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MailA lot of improvements can be made when you understand what is happening during new patient phone conversations. Linda Miles explains why she encourages dental practices to use Patient Prism.
I must have spoken with thousands of dental practices in my career as a consultant, and one of the biggest problems for dentists is their rate of new patient conversion. They are often simply unaware of how their telephone is being answered and the number of new patient opportunities they have lost over the phone.
As they see happy patients coming and going, they think everyone in their practices knows the best way to converse with patients. But in most dental practices, when it comes to the phone that is a false assumption.
New patient calls can be simple to complex. I’ve heard it all. First of all, there isn’t face to face connection going on with meaningful empathetic or enthusiastic facial expressions. Receptionists and callers are reliant on words. Often new patients don’t know where to start… what to ask… what to share. Receptionists listen out of respect for callers’ responses to things they say, and then conversation can lag. Often there is a loss of momentum and comfortable opportunity to ask for the appointment.
There are other hurdles too, such as:
- Not knowing fully what concerns are on the caller’s mind,
- Interruptions at the front desk,
- Too many calls coming in a one time,
- Lack of reception experiences and training,
- Gaps in knowledge,
- Workload pressures and personal stress,
- Unknown caller expectations, and
- Different vocabularies.
Sometimes receptionists have never had coached feedback to help them at all. It’s no wonder 50% of all incoming new patient calls are missed, fail while on hold, or do not result in a booked appointment. That 50% rate just isn’t good enough when receptionists who have the benefit of coaching are able to implement best practices and do raise that rate much higher.
Patient Prism easily develops your receptionists’ phone skills.
Patient Prism improves phone call conversations. The artificial intelligence (AI) of the software tracks keywords and phrases and evaluates conversation performance during each segment of a call. The software and live call coaches provide nonthreatening feedback in the form of notes and links to short training videos. Because calls are tracked by the name of the receptionist, this feedback can be viewed by the receptionist who was on the call. Bit by bit, improvements in call performance occur.
It’s often minor weaknesses that can be easily overcome when there is recognition of the little issues that undermine successful phone conversations. As we all know, by solving small problems we make incremental improvements that can significantly improve our performance and profitability. I’m proud to be one of the experts featured in the training videos.
Patient Prism provides intelligence so you can make informed marketing decisions.
You can do all the marketing in the world to attract more calls, but in the end, you need to sell potential new patients on how well you will care for them and how comfortable they will feel. When your new patient conversion rate goes up, you can spend less on marketing and your front desk team will feel greater job satisfaction. Patient Prism will increase your patient conversion and marketing ROI.
The Patient Prism software monitors the results of your marketing efforts on a dashboard that comes to you on-demand with almost real time intelligence. It does this by knowing the phone number associated with each of your advertising campaigns. As calls are made to a specific number and relayed to your front desk, Patient Prism tracks the ad that triggered the call. Your dashboard will show you the number of responses for each of your tracked campaigns. In addition, Patient Prism tracks how many times specific services were mentioned.
With this data, you can determine which marketing campaigns are successful, which campaigns should be modified with a new message or offer and tested again, and which campaigns you want to an end. With the tracked keyword data, you’ll know the services that are in high demand in your community. You may see a trend that justifies expanding your services, expanding your team, adding an insurance plan, or investing in new technology.
Learn more about Patient Prism.
We invite you to schedule a Patient Prism demo at a date and time that is convenient for you. See how our call coaching platform rapidly provides feedback and trains administrative teams in the art of phone conversation and more. We’ll also show you how our re-engage lost opportunity alerts enable your team to call back potential high-value new patients and win them over. Dental practices of all size are doing this, which increases ROI even more.
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