the warmth… no,no,no… you instead run an advertisement talking about the diesel engines that power the cruise ship, how big they are, how much horsepower they produce. You talk about how your cruise ship is equipped with the LATEST and the BEST navigation system. We’re not like other cruise ships, we connect with much better GPS satellites for our navigation, we’re state of the art. Instead of our position being accurate on the map to 5 meters, our navigation system is accurate to 2 meters. Order your tickets today!

How successful do you think this would be? This is why so many dental websites produce little-to-no results. They are built to impress the dentist and stroke their ego rather than actually impress patients. You have to remember that when you’re trying to sell someone on Invisalign for example, that person is considering whether they should do Invisalign or if they should go with their friends on a cruise. And the cruise companies do a much better job of marketing their services than dentists do.

So what should you talk about on your website and what pictures should you show? Well when it comes to content you want to focus mostly on what a patient can expect from coming in. If someone is looking for Invisalign for example, you don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining what Invisalign is like most dental websites do, because nobody is going to land on your Invisalign page not knowing what Invisalign is and read your content and say “ohh.. that’s what that Invisalign is. I never knew. I don’t need Invisalign, but I was curious to find out what it was.”

You want to have a bit of that content explaining the service more for SEO reasons to help Google understand that you actually do provide this service. The vast majority of your content though should be around things like:

• How is this treatment carried out?
• How long does it take?
• Does it hurt?
• Do I need to take time off work?
• What can I expect to happen when I come in to YOUR office.
• How do YOU do this procedure?
• Why do YOU do it that way? Why is that better?

You want to talk about what makes you different from other practices. This is where you can sort of touch upon your equipment, but make sure it’s not the main focus, or you’ll lose people’s attention. For example, if you have a CEREC machine, you can say that “Our office is equipped to do same-day crowns.” You would focus the content on the benefit your equipment provides not what that equipment is, because again patients don’t care.

You can also focus a bit of content on the dentist who provides the treatment. For bigger cases like implants or ortho, people will want to know that the dentist who’s doing the work is an expert. While you can’t necessarily state that you’re an expert because this may go against the advertising guidelines of your governing body, you usually can say something like “Dr. so and so has been practicing dentistry for 30 years and has performed over 2,000 implant cases.” or “Dr. so and so has been doing implants for 15 years and regularly teaches at the local university.”

Again you want to review the advertising guidelines for your state or province and make sure you don’t break any rules, but you can have usually have a nice section on a page talking a little about the dentist from the angle of “this is how their experience is going to benefit you as a patient” much like you do when it comes to dental equipment. You don’t want this section to talk about how “Dr. So and so has 4 kids and he enjoys hiking and fishing on the weekends” because… nobody cares. It has to revolve around the patient and their needs.

Now when it comes to photos, you want to follow the same examples you see with vacation advertising. Pictures of happy patients, pictures of your staff in the practice, smiling, having fun, pictures of kids coming in for their first checkup, pictures of staff events, etc.

What you DONT want is pictures of an empty office. You don’t want pictures of an empty operatory showing your equipment, or pictures of your sterilization area or your CBCT scanner. Nobody is going to look at a picture of an empty dental chair with a bunch of sharp and pointy instruments on a table beside it and think “wow that looks fun!”

We see this all the time and I can tell you it is going to tank the conversion rate of your website.

Again, think of it like the cruise vacation. You want to show pictures of guests having a blast on the ship, having a wonderful vacation, you don’t want to show pictures of the engine or pictures of empty rooms on the ship or random equipment.

What your photos need to convey is that you have a nice and modern office, you have warm and friendly staff, and patients seem to be having fun and are happy to come to your office.

Things like photos and content usually seem trivial to most dentists but the reality is they can either make or break your business. The success of a cruise ship is not based on how state-of-the-art their ship systems are or how many certifications the captain holds. It’s largely based on the marketing that attracts passengers and the experience those passengers have once they are on the ship.

