There is always debate as to the best way to answer the dental office phone.

Which greeting should you use?

The phone greeting that we found worked best in our office was this:

“Thank you for calling ABC Dental. This is Elizabeth. How may I help you?”

 This greeting was constructed as the combination and integration of three very important and necessary parts.

Together all three unite to create a truly transformational and magical greeting for your caller to hear.

Let’s look at those components and see why they work so well.

“Thank you for calling ABC Dental.”

This sentence sets the tone for the whole call.Firstly, the use of the words “Thank you” tells the caller immediately that we are appreciative of them making the call to our office. We are leading on the front foot here with gratitude.

We are also identifying the name of our Dental Office.

I make this comment, because I often hear of Dental Offices where they do not identify their office by name, when calling on the phone or answering the phone.

Sometimes I hear them call themselves “The Dentist”.

It’s always important to use the Office name.

After all, the caller could be a wrong number, who will be so impressed with your greeting that they will remember you, and tell their friends about you.

Lastly, the use of the “Thank you” reduces the need to greet the caller with “Good morning” or “Good afternoon”. And when we use those time related greetings, there wills always be checking, hesitancy, errors, and corrections.

Eliminating the time related greeting adds to your professionalism by reducing unforced errors.

“This is Elizabeth”

Short and sweet and succinct.We need to let the caller know with whom they are talking. We need to let them identify that team member by their name.

This eliminates the question in the callers’ minds as to which employee is answering the phone, and what is their name. By doing this, we are identifying ourselves on an even more personal level for the caller to connect with us as people and not simply as an Office that performs dentistry.

We found this line to be far more professional than saying “You’re speaking with Elizabeth” which implies that *you should be so lucky to be speaking with Elizabeth* or “Elizabeth speaking” which implies a touch of boredom that *Elizabeth would rather be doing something else than answering the phone*.

“How may I help you?”

This is the most important part of the three-part greeting.Because it really is telling the caller that we are ready for them to let us know what is wrong with them and to let us know about their situation.

We are giving the caller immediate permission to start letting us know why they have called.

Remember that whoever is asking the questions during the phone call is the person in control.

So we need to open service with a question.

The beauty of this question is that although it asks a question, what it really is saying to the caller is this:

“I’m here to help you.”

And so this magical greeting let’s the caller know that our Dental Office, and Elizabeth, are here to solve their problem.

And that’s magical.

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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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