February 2020--As the Patient Experience Manager at Dental Associates, I am dedicated to constantly improving the patient experience at all our locations. When we decided to focus on converting more of the new patients who call us and move our % scheduled way above the national average of 50%, we turned to Patient Prism’s software platform. Patient Prism has made it possible for us to achieve our goal and continue improving our conversion rate with significant ROI.
New patients go online and do research. They try to learn if we are the right dental practice for them, and then they call us. We absolutely must deliver on why we are a place they want to be, or they will hang up and call the next dental practice on the list. Or they might schedule an appointment and then fail to show because they’ve called other practices and found one that made a better first impression.
In dental practices, we’re great about solving problems. We say, “Okay, you want an appointment. I can schedule you here.” We forget about all the warm and fuzzies that our dental patients want. This is especially true of potential new patients who are seeking a new dental home. We must be careful about this, or we give the wrong message that we don’t care… that we don’t value the patient as a person.
There are other factors that make unsatisfactory impressions, for example,
Getting an understanding of what is happening on your phones is important. Once you identify your problems, you can solve them.
The information we get on the Patient Prism dashboards tells us the reasons why calls are failing:
We get to dive into the data from Patient Prism to get a big picture of why patients have not scheduled with us. Real-time data shows:
Patient Prism does more than enable us to efficiently track our new patient calls so we can improve our performance. It helps us solve our problems.
For example, one of the great features of Patient Prism is its RELO alerts that tell us when a high-value patient has not booked. The alert takes us to the recorded call where there are feedback notes from Patient Prism’s call coaches. Because we receive RELOs within 30 minutes, we are reconnecting fast, and with the coaches’ feedback we are better prepared to help new patients get the appointment they need. When callbacks are made within an hour of the original patient call, conversions occur at a high rate.
Another great solution is Patient Prism Academy, containing short training videos for just about every dental call situation. We encourage our team members who answer phones to view the video tutorials for self-development. They learn from the featured, well known call coaches and experts in patient behavior how to optimize dental patient calls and why this is so important.
The Patient Prism blog and the Patient Prism Academy video library feature hundreds of dental industry experts presenting recommendations and examples for leading and growing your dental practice, multi-practice group, or DSO. We have many videos from practice management coaches that provide advice for improving patient communication, converting new patients, and scheduling. We invite you to schedule a Patient Prism demo at a date and time that is convenient for you.