Maximize Your Dental Practice's Phone Appointments: 10 Tips to Turn Inquiries into Patients

Did you know that one of the most powerful tools at your dental practice is your telephone?

To help you harness the potential of your practice telephone, here are ten great tips on how you can turn simple inquiries into fully blown 'in the diary' appointments. 

10 Top Tips to Boost Your Dental Practice's Inquiries from Phone Calls

1. Get your whole team on board.

The first step to making it happen is to get your whole team on board. Tell them that as a business you're actively looking to convert more leads into inquiries and would be keen to draft in some expertise to train staff up.

As an incentive, you could also give a prize to the highest weekly/monthly achiever, making it more attractive to employees to perform. Make sure you give positive praise for good results and offer motivation when the going gets a little tough. Do this and your team will (A) like working for you and (B) will more than likely get results.

2. Use KPI's regularly.

KPI's or Key Performance Indicators are a great way of not only measuring performance levels of individuals, but they're perfect for gauging where individual strengths and weaknesses lie. A simple way to do this is to document any new appointments and where they come from on a spreadsheet.

This way you can see immediately which members of your team are doing what, and more importantly, how. KPI's also make it easy to spot any shortcomings and to identify any vital gaps in skills or knowledge. This in turn can help to laser-focus training, making it less time-consuming and more beneficial to those that need it.

3. Have the right people in the right place.

Your reception desk is usually the first impression everyone gets of your practice, so for this reason it pays to put people there who are confident, customer focused, and have a great telephone manner. By having your most confident and strongest people in the right places, you'll be surprised at the difference it makes.

4. Be contactable all day.

Unsurprisingly, the lunch hour is the most convenient time for many working people to contact their dentist, so it pays for you to be contactable during this time. Why not stagger the desk team's lunch breaks to provide sufficient cover? This ensures that you can be easily reached throughout these busy periods. 

5. Your team needs to be confident.

It's no good telling your reception team that you really need them to do A or B when they aren't entirely confident at doing either. Rather than having reception staff being drawn into lengthy dentistry based conversations with callers, what you really need is for them to promote the benefits of a consultation appointment and get a booking in the diary.

To achieve this, you'll need to provide staff with the relevant knowledge through regular training. Once they know exactly what to say to callers, not only will it boost their confidence, but will also (hopefully) increase leads. 

6. Define and outline key benefits of a new patient consultation.

One point that many practice owners fail to do is to define what a new patient consultation entails, and to share this with the team. You might want to consider the following factors:

• How long the consultation lasts?
• What's entailed?
• How much it costs (if not free)?
• What does it enable the patient to do?

Not only are these key benefits that can be used by your team to leverage bookings, but for any patient thinking of booking a consultation, they now have an important yardstick with which to compare to other practices in your area. 

7. Maintain the right frame of mind.

It's a fact that around 70% of all communicated meaning is visual, but when talking on the telephone the opportunity to observe body language, or indeed any type of facial expression, is totally lost. For this reason, what you say (verbal) and how you say it (the vocal tone) are highly important.

Before answering the phone, reception staff need to be in the right frame of mind. Doing so is far more likely to impact positively on the caller, giving them more incentive to book a consultation. 

8. Don't forget your answer machine message.

Bearing in mind the visual, verbal, and vocal factors, these need to also be present in any answer phone messages you have. Remember, because someone can't get hold of you when they need to, it might already put the caller in a negative frame of mind. Therefore, when recording your message ensure that it's clear, concise, empathetic, and includes a reference as to when the call will be returned. 

9. Prepare responses and practice them.

I'm sure that when working in a dental practice, most of the questions asked are ones which have been heard many times before. To ensure consistency, make sure your team are well-versed in answering them. Get your team together and come up with some 'stock' responses.

It's important that these responses are personalized and not scripted, and should provide a confidence boost to the reception team. This in turn should result in a positive impact on the overall conversation. 

10. Empower your team!

Finally, like any slick, well-oiled team, it needs ongoing training. How about authorizing the highest performers in the team to train the rest.

Everyone loves a bit of empowerment and in fact, it's regarded as one of the biggest reasons for job satisfaction. By giving the highest performers greater responsibility, you'll not only have a better team that can turn inquiries into leads, but you’ll also have a happy team who really want to work for you.