You’re a small business owner, and the fact that you’re still in business says a lot about your business savvy. You’ve certainly hired good, even great people for your practice. That holds true for the dental hygiene and dental assisting sides as well as for the front office.
You can monitor the work, or at least the results of the work, for the clinical side. But you’re spending most of your time in your operatories, so monitoring the front office staff is a lot harder.
That’s not to take away from anyone’s efforts; they’re undoubtedly fine people doing the best they can to keep your chairs full. But unlike dental hygienists and assistants, there’s really no formal phone training for dental office phone answerers. Even if they’ve completed a generic customer service training program, that doesn’t address the unique fears and hopes of dental patients.
How Many New Patients Are You Losing Over the Phone?
Dentists everywhere swear that their staff does a great job appointing new patient callers. SmartBox has hard data to show that’s not the case. After monitoring the incoming calls to a large number of dental practices for an entire quarter, we discovered that:
- A huge percentage of calls were never answered.
- Of those that were answered, far too many hung up after being placed on hold.
- The total number of new patients appointed was sharply impacted by mistakes in the staff’s handling of the call.
The bottom line is that dentists lose far too many new patients that their staff should have appointed. That’s not acceptable to us, so we created a training program to meet the need: our proprietary, dental practice-specific, Patient Attraction Phone Training
and Certification Program.
Dental Practice Phone Training Done Right
Our online, on-demand, self-paced training course goes far beyond a simple didactic program. We provide HIPAA-compliant call monitoring and analysis to detect issues with staff’s phone technique. We place a number of mystery calls to experience how each staff member overcomes specific objections, takes control of the call, and moves to set the appointment at the right time.
We can demonstrate the sharp increase in new appointments that happens after a practice’s staff completes our proprietary, dental practice-specific, Patient Attraction Phone Training and Certification Program. That’s additional confirmation that dentists aren’t getting all the new patients they could be getting.
Just as importantly, those dentists aren’t getting enough of the better dental patients in their markets – the individuals who have the ability and willingness to pay more for the right dentist. These loyal, long-term patients provide many times the lifetime value compared to the one-and-dones that flood dentists’ practices.
Our Patient Attraction Phone Training and Certification is available as one of our amazingly affordable Practice Perfection Suite products. For more information, email us at thrive@smartboxdentalmarketing.com or call 502-509-1413. You can also visit farbeyondphonetraining.com.
Stop losing patients over the phone, particularly the better patients that will allow you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life again.
The post Your Dental Office Front Staff is Good, But Not That Good appeared first on SmartBox.