The same happens with dentistry. Your success as a dentist is much more dependent on your ability to attract patients and the experience those patients have when they come into your office,  than it is on your clinical skills. This isn’t to say that quality dental care isn’t important, it is, but dentists often neglect many other areas of their practice which leads to poor results over the long term.

The success of your dental practice, and your success as a dentist, is really at the mercy of your staff. If you’ve got a great team that delivers amazing customer service, you will be able to build a very successful and profitable dental practice.

However, you could be the best dentist in the world, but if you’ve got a team that is average, or below average, you’re going to be under a tremendous amount of financial and emotional stress as you have to constantly run around putting out fires in your business.

Today we’re going to talk about why you need to implement a strong accountability system to monitor and improve the performance of your team. Stick around.

One of the biggest challenges we faced when we began working with dentists is that we would build them a great website, do their SEO and rank them high on Google, create a great presence on social media… but what we were surprised to find out was that in a lot of cases… this didn’t actually create a big improvement in their new patient count.

Sure, the numbers did go up and those clients did generate a return-on-investment… but nowhere near the amount that we expected to see. When we doubled or tripled the amount of new patient calls to a practice, we expected to see double or triple the amount of new patients booked… but this wasn’t happening.

We were really curious to understand what was going on so we started to listen to every single  call coming in and… let’s just say… what we found was shocking.

Across nearly every dentist we worked with the customer service and new patient experience was lacking at best. We found hundreds of instances of staff being rude or dismissive to patients, not taking the time to engage with them and answer their questions, often just talking to patients with this demeanor that said “I don’t really care”

Let me give you some examples. Just TWO WEEKS ago, we listened to a call from a dental practice where a patient called in at 4:31 PM on a Friday. Now this practice closes at 5:00 o’clock. The patient wanted to book an appointment for next week. The receptionist told him “ohh.. I already turned off my computer, can you call us back on Monday?” 

Do you think this patient called back on Monday? No… they went somewhere else. The dentist didn’t even know about it until we showed them.

In another example, one of our dentists had recently purchased the ZOOM teeth whitening system and wanted to get more teeth whitening patients in the practice. We built them a new landing page, did their Google AdWords campaigns, and started to get them more calls for teeth whitening. Someone saw the advertisement and called the practice and said:

“Hi, do you guys do teeth whitening” ?

The receptionist says “Yes we do”

The patient asks “How do you do it? Is it take home trays?  Is it done in the office? How does it work exactly?”

The receptionist says “Ugh… I don’t really know. The hygienists have something they do but I’m not really sure, you’d have to talk to them about it”

The patient goes “Oh… ugh.. Okay. Well could I speak to the hygienist?”

And the receptionist says “Actually the hygienist is on a vacation this week, I think she should be back next week. You can try calling us back then”

The patient goes “Oh okay… thanks.”

The receptionist didn’t ask for the patient’s name, how he found the practice, his phone number to followup later, or anything at all. The funny thing is this practice could have seen the patient because they had multiple hygienists and doctors that could have done the whitening. Also the dentist who owned this practice also owned another practice on the other side of town, just 7 minutes away and the receptionist could have referred the patient to that other office instead.

Do you think this patient called back a week later to book the appointment? No, of course not. He went to a different dentist down the road.

What was shocking to us and our dentists was that these weren’t rare isolated cases, this was often the standard experience new patients were getting.

Take a look at what our clients had to say when we started to share our findings with them this is pretty much the reaction every one of the dentists had.

Here’s one of our clients that operates a very large cosmetic practice in Toronto that focuses on dental implants. He had spent hundreds of housands of dollars over the last 10 years on marketing his practice and on training his staff and was under the impression that they were delivering world class customer service. Here’s what he had to say when we shared with him a dozen call recordings showing him the experience new patients were getting when speaking with his staff.

 

Hi Nick

I’m absolutely appalled by this. I can’t believe this is my staff!

I have so many questions…

Here’s another quote from a large established office. Again this dentist had spent thousands of dollars on marketing, consultants and training. We shared with them a handful of examples of how new patient inquiries are being handled and here’s what the dentist had to say:

OMG! This is absolutely not the way I want my business handled. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I will address it ASAP.

