One of the things I learnt very early on in my career as a dental practice owner was that to grow a practice, I needed to have enough phone lines available for those moments each and every day when multiple callers wanted to contact my office all at the same time.
And these moments do indeed happen…
And when those moments happened, I needed to be able to put some of these callers on hold, while my office team served each and every one of those valuable telephone enquiries.
And here’s the kicker: you just can’t dump callers onto chimes, and bells, and mind-numbing tunes. Nor can you put them on hold listening to a radio station playing music that you have not chosen, and playing adverts about erectile dysfunction, or worse still, playing adverts for one of your competitors.
And you can’t have callers listening to messages that are all about how wonderful you think your dental practice is. Messages like those are only to be played to impress your mother when she rings.
Your on-hold phone messages need to be inspiring and uplifting, and need to have your patients and callers coming off hold and asking:
“Can you tell me more about how you can help me with _______”
Your on-hold messages need to be focussed on being solution based.
Since selling my practice and retiring off the tools, I now consult to dental offices, and work closely with Australia’s leading dental front office phone skills trainer.
What we see is that 38% of all calls to a dental practice never even get answered, with the call either ringing out or going to a recorded message begging the caller to leave their details in the HOPE that they may be silly or lame enough to do so.
Most callers do not leave messages when this happens. They just hang up, scratch out your practice’s name from their list, and then phone the next dental office that is on that list.
And when your busy receptionist dumps your callers into a less than adequate on-hold system, what you will find is that by the time the receptionist gets back to that caller, they’ve hung up and called another dental office.
People are calling dental practices because they are looking for someone nice to talk to who can solve their dental problem.
And let me tell you this:
If you have some whiz-bang phone system that begins with a recorded greeting message for your practice, and then is followed by “live person” coming on the line, that too is another mighty TURN OFF for any caller just wanting to speak to a real live human being.
Now….
there will be times that callers will sometimes need to be placed on hold.
If your on-hold messages are boring and lousy, then you’re literally capturing a VALUABLE new patient enquiry and burning it up, right before your very own eyes.
In my opinion, if you want to provide all your clients and patients with The Ultimate Patient ExperienceTM each and every time that they phone your dental practice, then you need to have your front office team trained on the best things to say when placing the callers on hold, and you need to have the best possible on hold message service that you can.
Anything less than best in these instances is purely and simply, killing your business.
So easy to fix, but yet, so many offices do not take the time to fix these easy-to-fix glaring errors.
They just blunder on, hoping that the silence they are witnessing from their callers may be blind acceptance, when in reality it is the stunned silence of shock.
*****
LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
*****
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 378 044 or 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