The Patient Experience begins at the first personal contact at your Dental Office with the person you hire to answer your phones or reply to emails.
The last point of contact may also be this same person.
Do you know how important it is to hire the RIGHT person to be that first point of contact?
I see the role of the person who answers phones in a dental office now starting to be fully realised by the Dentists who hire them.
I see excellent Dentists doing the very best dentistry and working hard to create the very best patient experience, and it ALL falls down when the person answering the phones is the WRONG person or a person who just does not have the skills to do the job well.
The Dentists scratches their head wondering what is happening.
“Why is my marketing not working?
“Why do I not have enough new patients?”
“The phone must not be ringing much.”
The phone is ringing but the calls are just not being converted to appointments.
The Dentists I work with finally get it and realise that they need to change the people answering their phones and/or upskill their existing team who have a great attitude but struggle coping when the phone calls.
Over the last twenty years Dentistry has changed dramatically.
The people who called through twenty years ago made an appointment. After all isn’t this why they called in the first place?
Now with the internet and many sources of information our potential patients are:
- researching us
- reading other people’s reviews and experiences
- asking so many questions
- resistant to going ahead
The people answering your phones need to be well armed and ready to handle all of these calls but unfortunately most people are not.
There is no point pouring large amounts of money into marketing your practice if the person answering your phones cannot make appointments for the people who call your office.
This does not add up.
Sit down and do the maths. If it doesn’t add up then you know something is wrong.
What is wrong is the person answering your phone needs to be excellent at answering the phone.
They need to be able to handle each call so the outcome is that an appointment is made.
This takes knowing how, practice, and measuring results.
So think carefully about who is answering your phones.
Check to see if they are doing an excellent job, a good job, an average job or a bad job at answering the phone.
It is time that Dentists realise the responsibility they give to the person who has the phone in their hand.
You rely on the person answering the phone in your business to make appointments for each and every caller.
After all, isn’t that the reason why those people have called your dental office?
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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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My FINAL live full day workshops for 2017 “How to Turn Every Dental Phone Call Into A Valued and Kept Appointment” are being held in Sydney on Friday October 6, 2017and in Brisbane on Friday November 24, 2017.
Click here on this link to register.
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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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At present I have availability for only ONE new private client. For more information on how I can improve your Dental Office’s Phone Numbers contact me, Jayne Bandy at jayne@theDPE.com
