“We’ve got some spaces in our book….”

Have you ever looked at your appointment schedule, doctors, and uttered these words?

Recently?

Spaces you know that are looming, and are going to be difficult to fill.

And then you say:

“It’s just a hiccup…”

“”It’s just this one time…”

And you hope to heck that you’re right.

But deep down, you know, that gaps like these, that days like these, are starting to appear more regularly in your appointment book..

And they do.

They do become more regular occurrences.

And so what do most dentists do?

They say it’s time to start more marketing!!

They say we need to run ads. They say we need to run more ads. They say we need to run bigger ads….

They say we need more SEO…

But sometimes, most times, the answer is not in the marketing.

Or the perceived lack thereof.

The answer is right there in the office.

The answer is in the numbers.

Before I’d be rushing off placing more ads, I’d be looking at some metrics.

What are our New Patient enquiry numbers?
How many of those are booking appointments?

What are our case presentation numbers?
Are patients leaving without appointments?
Are patients calling and cancelling appointments?
What are those numbers?

And who is taking those cancellation calls?

You see, somewhere between the marketing, and the appointment book, there’s a whole number of connections or touch points that could be being broken.

And each one of those breakages, repeated on a regular basis, will have dire impacts upon your appointment schedule.

But what do most dentists do?

They just race out and do more marketing.

Last year, for one of my clients, we looked at New Patient numbers over a two-month period.

She saw eighty-five New Patients.

A healthy number.

But what wasn’t so healthy was the fact that over that same period, twenty-eight patients called and cancelled appointments without re-booking.

And that’s a bad number.

In simple terms, what this meant was that one third of the new patients booking in were there simply there to replace those patients cancelling.

What this meant was that one third of this dentist’s marketing budget was being spent on acquiring patients to replace those being allowed to “drain” out of the Dental Practice.

And that made no sense at all.

So here’s what we did.

We were able to identify the deficiencies in her office that were allowing this high number of cancellations.

And we addressed those areas…

The result?

Fewer, significantly fewer, cancellations and reschedules.

Leading to fuller appointment books.

Cost to the practice?

A little extra training and education.

Benefit?

Priceless!!

Fixing the leak, for virtually no cost, was like adding a whole pile of new patients for free, because there was no extra spend on marketing…

It became like *Standing Room Only* in her appointment schedule.

Often the reason we have holes in our book is not that we’re not getting enough new patient enquiries.

It’s that we’re not spending the time and the effort on retaining the patients we have.

Or we’re not spending the time on converting all the enquiries we receive.

We’ve got to look after the patients we already have.

And we’ve got to treat those enquiries like gold…

Everything we do in the Dental Office must be focused upon maximising retention of our most valuable asset, our patients.

Wow your patients with World Class Service.

Spend the time with them.

And make sure there’s zero confusion.

There must be absolute clarity.

CLEAR. NEXT. STEP.

With New Patient enquiries, are we spending the time with them so that they know that our Office is the Only Place in Town that they should go to for their Dentistry?

And if we’re not, then why not?

Seems pointless running for the fire hose if we’re leaking gallons out through holes in our barrel.

How’s your barrel?

Got any holes?

What are your numbers?

Seems crazy to be buying more baseballs if your pitcher’s being belted out of the park?

Makes more sense to get better at pitching and throwing..

******

My One-Day Workshop in May covers in greater depth how to address these two BIG areas of leakage. For more details on the Philadelphia workshop CLICK HERE.
For more details on my Australian workshops CLICK HERE.

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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