Time management in a Dental Office is often a real struggle.

I know I used to struggle some times!

Front Office teams are frequently asked to add things to their workload, and smile at the same time even when they get worried whether they can do it all!

I was in this exact same place and one day I thought I might explode.

Your team will feel overloaded and out of control. This is not a good combination.

I then had a good look at all my office duties including the important phone communication with patients and potential patients and realized something.

I was spending too much time on things that were the least effective and productive with respect to the patients and our business.

I then sat down and came up with a list of what I did every day and what I wasn’t doing and should have been doing. I then started reorganizing this list until it made sense.

One of the parts of my job that was suffering from my poor time management was following up with patients.

At one point I did have a quite a long list of patients to contact and it was always a big issue to everyone including myself.

It would be nice to dream of a world with no patients to follow up.

I knew the real solution was to reduce this list to a manageable list of patients to follow up in a given period of time.

A follow up patient is one who:

• Cancels their appointment and does not make another one.
• Asks you to call them and make an appointment later on.
• Does not make another appointment for their treatment.
• Calls our dental office and doesn’t make a first appointment.
• Somehow we don’t know what happened but they disappeared off the radar.

Do we all have similar lists?

The answer I am sure is YES!

These lists are of people you can contact, who usually like you and for some reason stopped coming in to see you or didn’t start seeing you for treatment.

It is the beginning of 2017 (well January is nearly finished! Can you believe it?) and now is the time to get your patient follow up into order.

A good start in the world of organizing patient follow up is to create some order and sequence.

Where do you start?

Start by grouping follow up patients.

Once you have grouped your patients then set priority.

Who will you call first?

Always start with the people you saw not that long ago…within 6 months.

They usually still like you and remember what fabulous patient service you gave them at their last appointment or on the phone.

I know you can SMS and email and yes it is less confronting than calling, but the truth is that the most effective way still to communicate with your patients, is face to face or phone to phone face to face!

So get sorted, pick up that phone and start calling and see what happens.

You will start to book in patients.

Make it a daily task.

Make it manageable and achievable and start booking appointments.

Let me know how you go.

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