How many people call your office and do not schedule an appointment?

By Jayne Bandy

Everyone who calls your dental office has already partly chosen you as their dentist. Something influenced the caller to call you in the first place. It was either your fabulous website and SEO or a friend referred them after telling them how wonderful you are, or they’ve decided you were so convenient to their home or work.

Whatever the reason was, they chose you. The next step is for the caller to finally choose to schedule an appointment with you.

It seems so straight forward, so why are so many dental offices failing to make those appointments?

Do you know how many people call your office every day and fail to make an appointment?

I am sure if I asked you what your new patients numbers are, you would know this number straight away. It’s so easy to bring a New Patient Report up on your dental software program.

But a lot of dentists have no idea how many actual calls come into their practice each day.

The good news it is easy to work out.

I know you’re probably wondering why you should know the number of calls received each day.

Once you know the number of New Patient calls you received each day you can soon work out how many calls did not make appointments.

Yes, the number of callers who did not make an appointment. The number of non-converted calls.

You can now compare the new patient calls received to the number of new patient appointments you made.

Why do you need to know the number of people who called your office and did not make appointments?

Because this is what you have missed out on. This is how many people you have missed out on who did not become your patient.

“Everyone who calls your office are potential patients who have a dental problem and/or concern that needs solving. And so, you need to keep an eye on the callers who are not making appointments and get to the bottom of why...”

So why do people call your office and some make appointments and some do not make an appointments?

Doesn’t everyone who calls your office have a dental problem or concern?

Yes!

Everyone who calls your office, other than your labs, dental supply companies and the like, are potential patients who have a dental problem and/or concern that needs solving. And so, you need to keep an eye on the callers who are not making appointments and get to the bottom of why.

The only way to know for sure how many callers are not making appointments, is to track the calls and analyse what is being said on each of the calls

This is how you get to the bottom of your missed opportunities when it comes to unconverted callers.

You may have no idea that your team are struggling to make appointments with the calls coming in because you don’t track this number.

Your team could be struggling to make new patient appointments and they have no idea this is happening.

I have seen a huge turn around in practice production and growth once calls are analysed and something is done to fix the problems.

Once you analyse the calls, you know for sure what is happening and why you are not converting calls to appointments.

You now have an opportunity to change what is being said on the phone, so more calls are converted to appointments.

The problem I see happening for many dentists and business owners who finally find out they have a big problem with

calls not being converted to appointments, is they don’t know what to do to fix the problem and nothing gets done and nothing gets improved.

Teams need to be continually working on their patient communication skills to improve and increase the conversion of calls to appointments.

You don’t want to be that dental office that receives FIVE calls and only ONE makes an appointment.

Tracking the calls coming into your business is one of the easiest ways to immediately grow your businesss

Keep in mind that you have already paid for every call that comes into your practice through your marketing, so it just makes sense to ensure all or most of your calls turn into appointments not just some of them!

About the author

Jayne began her career as an educator. After spending several years teaching, she made the jump to dental practice management. Jayne served as a Practice Manager for a renowned dentist in Sydney for more than 25 years, having the opportunity to learn first-hand what works when it comes to building and maintaining patient relationships, how to convert leads over the phone and most importantly - what it takes to reach your practice goals. As the CEO and Founder of Dental Phone Excellence, Jayne strives to help practices convert more calls into appointments, reduce cancellations and help nurture effective patient communication that will result in increased profitability. Her past experience as an educator combined with her passion for practice management gives her a unique set of skills that allows your team to fully understand and take advantage of the tools she presents.

To find out how I can teach your team to know what to say and ask your patients, to help them make more kept appointments and prevent cancellations, call me on 1300-378-044 or email jayne@thedpe.com

Call Tracking Excellence is not a product IT’S A RESULT!

With Call Tracking Excellence your team will learn the SAME exact processes Jayne used to: 1. Dramatically improve new patient call-in conversions to booked appointments. 2. Retain existing patient appointments and...

3. Prevent ongoing losses from appointment cancellations.

Visit the website to find out how to get started. It’s that easy! www.calltrackingexcellence.com

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