In the competitive world of dentistry, it’s crucial for your team to be skilled in effective phone communication. How your team talks on the phone can greatly impact your dental practice’s success.

In our recent webinar, we discussed essential steps to improve your phone conversations, specifically tailored for the dental field.

When it comes to answering phone calls at a dental practice, it’s essential to recognize the significance of the initial impression you make. The way you greet patients can significantly impact their perception of your practice. Therefore, follow these key principles to ensure a warm and effective phone interaction.

Begin by extending a warm welcome that conveys friendliness and professionalism. This can be achieved by offering a pleasant greeting, such as “good morning” or “good afternoon,” immediately followed by stating the name of your dental practice, thereby confirming to the patient that they have indeed reached the right destination.

Furthermore, it’s equally crucial to introduce yourself by sharing your name, which adds a personal touch to the conversation. This introduction not only humanizes the interaction but also allows the patient to address you by name, making the conversation more engaging and personable.

Initiating the conversation, instead of leaving it entirely up to the caller, is another important aspect to consider. By doing so, you ease any potential discomfort the patient might feel and create a more welcoming atmosphere for them to express their needs or concerns.

Additionally, remember the power of maintaining a friendly and warm tone throughout the conversation. Smiling while speaking, even if the patient can’t see it, can convey a sense of warmth and professionalism. This simple action can help build trust and rapport with the patient.

Lastly, avoid using gimmicky or condescending phrases in your greeting, as these can come across as insincere or even off-putting. Stick to clear and effective openings, such as “this is ABC Dental,” which provide all the necessary information without any unnecessary embellishments.

Shifting the power during phone conversations is a vital aspect of ensuring effective communication, especially in the context of a dental practice. It involves taking control of the conversation without overwhelming the patient. When you leave the patient to ask all the questions, it can make them feel like they’re carrying the weight of the conversation, which is far from an ideal scenario.

Consider a typical situation where a patient inquires about a dental service, like dental implants. They might ask something like “Do you guys do dental implants?” In some instances, the receptionist may respond with a curt “Yes, we do,” leaving the patient to figure out what to say next. This approach often leads to misunderstandings. It’s important to realize that when someone asks about the cost, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re just price shopping. More often, it’s because they don’t know how else to initiate the conversation.

Now, let’s delve into the psychology behind these interactions. If a receptionist responds with a simple “Yes, we do” and leaves it at that, the caller might perceive it as dismissive or uninterested. This is one of the primary reasons dental practices believe that potential patients are merely price shopping, not genuinely interested in their services.

In reality, patients seek answers to various questions, but the cost inquiry is a common starting point because it feels safe and straightforward. However, what follows next is crucial. If the receptionist immediately assumes that the patient is not serious or feels irritated, it can negatively impact the conversation. The receptionist’s tone may change, and they might hurry through the interaction, leaving the patient unsatisfied and less likely to choose their practice.

Alternatively, some receptionists might insist on an in-person consultation before providing any cost information. While this approach is intended to ensure a thorough evaluation, it can come across as a barrier to potential patients. The patient might interpret it as an unwillingness to provide straightforward answers or an attempt to delay the process.

So, how can the power dynamic in these conversations be shifted to create a more positive experience? It’s surprisingly simple yet highly effective. Instead of instantly diving into cost details, the receptionist can acknowledge the cost question and gently say, “Can I ask you some questions so I can better assist you?” This simple phrase signals to the patient that their inquiry is taken seriously, and it shifts the responsibility of guiding the conversation onto the receptionist’s shoulders.

By asking a few relevant questions, the receptionist can better understand the patient’s specific needs and concerns. For example, if a patient inquires about dental implants, the receptionist can ask about their dental history, the reason for their interest in implants, and whether they’re already a patient at the practice. These questions not only provide valuable information but also show the patient that the receptionist is genuinely interested in helping them.

The concept of “Discovery questions” in phone conversations involves asking specific questions to understand the patient’s situation and needs better. These questions go beyond basic information and help receptionists tailor their responses effectively. While some common questions like patient status and contact information are important, “Discovery questions” aim to uncover unique details about the patient.

Examples of effective “Discovery questions” include asking about the patient’s recent dental history, whether they are experiencing pain, if they have specific treatment preferences, and how long they’ve been considering treatment options. Additionally, inquiring if the patient has contacted other dental practices and what those practices told them can provide valuable insights.

