There are a thousand questions to ask a New Patient on the phone but we need to ask the ones that make the difference.
Asking the following four questions on the New Patient call will make the difference.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions first so I can help you?”
When a potential New Patient calls your dental office they usually have many questions they want answered.
Most people answering the phone in a dental office will go into what I call “answer mode”.
There is nothing wrong with this because you do want to answer the caller’s questions. It would be very rude not to.
What you want to do is not answer the caller’s questions straight away.
Answering questions on the phone means the person asking the questions is in control of the conversation/call, so what you want to do is turn it around so you are the one asking the questions and the caller is doing all the talking.
You are listening and finding out so much more about the caller, than if you were just doing all the talking.
This makes so much sense, yet so many dental offices get this wrong.
When a caller asks a question you immediately want to know more about the caller and their dental concern or problem before you answer their question.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions first so I can help you?”
is the best way to do this.
It is polite and calm and most of the time the caller will say yes that is ok.
It is now ok to ask questions before you answer their question.
You do want to make a note of their question because you will need to answer it at the end of the call and after you have asked your questions.
“What was the reason you chose our Dental Office?”
This one question will tell you so much about the caller and what is important to them. I train teams to use this question after a caller has asked about the price or Health Insurance.
You can then focus more on this reason rather than just cost.
Callers asking questions about the price and insurance are the biggest concern to people answering the phone in the dental office.
“Would you like morning or afternoon?”
I write and speak about this regularly. When you ask the caller a question you want it to be simple and clear so it can be answered. When you start asking questions that are difficult and confusing all you do is make the caller hang up.
Presume all potential patients ringing your dental office are ready to make an appointment when they call.
“It sounds like you need an appointment.”
Asking if they prefer morning or afternoon is a quick and easy way to get the appointment made.
You are giving the caller an easy choice and they feel you have considered their schedule.
I worked with a young girl last year who was making this step so complicated with too many choices and lots of questions. She was astonished how such a simple questions changed things for her.
“Is there anything else you are concerned about that you want the Dentist to know before your appointment?”
This question should be asked at the end of every new patient call.
This one question gets the New Patient who has just made their appointment, thinking.
You want your patients thinking about their treatment they may need and other treatment they may have down the track.
When a New Patient comes in for their first appointment the Dentist now knows what else they are concerned about.
It makes it so easy to now start talking about other dental concerns they have.
The patient is ready and feels comfortable talking about their dental issues.
Do you see how important questions are?
Are your front office team asking excellent questions when they talk to potential New Patients on the phone?
Are you losing patients because the right questions are not being asked on the phone calls?
This blog features simple practical ideas that are easy to implement tomorrow in your Dental Office, impacting immediately on your Patients’ Dental Phone Experiences, and ultimately, improving your practice profitability.
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Dental Phone Excellence is a simple to implement complete Phone Answering system I developed that helped me to build an extraordinary dental practice in the heart of working class western Sydney.
If you’d like to know more, download my sixteen page FREE special report “How I Quickly and Easily Went From 35% to 77% New Patient Telephone Conversions, and Doubled The Size of my Dental Practice Along the Way” and discover some of the many costly mistakes being made on your phone…..
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My next live full day workshop “How to Turn Every Dental Phone Call Into A Valued and Kept Appointment” is being held in Sydney NSW on Friday February 17, 2017.
Click here on this link to register.
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At present I have availability for only THREE new private clients. For more information on how I can improve your Dental Office’s Phone Numbers contact me, Jayne Bandy at jayne@theDPE.com