Last time I looked it up I found that no baby had ever been born with a telephone handset in their hand.
Nor had any newborn arrived and been able to speak at birth.
This means that speech, and the ability to speak, are learned skills.
They are not inherent.
Nobody is born as a “natural speaker”.
Nor is there such a thing as a “born salesman”.
Speaking, and selling, are therefore learnable skills.
And therefore everybody has the ability to choose and attain their own levels of accomplishment when it comes to speaking, and conversation.
And speaking on the phone.
You have the ability to choose how good, or how bad you want to be when it comes to how you speak to people both face to face and on the phone.
On the dental office telephone, your primary role is to help the caller.
You need to be able to solve the caller’s problem.
The beautiful thing about a dental practice telephone is that nobody ever phones up a dental practice just for the fun of it.
Nobody.
Everybody who phones a dental practice has a dental problem or concern that they need help with.
And our role as a dental phone answerer is to help the caller.
Our role is to find a solution to the caller’s problem.
And more often than not, the solution required is for the caller to come in to our dental office and see one of our highly skilled dental professionals.
The difficulty is that most callers to a dental office do not enunciate their problem in a clear and concise manner.
They often try to disguise their dental issue inside a price enquiry or a technique or procedure enquiry.
Our role needs to be to help the caller move towards the solution of their dental problem.
And we do this by being courteous and friendly and concerned for their well-being, when we speak with them on the phone.
Statistically, only one in five callers to a dental practice schedules an appointment on that first call.
And that is a horrid statistic.
Four out of every five callers end their call without scheduling an appointment.
Of those who do schedule an appointment, only two out of every five of those people actually end up attending.
Yes, three of every five people making a dental appointment at a new dental office either fail to show, or cancel, or go somewhere else.
What this means in total is that only eight percent of callers to a dental office actually end up in the dental chair.
And the silly thing is, that most dental offices do not have any systems in place for managing and recording these vital statistics.
And then, most dental offices do not have any processes in place for reviewing what is said on their dental office phone and improving on what is said.
Most dental offices have no accountability processes for what goes on on their dental office phone.
What gets measured gets improved upon.
If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know whether they are going up, or going down.
So firstly, you need to measure.
What exactly is being said?
Are you recording the calls on your dental office phones?
Are you listening to those recordings?
Are you receiving written transcripts of all the phone calls to your dental office?
And are you reading those transcripts?
Training.
With those recordings and transcripts, are you sitting down with your team and reviewing their numbers?
Are you reviewing exactly what is said on each call to your dental office?
Are you keeping your team accountable for their numbers?
Are you keeping your team accountable for what they are saying on your dental office phones?
Who has time for all that?
After all, you’re a dentist.
You have teeth to fix.
You haven’t got the time to be bothering with all that….
“Either you do it, someone else does it, or it doesn’t get done.”
How would you like to stop wasting all that money you are wasting because your phones are not being answered as best as they can be?
Wouldn’t it make sense to spend a little bit of money employing an expert to listen to your calls, AND read all your transcripts, AND train your team to be better on the phones?
AND keep your team members accountable for the numbers they are achieving?
What if that EXPERT SERVICE cost YOU only a small fraction of what a new patient is worth to your dental practice?
And what if that service were to result in your phone conversion numbers improving, so that MORE new patients were making appointments with you, and keeping those appointments with you, and then going ahead and getting their diagnosed dental treatment done?
Wouldn’t it make sense to be employing a DONE FOR YOU service that brought you more new patients than you could imagine?
Well, wouldn’t it?
Because guess what?
Here is the kicker….
If you don’t improve your dental practice phone numbers, you can bet that one of your neighbouring dental practices is going to, and when they do, their new patient numbers are going to go up, and yours will probably go down as a result?
And that’s not a very clever thing for you to allow to happen?
So why not act now and do something about it?
Remember, it’s always wiser to be ahead of the trend, than be behind the trend, trying to play catch up….
*****
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.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
Convert more calls into appointments…Click the link: http://www.calltrackingexcellence.com
Call Jayne on 1300 387 044or email Jayne@theDPE.com for more details.
*****
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
*****
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
Leave a Reply