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Published by Viva Concepts, 2018-06-25 17:18:12

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Information for Conversion:
How Hard Facts Can Help You Grow Your Practice
Article by Dr. Chris Phelps, Concept to Practice
Do you want your practice to grow? For a practice, growth comes from new patients and retention of those patients. If you want to see growth, you must understand how new patients nd your practice, what makes them schedule appointments and how you can ensure new patients show up for those appointments. You may think you understand the processes that take a new patient from spotting an ad to showing up in your o ce, but unless you have hard data to back up your assumptions, you may be wasting marketing dollars and losing potential patients.
Most practices su er from a lack of hard data. In my work, I’ve discovered several key areas where more data can spotlight problems and drive practice growth.
Where do new patients come from?
Most practices use a range of marketing tools. They mostly do direct mail, put ads in newspapers and magazines, advertise on radio, run a web page and even sponsor community events to connect with new patients. Do you know which ads bring in new patients and how much those new patients are worth?
To get detailed marketing data, you can’t just track calls to the o ce. An advertisement isn’t working for you if it doesn’t bring in patients who actually make appointments and bring in revenue. To track the actual return on investment of your marketing campaigns, you need detailed information on whether the people who respond to an advertisement end up as patients in your o ce and where they actually heard about your o ce.
When I ask doctors if they are asking patients, “How How did you hear about us?,” most tell me they are. However, they are often asking the patients the question when they come in for the appointment. The challenge with asking weeks after the patients have scheduled is that they have likely forgotten the true source of the information. They will give you an answer such as “a friend” or “the Internet,” but it may not be accurate. Another mistake is asking the patients if they found the o ce as a result of a speci c campaign. The team may say, “Did you hear about us from our Facebook?,” and the patients will agree they did even if they didn’t.
You will get the most accurate information if you ask the question during the scheduling call. As soon as 52


you gure out there is a new patient on the line, ask them how they he or she heard about your o ce; it will be fresh in their his or her mind and likely true.
When do you miss calls?
Did you know that 87 percent of new patients won’t leave a message or call back if their calls get are sent to voicemail? That means for every 10 calls that go to voicemail, you’re only getting one potential new patient to leave a voicemail message. Those few patients who do leave you a message are likely referrals, willing to go the extra mile because their friend told them to call. The fact is this: Potential new patients do not leave messages.
Another fact is they will then be Googling the o ce down the street if you don’t return a call within seven minutes. That is a tight window of opportunity and requires someone to be paying full attention. Unanswered calls are a costly missed opportunity to for your practice. Nationwide, the data coming out of Call Tracker ROI reports that the average dental o ce is not answering 33 percent of its marketing marketing-based, potential new patient appointment opportunity phone calls. That’s one-third of the calls they spent good money on to generate new patient leads!
How often do calls go to voicemail? If you ask your sta , they’ll say rarely. That’s because calls go to voicemail when the o ce sta doesn’t notice them. If the new patient doesn’t leave a message, it’s as if the call never happened. You can’t reduce missed calls if you don’t know that they exist.
Once o ces start tracking missed calls, they will begin to see patterns. Many o ces miss calls during
or immediately after the daily lunch break, on Fridays and on weekends. Other o ces miss calls during peak hours. They don’t have the front-o ce sta and physical phones to deal with patient intake, billing, patient check-out while also paying attention to incoming calls. Data on missed calls can help practices streamline procedures or add phones to deal with peak times.
If you still don’t think you are missing calls, think about this age age-old con ict:
No one is more important than the new patient calling the o ce, BUT no one is more important than the patient standing in front of you trying to make an appointment.
We know the caller likely won’t leave a message so what does your team member do? They will honor the person standing in front of them—a hard choice and a missed opportunity.
If you have the hard data on calls missed and the data justi es the expense, you can choose to stagger lunches or rotate team members so the phones are always covered. Some smart o ces get the o ce sta a cell phone to keep the land line phones open. Others have di erent team members with a cell phone on Fridays ready to answer patient calls. Again, if the data justi es the expense, it is 100 percent worth it.
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Does your sta ‘close the deal’?
Does your sta know how to turn a new patient contact into a scheduled appointment? Only about 5 percent of o ces train their support sta in answering the phone, dealing with queries and scheduling appointments. While some of your o ce sta members may have a natural talent for handling new patients, most need training. You need data that tells you what happens when someone calls your o ce, how each sta member responds to di cult questions and how often each sta member manages to convert a new patient phone call into an appointment. In addition, if they are struggling to convert calls into appointments, you need to the data on why this is occurring. Research I conducted through Call Tracker ROI shows 64 percent of potential new patient calls are not converted into appointments. We miss the opportunity to schedule 66 out of 100 people that who call our o ce. That’s a lot of lost opportunity that could be costing you tens of thousands of dollars every month.
To get in-depth data on sta /new patient interactions, you’ll need to record calls and track results. Each month, schedule a meeting to go over the previous month’s data with your o ce sta and respect the challenges they face on the telephone. Schedule training sessions to teach them how to respond to questions about emergency appointments and scheduled appointments. If you do not have the time or capacity to record and go through calls by hand, services such as Call Tracker ROI will do it for you and provide detailed analytics showing exactly what is happening––invaluable information for o ces that want to see growth. It is imperative to nd out what challenges the team members experience that prevent the calls from being converted. That answer will change everything.
Small changes can make a big di erence in how many new patients make it into the o ce. For instance, a subtle change in the scheduling dialogue can virtually eliminate noshows.
Research in the restaurant industry found that changing the scheduling dialogue from “Please call if you need to cancel or reschedule” to “Will you please call us if you need to cancel or reschedule? (Pause
for answer.) Great! I’ll let everyone up here know that you’re going to call us if you need to cancel or reschedule” dropped no-show rates from 50 percent of reservations to 5 percent of reservations. O ces that employ this tactic have seen a similar drop in no-shows.
Slight modi cations in o ce management and advertising practices can lead to big gains in income and new patient retention. If you don’t have data, you can’t make smart decisions about marketing, sta ng and o ce routines. With detailed data, you can spot problems and craft solutions that will help your practice grow and thrive.
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The Masters of Marketing Administration is an educational advancement for training of business owners and their administrative and support sta on the Viva System—a system that puts in place the
ideal residual business model for consumer
acquisition, loyalty and retention.
Copyright © 2016 by Gregory Hughes, Viva Concepts, LLC. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America. First Printing, 2016



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