At the dental office, the ringing phone is not an interruption to your day.
Rather, the ringing phone is an opportunity.
It is your opportunity to make someone’s day.
The way that you look at your dental office phone has a serious impact on the outcomes of the calls your office receives.
Meet someone new.
Every time that phone rings at your dental practice, it could well be someone who has never been to your practice before.
This person could well be a person of influence in a circle of people that you do not know, and may be your personal opportunity to broaden your horizons, if you take the opportunity to get to know them in that instant, as well as later on.
Help them.
Nobody phones a dental practice just for the fun of it.
The phone at a dental practice rings because the caller has a dental concern that they need fixed.
It’s just that sometimes the caller may not know how to begin the conversation, so they start by asking a “careless” question that is unrelated to their issue.
This question that they ask may be about your prices, or about your opening hours.
If you are good, you will skillfully dig through the fluff and carefully expose the true reason for their call.
If you are no good you will just blurt out an answer to the careless question and the phone call will usually end just there.
You will have failed to do what you have been employed to do.
Make a friend.
The best way to help someone is to be friendly.
And the best way to be friendly is to ask questions, so that the person you are talking to can answer them.
When someone is answering “the right” question, and speaking, they feel more at ease than when they are listening to someone rattle on.
If the caller feels your genuine concern, you will have created a friend.
Go the extra mile
Make each caller feel as if their call to your office is the call that you have been waiting for all day, and that nothing else in the world has any relevance, at that point in time.
The easiest way to do this is to create a viable solution for the caller that includes clarity, and action.
A clear, next step.
The call must conclude with the caller feeling that you have “gone out of your way”, and you have given the caller a significant degree of certainty about what they now need to do next.
Create anticipation
Let each caller know that if an opportunity arises, you will be phoning them and bringing their appointment forward.
Every call to your practice should end with the caller putting down that phone and thinking:
“I hope that they can get me in sooner.”
When your team believe the ringing phone is an opportunity…
When you have any employees who consider a ringing phone to be a nasty interruption to their day, `then you have the wrong employees.
The ringing phone is the opportunity to help solve someone’s dental concern.
The way you handle that opportunity allows you to become “a hero” in the eyes of that caller.
Don’t deflate that opportunity..
Step up.
And embrace the opportunity….
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Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
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Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.
You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order
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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.
Email me at david@theupe.com
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