Are Your Dental Office Staff Ripping Up Hundred Dollar Bills?

Thirty-eight percent of phone calls coming in to dental practices never get answered.

Statistically, only sixty-two percent of calls to dental practices get picked up and answered by a real live human being.

Why is this so?

What actually happens?

Firstly let’s take a look at who is actually calling the dental practice and why the dental practice phone is ringing in the first place…

When you consider the fact that nobody calls dental practices just for the fun of it, then what we realise is this:

Every call to a dental practice is being made by someone with a dental problem.

And it’s a problem that needs to be solved.

Which means, that every time a dental team member answers the phone at work they have the open opportunity of being THE SOLUTION to the problem that that caller has.

They have the opportunity of being a problem solver.

They have the opportunity of helping someone in need.

Now, realistically, not every caller to the dental practice is thinking rationally when they phone.

Some just want immediate help, and believe that to be their God given right.

But not many do…. and with skill we can certainly filter out those less grateful callers and refer them on to another practice if necessary.

Now, when the phone rings, some dental practices rely on a message service for those calls that are inconvenient to answer.

But we all know that the only people calling dental practices who actually leave messages on the dental voice mails are patients looking to cancel their already made appointments.

New patients calling a dental practice for the first time and who get funneled off to a voice mail service are more than likely to simply hang up the call and dial another dentist.

And why wouldn’t they?

After all, they’re probably thinking that if this dentist can’t get his phone systems right, then there’s probably a whole list of other things in that practice that need improving…

What I’ve seen in practices I’ve visited is that the dental receptionist of today is quite poorly skilled when it comes to juggling multiple phone calls.

And I consider managing two calls concurrently to be too difficult in a lot of cases.

I also find that the average dental receptionist is also poorly skilled when it comes to receiving phone calls while trying to attend to live patients in front of their reception desk.

Things just aren’t like they used to be back in the good old days….

How do we improve this situation?

It is my belief that the modern day dental receptionist does not fully comprehend that the ringing phone represents income to the dental practice.

John DiJulius III said:

“The ringing phone is next week’s paycheck, treat it as such.”

The ringing phone is not an inconvenience, and is not to be treated as an inconvenience or an interruption.

All ringing phone calls need to be answered and dealt with appropriately and professionally.

Not answering the ringing phone at all is akin to ripping up hundred-dollar bills.

The phone is ringing because the caller has a problem that they need your dentist to solve.

When the ringing dental office phone is respected and treated as an opportunity to serve, that’s when the magic really starts to happen in your dental office.

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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.