During my drive home, I happened upon a pretty standard suburban intersection: Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Panda Express, the whole 9. I noticed a medical office complex and saw about four different DDS offices on the main sign. I proceeded past the stoplight and saw two other dental offices in the plaza caddy corner to the previous. Just a quarter mile down the road, I found three more just behind the local Firestone. That’s a total of nine different options for dental care within a two-block radius.
Now, I’m not sure I care if your office offers complimentary waffles and premium cable, it’s hard for consumers to not be fickle in that environment. And with the increasing costs of dental equipment, insurance, and labor, the pricing across non-surgical practices is going to be around the same: high.
Also, the transparency that social media and sites like Yelp have brought upon the industry should provide impetus for dental offices to really make sure they are covering all of their bases. This does not necessarily mean that dentists should staff up and hire a Twitter expert to talk molars in fewer than 140 characters.
Rather, it should really mean that dentists take advantage of tools that streamline their internal processes, allowing their team more time to tie up other loose ends. This renovation calls for a couple of different initiatives namely: figuring out where customers are going before they call in and finding an effective, all-in-one way to make sense of the inbound and outbound phone calls.
One of our valued clients runs a consultancy that hosts seminars designed to help dentists improve their practices across the board. This optimization ranges from improving office décor to choosing the software used to schedule appointments and invoice clients. He contends that call tracking software like ours is a wholly effective way for dental practices to make sure that no element of their business is falling through the cracks.
Utilization of this type of service carries more benefits for DDSs than simple lead management. Call recording can be used to help dentists ensure that their staff on the phone are maintaining brand image, giving sound medical counsel, and handling insurance claims properly—all things that drastically affect the bottom line.
The proliferation of unconventional forms of media has many medical practices scrambling to figure out what advertising effort is or isn’t worthwhile, where they absolutely need to be and what’s a waste of time and money. Attaching different tracking numbers to the various digital and traditional outlets used to promote your trade is a simple, inexpensive way to get accurate metrics on what is driving patients into your waiting room. All of this paired with a synced web tracking software and you have an entirely new way by which you can tackle every toothache in town.
Think your office staff could afford to gain some precious minutes back? So do we and the process is quicker than a periodontal scaling.