The end goal of all your marketing efforts is to put more new dental patients in your chairs. Everything else – impressions, views, clicks, likes, shares, opt-ins – is just a means to that end.
While an increasing number of prospects book their first appointment online, the vast majority still pick up the phone and call your practice. That first point of contact is the make-or-break moment for your marketing. Every new prospect that calls your office but isn’t appointed is a complete waste of your marketing investment.
Let’s Give The Front Office Its Due
Dentists hire front office staff who are personable, professional, and good at their jobs. They’re great people doing the best they can.
It’s fairly easy to measure competence in most performance areas, but converting prospects into appointed patients isn’t one of them. You’re hopefully spending the vast majority of your work time in operatories, solving patients’ dental problems. You certainly don’t have time to hang out in the front office and listen to new patient calls.
Some practices rely on their phone answerers’ self-reports to determine new patient conversion rates. Self-report doesn’t return consistently reliable results. Some phone answerers have a bonus structure that might – might – lead them to underreport new patient calls. Hopefully not, but it does happen.
Some busy front office staff might, despite their best intentions, misreport the reason why the prospect refused an appointment. Your staff almost certainly doesn’t have professional training in detecting and bringing out hidden objections, dealing with those objections, taking control of the call, and asking for the appointment at the perfect moment.
Despite your front office staff’s best efforts, you’re almost certainly not getting all the new patients you could be. There’s one more reason why that’s true.
SmartBox’s carefully gathered data shows that a shocking number of incoming phone calls to dental practices during business hours are never answered. If even five percent of those calls are from prospects, you could easily be missing dozens of new patients every month.
Some dental practices purchase pricy, generic customer service training for their front office people. The problem with that approach is that dental patients aren’t generic customers. The entire value proposition, and relationship between “customer” and “business,” is different and more nuanced for dental patients
SmartBox’s Patient Attraction Phone Training
and Certification Course
SmartBox has created a state-of-the-art, dental practice-specific phone training and certification course. The proprietary online, on-demand course is designed to train front office staff on every aspect of converting prospects to appointed patients.
Your staff will not only learn a deeper understanding of the unique hopes, needs, and fears of dental patients, they’ll also learn specific new techniques that will turn them into new patient-appointing powerhouses.
Get Started.
To learn more about SmartBox’s Patient Attraction Phone Training and Certification course, visit www.farbeyondphonetraining.com.
When you think about the average case value of a new patient, you’ll see that our Patient Attraction Phone Training and Certification course is true bargain.
You can stop losing money – and new patients – at the point of first contact
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