We’ll never stop beating this horse (bet you didn’t expect to read that today): Dental practices need to get serious about phone calls.
Yeah, we know you’ve got a terrific front desk team. But that doesn’t change the fact that if you’re like most practice leaders, you’re probably systematically undervaluing just how important it is to always answer the phone — and to know what to say to potential patients when you do.
Sounds a little passionate for a dental blog, you say? Well, we like to trot this number out every few months: The average dental practice misses roughly 35 percent of all phone calls.
That’s 35 percent of your marketing budget — wasted. And as marketers, there’s nothing that makes us feel crazier than waste.
But don’t just take our word for it. Kevin Tallman, CEO of Mango Voice, leads a company that makes managing phone calls simpler. He works with thousands of practices and says that dental leaders need to start thinking about how to get phones right from day one.
“To me, you need to start as soon as you open your first practice,” he tells us. Why? Because even today, with online chat becoming an ever-more-popular option, “the main way you’re corresponding with patients is through your phones.”
For many practices, this means investing money in an effective phone system and in hiring enough front desk team members to make sure a call never gets missed (plus an answering service for after-hours). It also involves making sure whoever is answering the phones knows how to talk to potential patients and can convert them into scheduled appointments at a rate of 80-90 percent.
Why do so many in dental do otherwise? Part of it is a natural urge to save money (although the point of putting money into phones is to actually boost your profits). Part of it is habit — a throwback to the salad days of the industry when all you had to do to succeed was hang out your shingle and tend to your patients.
But investing in call handling capacity and phone training also makes many in dental uncomfortable for another reason. This is because for some practice leaders, spending on phones feels too close to the S word: sales.
“People don’t like to hear this, but your front desk people really are your sales team,” Kevin says. “I know that has a negative connotation, at least in the dental space, but that’s what they’re doing on a daily basis.”
In other words, we could all do with a little honesty here. Even in dental, business is still business — and part of being in business is not being afraid to communicate why potential patients should go to you and not the practice down the road.
As Kevin puts it, “If your call team can sell that, it’s gonna be so much more valuable for your practice.”
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