We got this reaction from virtually every dentist we worked with. Here’s another example. One office manager said:

Hi guys,

Wow, that call was very difficult to listen to. That was probably the worst customer service call I’ve heard on her part in the 2 years she’s worked here.

Key note here… “that she’s heard”… but here’s the thing, nobody was recording or listening to any of the calls coming in before we came along, so how many times did it happen in the past 2 years? This is like catching someone stealing and thinking “well they only did this once, so I’ll forgive them” but the truth is this is just the first time you caught it, not the first time it’s happened.

In many cases the problem is that receptionists don’t really know what to say and they give patients wrong information.

In one example we had a patient call one of our clients to book a consultation for Invisalign. A new receptionist who had only been working there for 4 months told the patient “ohh… I don’t think we do Invisalign”

The patient was confused because he was looking at an Invisalign page on the client’s website. He thought maybe he called the wrong practice so he asks the receptionist if she knows anyone in the area that does it. The receptionist proceeded to give the patient directions to one of our client’s competitors down the street.

Now this may sound like I’m just sitting here bashing dental receptionists, but the truth is we were really shocked to discover this. We were just trying to figure out why new patients weren’t booking and we never expected to find what we found.

So how can you tell if this is happening in your practice, and if it is, how do you fix it? Well it turns out the reason this happens is because nearly all dental offices lack a strong system of accountability. This is what we started to implement into each dental practice. We did a few things:

• We tracked, recorded, and listened to every single call coming in. Our team found out how many calls were coming in each month, how many were new patients or existing patients, how those patients found the practice (Google, Facebook, Referrals, Flyers etc). Who they spoke with and whether they were booked for an appointment. If they weren’t, why not?
• We looked at how each staff member was performing. We found many instances where if a new patient spoke with Receptionist A, there was a 60% chance to get an appointment, but if that person spoke to Receptionist B, only 25% of calls turned into appointments.
• We tracked each new appointment request that came in from the website and followed up with the staff to see what happened. As we started to do this it became clear that a lot of patients who requested appointments weren’t even being contacted, and if they were, it was often days later after they had already decided to call and book with a different practice because nobody had reached out to them. Once we started to hold the staff accountable for those appointments and followup with them we found that patient booking rates more than doubled.

Take a look at an email one of our dentists sent us:

Hi Nick,

Just a brief update to report something astounding that happened yesterday. We booked 9 new patient exams in one day! Mind-blowing, considering nothing anywhere near this has ever happened, and rarely do we get this many in a full month never-mind in a single day. All but one came in through Google.

The truth is we didn’t actually do anything different on Google. All we did was implement a system of accountability and followed with the staff about each patient and… surprise surprise… things improved.

So if you’re not happy with the amount of new patients you’re getting, ask yourself “what are you measuring?” You may be measuring how many new patients come in, but are you also measuring things like:

• How many people contact you to inquire about different dental services?
• How are those people finding you?
• Who is speaking with these patients?
• What is your staff saying to these patients?
• What is the result of that conversation? Do they book an appointment?
• When a patient requests an appointment from your website, how quickly do the staff contact the patient back? Is it a few hours later or a few days later?
• When your staff can’t reach a patient, do they try to follow up multiple times or do they just give up after the first attempt?

If you don’t have answers to these questions then it’s likely that you’re missing a strong system of accountability in your office, and this is critical to building a successful and profitable dental practice.

We have a lot of dentists reaching out to us to help them drive more new patients. They want to build a new website, they want to do SEO, or Google AdWords, or social media, all kinds of things to try to increase patient flow.

The funny thing is however, the majority of results we get for our dentists have absolutely nothing to do with marketing at all. Most of the results we get are from finding and fixing internal issues in the office.  In today’s video I’m going to show you a behind-the-scenes look at how we do that, what data we track, how we use that data, and how we improve the results for dentists without spending a single penny more on marketing.

We’re going to take a behind the scenes look at a system we’ve built called the Scorecard that tracks what is happening with patient communication at the practice day-to-day.

