With a Dental Practice Phone System, you can streamline your patient journey, increase turnover, and save money.
According to a poll conducted by DentaVox, 79 percent of patients who booked online had a better experience than those who booked over the phone. The survey also revealed that 51% of people still schedule appointments over the phone. The survey’s main lesson is to improve the patient journey over the phone, rather than abandoning phones and going completely online.
This article will show you how a well-designed and implemented hosted cloud-based VoIP phone system may improve both your patient experience and your bottom line.
1. Don’t Ignore New Patient Calls
Calls should be prioritized in the following order: The cloud-based dental phone systems from LadiTech can be set up to prioritize calls based on the type of inquiry. During peak periods, new patient inquiries will be prioritized. During busy times of the day, this technique decreases the chance of losing a new patient.
When all the phones at the reception are in use, the overspill system is used as a backup. Excess calls are forwarded to other phones in the company. Overspill phones can be found everywhere in the world, including in the next room, at another dental practice, or with an off-site receptionist. This technology allows you to scale up your call-answering capacity during peak hours so you don’t miss any new patient inquiries.
Call from any location: Having the ability to call from any location is a valuable tool, especially if you have a multi-practice practice. This tool allows your complete company’s personnel to collaborate. Calls from busy practices can be routed to quieter ones. The caller’s location will be displayed on the screen, alerting the receptionist. The receptionist will open the appropriate booking calendar and answer the phone as if they were at the location.
2. Examining Phone Activity Marketing ROI
It’s one thing to double your Instagram followers or acquire an extra 500 Facebook engagements each week, but these efforts must finally result in new patient inquiries. The reporting and analytic features of LadiTech’s intelligent dental phone systems are built-in. They give you detailed information about how many of your inquiries are from new or returning patients, so you’ll know if your extra 20,000 Instagram followers are converting into new patient inquiries.
As your business grows busier, you’ll need a strong team to handle as many calls as possible while still providing a high-quality patient experience. The Percentage Serviced function is a crucial reporting component of the LadiTech Dental Phone System.
This is the percentage of calls that are answered vs those that are dropped. It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the ratio of serviced calls as a percentage of total calls. Anything less than a 99 percent response rate is money in the hands of your competition, so be sure your team is answering every call.
The typical individual will only give you 40 seconds of their time if they’re on hold, according to Dentaleconomics.com. So good luck keeping a patient with a severe tooth happy while waiting for many minutes on hold. If a patient is having trouble reaching your receptionist, the chances of losing that patient, especially if it’s a new patient, increase dramatically.
Serviced calls and ring time are frequently two sides of the same coin. If you concentrate on reducing ring time, the percentage of serviced calls will take care of itself. You can look after yourself with LadiTech. The extensive analytics and reporting features will provide your team with the information they need to determine where they need extra assistance with customer service or sales goals.
Keep in mind that as ring time and serviced calls decrease, so do bookings and turnover.
3. Cost-cutting
Free unlimited calls: A landline call to a mobile phone in the UK costs between 10p and 20p per minute. This corresponds to at least £186 per month based on 30 two-minute calls per day to mobile phones. All of these fees are eliminated with LadiTech’s cloud-based VoIP phone services. All landline and mobile phone calls are free and unlimited.
Unlimited scalability: The scalability of dental phone systems should be unrestricted. The number of phones you can use with a standard phone configuration is limited by your phone line. Adding another phone line usually entails increasing the number of phones. A new BT landline costs around £140 on average. On top of that, you’ll be saddled with a hefty phone bill each month.
With LadiTech’s cloud-based dental phone systems, the equivalent is just £7 per month per additional phone, with no additional setup expenses. Because of this limitless scalability, our clients have been able to expand their practices without the hassle and expense of setting up extra landlines.
Cost of losing a patient: Root canal treatment costs roughly £380 per tooth on average. Second, a dental implant costs roughly £2,000 per tooth on average. So, if your existing dental phone system is prompting new patients to hang up and schedule elsewhere, you might be losing hundreds of pounds per month.
Don’t take the slipping of a patient lightly. We’ve assisted dental businesses that were losing over £30,000 per month in lost patient inquiries to turn things around. It was not uncommon for practitioners to only answer one out of every three calls throughout the day. This was entirely due to their outdated, dead phone system, which caused bottlenecks in the patient funnel and an unhappy patient experience.
4. Increasing Turnover
Increase the number of new patients you convert: The major goal of a good dental phone system is to provide the ideal patient experience that leads to appointments. The ideal patient journey ensures that no patient is unsatisfied to the point of hanging up and booking an appointment elsewhere.
The typical UK household spent £3,270 on dental treatments in 2019, according to statista.com. 3 Let’s conduct some fast math using the assumption that a phone system loses one new patient (including household) every week.
£3,270 multiplied by 52 (weeks in a year)
Annual loss potential = £170,040
Wait until you have many practices, each with upwards of two phones at reception, and that number becomes terrifying. You can expect this figure to multiply rather quickly after that.
Effective cancellations and re-bookings: As any dentist knows, an empty chair earns roughly £0.00 per hour. It is critical to make every attempt to keep the chair active by filling cancelled appointments, especially during peak hours.
You’re asking for an empty chair if your dental phone system doesn’t prioritize cancellations and rebooking inquiries. Patients who offer enough notice of their need to postpone or cancel should be given priority.
The smart dental phone systems from LadiTech are designed to prioritize certain inquiries. As a result of this prioritization, appointment gaps are maintained to a minimum and the chair remains full.
It’s critical to consider a dental phone system as both a communication and a business-growth instrument. Use the reporting and analytic features to better train your receptionists in order to provide a more streamlined service that prevents new patients from slipping through the cracks. Ensure that every call is answered, and your earnings will rise.
For more information contact us:
- +1 (613) 416 7874
- +1 (386) 400 5005
- +90 (212) 900 9094
- [email protected]
