Your front desk is the front line and ground zero of your patient experience. Essentially, the front desk is where the new patient conversion is won or lost.  

At Whiteboard Marketing, we manage and monitor phone call tracking for the majority of our dental clients. So, we have a lot of opportunities to listen to the recorded incoming phone calls. First, we always recommend that you listen to your recorded calls if you are tracking them. And, of course, we recommend that you track your phone calls, but that is a different blog. Stay tuned for it.

From the hundreds upon hundreds of calls we listen to, we see several key themes that prevent a dental office from converting a prospective patient into a new patient. Every prospective patient is an opportunity.

Hypothetical: If your practice receives 40 prospective patient calls per month, but you are only scheduling 15 of those people for a new patient appointment, what happened to the other 25? Do you know? Do you want to know? You should.  

Tracking, recording and listening to your phone calls helps you analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You can track the number of calls that come from your Pay-Per-Click advertising, social media ads, SEO, newsletters, Google Maps and other channels. Don’t you want to know how many phone calls you are receiving as a direct result of your marketing spend? You should. For example, if you invest in PPC but you are not getting any new patient calls from your investment, then you can decide to keep doing PPC or move those funds towards another channel that is generating new patient calls for you.

Listening to your phone calls helps you understand the key questions patients are asking your front desk team.

• You can adjust your marketing messaging based on what prospective patients ask on the phone. For example, if you receive multiple calls from people asking what insurance you take, you can then decide to add that information to your website. You also may want to run PPC ads that reach people who are searching for network providers in your city.
• Listening to your recorded phone calls can help your team be better prepared for incoming questions and how to handle patient scenarios.
• And, the front desk team can learn from one another. Perhaps “Cindy” answers a questions in a way that “Sue” could learn from.  

Regarding the hypothetical 25 prospective patients who didn’t schedule an appointment with your office, you may learn that you don’t take insurance plans for 10 of them, or that 5 thought they were calling a different dental office, or 6 patients called on a Friday afternoon when the office was closed, or that 4 patients were calling a few different dentists… If this were the scenario, listening to your recorded calls could help you with the following:

• Develop talking points to address the difference paid for out-of-network patients and that you see many patients who are in their situation
• Craft talking points for the 5 patients who thought they called a different dentist or the 4 who were “shopping around.”  You could still schedule them for an appointment at your office. Remember, every prospective patient is an opportunity.
• Maybe you realize that you get a large enough number of calls when your office is closed, that you should set up call-forwarding to a front desk person on those days so she can schedule/answer questions.

We can all learn from tracking, recording and listening to patient phone calls. Can’t you? 

 

Contact us today to set up call tracking for your dental practice.