I’m going to show you how we use this information to drive a lot more new patients, 20, 30, 40% increase in a year without spending any more money on marketing. In fact we are often able to help our dentists spend LESS money on marketing. So let’s jump into my computer and we’ll take a look at how this system works.

So what you’re looking at here is our Scorecard report. Now I’ve exported this as a PDF so I could redact and black out all of the personal information in here to not violate HIPPA. Normally this information is in our dashboard and a client can login to look at it, but in this case I wanted to show you a REAL client, an actual real example, not a bunch of demo data like many companies do. This is a REAL report from an actual client and what results they got in the month of December.

Now one of the first things we track is how many reviews a practice has on Google. Google Reviews are the gold standard of reviews on the internet. Most people looking for a new dentist are just going to go to whoever has the most and best reviews. Wouldn’t you?

We would tell this to all of our dentists, all of their staff, and they would listen and nod their heads in agreement… but nothing happened. Nobody did anything different. It wasn’t until we started reporting on how many reviews the practice had and how many their competitors have that things started to improve. In fact one of the most common excuses we kept hearing from dental staff was that they WERE asking for reviews, they were asking every patient.

Confused, we started looking into it trying to figure out what was going on… only to find out that when we looked at the system, the staff hadn’t logged into the system in months, they weren’t sending any review requests at all. We showed this to the dentist and the staff felt like they had been caught with their pants down. So we then started to track how many review requests were actually being sent out each month so we could create a system of accountability.

Unsurprisingly things did improve and now the dentist is the highest ranking dentist in their area, has won numerous awards like Readers Choice award, Three Best Rated award, and has seen a lot of new patients come in because of it.

The next most important thing we track is the Cost to Acquire a New Patient. I am still completely shocked to this day how more than 95% of dentists I speak with have no idea what it is costing them in marketing to acquire a new patient. They just splash money around on all kinds of random marketing activities like SEO, social media, flyers, promotions, ALL KINDS of silly things and when I ask them “what is the ROI on this?” “How many patients is this bringing in?” “How much money is this making you?”… they just sit there like deer in headlights because they have absolutely no idea.

The best they have to show is usually a report their marketing company sent them on how many “clicks” they got to their website, or how many Facebook likes they have, metrics which have about as much value as Monopoly money. You can’t pay your rent for the office with Facebook likes. You can’t pay your staff with website clicks. That’s not a currency. If you’re spending money on marketing you need to be able to clearly see how many new patients this is bringing in, and you need to validate that these patients are coming in as a direct result of the marketing, not because they were referred by someone or they walked by your practice and saw your sign. Those people would have come in anyways so it wasn’t the marketing that made it happen.

A lot of dental practices don’t operate based on data, they operate based on “feelings” If they notice a few new people coming in that week they “feel” that what they’re doing is working. They have no idea how those patients found the practice or even if they had come as a direct result of the marketing. If they have a bad week and there’s some holes in the schedule they “feel” like things aren’t working and they feel they need to try something different. This management by feeling is why a lot of dentists never achieve more than “average” results.

So in our system we track how much money the dentist has given us to do marketing. This includes website, SEO, AdWords management, content, photos, the whole shebang. It also includes how much money we spent on Google AdWords, or social media, or flyers, or whatever. In this particular case we only spent a little over $30 on Google AdWords because we just didn’t need to. Their SEO and Google Reviews were so strong they didn’t need to put more money into marketing.

As a result, we were able to generate 39 new patient leads. Now these 39 leads were patients who on the phone said they had found us on Google by doing a search for a dentist in the area, or they fill out a Request an Appointment form on the website and when asked how they found the practice, they were presented with many options like Referral, I Live in the Area, I saw your sign, etc, and they self selected that they had found us on Google. So these are 39 new patient leads came in as a direct result of the marketing investment. So we’ve spent an average of $39.03 to get a new patient who had never been there before and found us on Google to call the practice.