Furthermore, questions like, “Do you need this for something special?” can help receptionists connect with the patient on a personal level and understand the urgency or motivation behind their inquiry.

“Discovery questions” in dental phone conversations are designed to gather essential information about the patient’s situation and motivations, enabling receptionists to provide more personalized and effective assistance. These questions enhance the overall patient experience and improve the chances of converting inquiries into appointments.

Building rapport with patients over the phone is essential to create a positive connection and make them feel valued and cared for. When patients feel comfortable, they are more likely to trust your dental practice and follow through with appointments. Here are some tips on how to build rapport effectively during phone conversations:

• Show empathy: Patients often call with dental issues, pain, or anxiety. Express sympathy and understanding for their situation. A simple “I’m sorry to hear that” or “I understand how you feel” can go a long way in showing empathy.
• Acknowledge anxiety: Dental anxiety is common, so let patients know it’s perfectly normal to feel nervous. Reassure them that your team is experienced in handling anxious patients and that their comfort is a priority.
• Personalize the conversation: Ask open-ended questions about their situation or interests. For example, inquire about their family, kids, or any special events like weddings. Showing genuine interest in their lives helps create a more personal connection.
• Be patient-friendly: If a patient has to reschedule due to a family emergency or similar situations, be understanding and accommodating. Offer alternatives and make the process as smooth as possible.
• Laugh and engage: If patients crack jokes or use humor to cope with their anxiety, don’t ignore it. Laughing and acknowledging their humor can help ease tension and make the conversation more pleasant.
• Compliment and congratulate: Celebrate special occasions or milestones mentioned by the patient, such as weddings or anniversaries. Offer genuine compliments and congratulations to make them feel valued.

Overall, building rapport is about making patients feel heard, understood, and respected. It fosters trust and enhances the patient experience, increasing the likelihood of successful conversions and long-term patient relationships.

Promoting your dental practice during phone conversations is an effective way to attract and retain patients. Here are some strategies to incorporate into your conversations to highlight the positive aspects of your practice:

• Mention Amenities: Bring attention to any special amenities your practice offers. For instance, mention that you have Wi-Fi in the waiting room, a toy box for kids, or free parking. These amenities can make the patient’s visit more comfortable and appealing.
• Highlight Expertise: If you have experienced dentists or specialists on your team, emphasize their expertise and years of experience. For example, you can say, “Our dentist, Dr. XYZ, has over 20 years of experience, so you’re in capable hands.” This reassures patients about the quality of care they can expect.
• Comfort and Care: Reiterate your commitment to patient comfort and care. Mention that your hygienists are known for being gentle and ensuring patients’ comfort. While all dental professionals prioritize patient comfort, stating it explicitly reassures patients.
• Family-Friendly: If your practice is family-friendly, let patients know. For example, mention that you have a dentist who is excellent with children and even has a toy box. Parents will appreciate this information, making them more likely to choose your practice for their family’s dental needs.
• Flexible Hours: If you offer extended hours or weekend appointments to accommodate busy schedules, communicate this to patients. Saying, “We know people are busy, so we stay open late on Thursdays. Does that work for you?” can be very appealing.
• Pre-Appointment Information: Before ending the call, provide essential pre-appointment information. Confirm the appointment date and time, mention that a confirmation email and text will be sent (with a link to a new patient information form if applicable), and provide your practice’s address. Highlight any unique landmarks that make your location easy to find.
• Duration of Appointment: Provide an estimate of how long the appointment is expected to take. This gives patients a clear idea of what to expect and helps them plan their schedules accordingly.

By incorporating these elements into your conversations, you not only promote your practice effectively but also create a positive and reassuring experience for patients. Patients are more likely to choose and stick with a practice that goes the extra mile to make them feel comfortable and valued.

Remember that people typically call a dental practice because they are in pain, anxious, or in need of dental care, not for fun. Being empathetic, professional, and promoting the benefits of your practice can make a significant difference in the patient’s decision to choose your practice for their dental needs.

The success of your dental practice, and your success as a dentist, is 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, 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.

In this article, we talk about why you need to implement a strong accountability system to monitor and improve the performance of your team.

