The end goal of dentists’ marketing is to put more – and ideally, better – patients in dental chairs.
The online space is the single most effective practice promotion venue these days. With digital advertising, there are a host of available indicators about how effective a marketing campaign is – likes, follows, shares, comments, reviews, clicks, and so on.
These are good and necessary things, but not sufficient. All of the clicks and likes in the world won’t put a single patient in your chairs. Your marketing pays off when new patients pick up the phone and book an appointment. But all of your marketing investment is wasted if those new callers aren’t appointed.
Where Good Dental Practices Go Bad
The weak link in almost all dental practice marketing is the initial point of contact – the phone. Not to take away from the efforts of your front office, but it’s a near-certainty that few of them, if any, have received any formal training in phone technique and overcoming new patient objections. Generic customer service training programs aren’t designed to address the unique wants, needs, and fears of dental patients.
SmartBox’s carefully-collected data shows that almost all practices lose new patients that could and should have been appointed. Phone technique error is generally the cause; front office staff fail to take control of the call, to elicit and overcome objections, and to move the call along to the right point to ask for the appointment.
Sometimes when new patient callers aren’t appointed it’s not due to a skills issue. Dental practices today are very busy places, and it’s inevitable that some callers will be placed on hold. On hold has a definite “shelf life.” Leave someone in “on hold limbo” for more than a couple of minutes, and he or she will likely hang up and call another practice.
Even worse, many calls to dental practices during office hours are never answered. While many of those calls might be from existing patients, others are new prospects who will almost certainly never call again.
You probably think that your staff does a great job appointing new patients, but how would you know? You’re busy in operatories throughout the day, not hanging out in the front office listening to phone calls.
Dental front office staff do their very best, but their best can be better.
Stop Losing New Patients Over The Phone
SmartBox proudly offers our proprietary, dental practice-specific Patient Attraction Phone Training
and Certification Program. This self-paced online course is far more than didactic training; it includes 15 in-depth lessons, on-demand video content, real-life examples of patient calls, interactive quizzes, supplemental learning material, and much more.
And our training program is amazingly affordable, particularly when you consider your average case value. For less than the value of ONE NEW PATIENT PER MONTH, you can turn your front office into a new patient-appointing powerhouse!
Get started by visiting http://beyondphonetraining.com. We’ll help you fix that whole in your dental practice marketing.
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