Of these, the staff were able to successfully secure 22 patients with BOOKED appointments.  So when we look at the total marketing spend that this dentist invested into both RevUp Dental and Google AdWords we were able to acquire new patients for $69.19 on average. Patients that found us as a direct result of the marketing, patients who came in and paid for treatment. On average from what we’ve seen in North America, most dentists are spending around $400-500 to acquire one new patient when you factor in all of the money they are spending on marketing from building and hosting their website, to social media, to SEO, etc. When we began working with this practice it was also costing us around $200 to $300 to get a new patient

In our Booking Rate section we give a breakdown of what happened with different types of calls and communications. For example we track what happened with all of the new patient leads and how many were booked. In this case the practice was able to secure 56% of new patient leads into appointments, which is pretty good given that when we first started with them the average was around 25-35% each month. It used to take 3-4 new patients calling  before 1 was booked for an appointment and now out of 2 calls they are almost always able to secure at least 1 appointment. Once you start tracking the right data, the staff and the numbers tend to improve.

We also had 40 existing patients reach out for an appointment 31 were successfully booked.  We had 30 patients call to cancel their appointment and 10 were successfully rebooked. This number is usually higher but we are in a pandemic right now.

Now out of 208 total phone calls coming in, 20 went to voicemail and 38 calls were not answered.

Of all of the appointment calls coming in this month, both new and existing patients, the staff were able to secure 76% into appointments. And of all the people filling out appointment request forms on the website only 40% were booked. Nobody contacted the business through the general form on the contact page to ask a question this month, and out of 229 total patient communications both through email and phone that happened in December, we found 20 where there was an opportunity to book an appointment but it was left in limbo.

What this means is sometimes a patient says “I’m not sure if I can do Wednesday, let me check my schedule and call you back” but they forget to call back, and the staff never bother to followup with the patient so it just slips through the cracks. We highlight this so that we can work on improving it and getting the staff to be more proactive about reaching back to patients as in many of these situations we can secure the appointment.

Now where this information is very powerful is when we look at average trends for other dental practices across North America. For example, that 40% conversion rate on the Request an Appointment forms immediately caught our attention. On average across dozens of other clients the conversion rate on these forms is around 75-90%. A patient would have to answer about 20-30 questions to request that appointment so if someone is spending 5 minutes filling out that form they are pretty serious about coming in. When we investigated this further we found it was taking the staff 3-5 days to get back to these requests and by that point they had found another dentist to go to. As soon as we brought this to the attention of the dentist and the staff the conversion rate doubled pretty much overnight as staff started to respond to these requests right away.

We look at things like what people are actually calling about and what dental services are popular in the area. We look at when the calls are coming in to make sure there are enough staff to handle the volume.  But most importantly, and the true bread and butter of the system is listening to and making sense of every single communication coming in.

We look at who calls, when they call, what their name is, what they’re looking for, if they’re a new patient or an existing patient, which staff member spoke to them, what was said on the call and what the end results were. Were we able to secure that appointment or not? And if not.. what went wrong and how can we improve moving forward?  It’s a monumental amount of work but it is critical to figuring out where the bottlenecks are in the practice.

Here’s a particular situation where we had a patient complaint. This patient called on December 8 at 3:59 pm and she was frustrated that she had not been informed that they were other options for sedation either than nitrous. She mentioned the receptionist she spoke with was rude on the phone and hung up on her. The office manager in this case did a great job of listening to the patient and building rapport, she calmly explained all of the different sedation options the practice offered and really sold the sizzle of the practice and the amazing dentist they had at the office, and in the end managed to secure an appointment with the patient.

There’s a lot that happens in a dental office day-to-day, and no matter how amazing your team is, no matter how amazing your office manager is, they cannot possibly catch every problem or be on-top of every little thing that goes on everyday. There is a lot that falls through the cracks unfortunately.  This is where we come in to help and make sure the practice continues to operate at a very high level of customer service.

We go through every communication that happens, we look at how calls are handled, we look at where the problems are, and we work with the team to fix them. Sometimes this includes a bit of training on customer service or how to deal with common objections that come up in a call like… people asking about the price and the staff not really know what to say. A lot of the improvement comes from being able to catch things before they get lost in the shuffle.