When we first began working with dentists, we would build them a great website, do their SEO, rank them high on Google, and create a great presence on social media– but we were surprised to find that in a lot of cases, none of this made 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 number of new patient calls, 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 that what we found was shocking.

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

Let’s take a look at some examples.

From the tens of thousands of dental calls we listen to each month, what we often find is that, at best, customer service is lacking. Dentists believe it’s their marketing that is holding them back but in 90% of cases we find that dentists have enough new calls coming in they could easily double the patient flow without doing anything different, or spending more, when it comes to marketing.

Take a look at what our clients had to say when we started to share our findings with them. We’ve removed the names to keep things confidential and not identify any particular practice, but this is pretty much the reaction every one of the dentists had.

Here’s one of our clients that operates a large cosmetic practice in Toronto that focuses on dental implants. He had spent hundreds of thousands 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 by their staff.

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. 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.

Notice that she writes, “…the worst customer service call I’ve heard…” But 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 two 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 the 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 we’re 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 that 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, and how those patients found the practice (Google, Facebook, Referrals, Flyers, etc). We also tracked which receptionist 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 follow up with them, we found that patient booking rates more than doubled.

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

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

So if you’re not happy with the number of new patients you’re getting, ask yourself: “What am I 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 does 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.

If you own a dental office and you want your staff to book more new patient appointments, then they must 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 prospective patients, and ultimately secure them as new patients.

But what exactly is a transition statement, and how do we use it? Keep reading to find out!

A transition statement is a single 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.

Without the use of a transition statement, a call will often end up being led by the patient and the conversation doesn’t go where it needs to, resulting in the patient ending the call without booking an appointment.

Often, when a new prospective patient calls your office, the conversation might go something like this:

Patient: “Hi, do you guys do dental implants?”

Receptionist: “Yes we do.”

Patient: “Ok… how much do you guys charge for implants?”

At which point, most dental receptionists will assume that the patient is a price shopper calling around to find the cheapest dentist in their area. They’re not alone. We used to think this too– until we learned better from our friends at All-Star Dental Academy.

According to All-Star, when a patient calls asking for the price, they’re not asking because they’re comparing costs to other practices, but because they simply don’t know what else to ask!

In other words, they don’t know how to begin the conversation. But neither do the dental receptionists. We have listened to thousands of dental calls and when a patient asks about the price, as in the above exchange, most receptionists respond with something like this:

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

Not only do responses like this fail to lead the conversation anywhere, but they also risk making patients feel like you are not being upfront with them. They might suspect that you just want to get them in the door, and they won’t book as a result.

This might lead us to believe that the best course of action is to be upfront about the cost… but this doesn’t work either.

Let’s say the receptionist answers with a firm amount, like:

“At our office, dental implants start at $3,000 per tooth.”

At this point, the patient’s question has been answered, leaving them with no choice but to say something like:

“Oh… okay… thanks,” and hang up.

When this happens, not only are we left without the patient’s name or their phone number for a follow-up, we don’t know 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 ultimately went nowhere.

A transition statement allows us to take control of the conversation and steer prospective patients toward booking an appointment. The following is a great example of a standard transition statement:

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

A sentence like this can make all the difference in how well a call goes. Let’s take a look at how the previous exchange might play out with the use of a transition statement:

Patient: “Hi, do you guys do dental implants?”

Receptionist: “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?”

Patient: “Uh… yeah. How much do you guys charge for implants?”

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

Patient: “Sure, okay”

Receptionist: “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, allowing them to assume the role of the expert. The transition statement signals to the patient that the receptionist has 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 can ask investigative questions that will build trust and rapport with the patient. The following are a few examples of good investigative questions:

• “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 how these questions can lead to a much more engaging and meaningful conversation with a patient. 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 to make a great impression.

A transition statement creates trust and people buy from people they trust. Make sure your staff knows how to use it, and that 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 number of appointments you book.

While marketing can get the phone to ring with new patients, it’s important to remember that how well your staff does on the phone plays a big role in how many patients actually come through your door.

You could get ten new patients calling this week, but if your staff are not well trained and have no idea what to say to patients to maximize their chance of booking, then those ten new patient leads may only result in two to three new appointments. Meanwhile, there could be another dental practice in your area that is spending just as much on marketing while also securing ten new patient leads. However, if their staff is well trained in how to talk to new patients, those ten new patient leads could result in 7-8 new appointments for that practice.