A dazzling array of marketing campaigns across a variety of channels is likely to get your dental practice on people’s minds when it comes to booking their next appointments. They’ll spread the word about your services and inbound calls will increase as a result, but your job as a business owner is far from finished.

The question you need to ask yourself is, what system do I have in place to ensure that my front desk team converts as many of these new-patient calls into bookings as they possibly can? Often, dental professionals are simply too busy to record phone calls and listen to them to devise an appropriate plan to increase conversion and retention. This results in lost opportunities as old habits remain old habits and solid leads continue their search for their ideal dentist.

One way to solve this problem is to partner with an agency that offers marketing strategies for dentists proven to increase ROI and overall patient satisfaction. Do your research and choose one with a glowing reputation for emphasizing the following three pillars of phone-based customer service:

A Welcoming Tone

It’s essential to project a warm and welcoming tone of voice on each and every call. This has a calming effect on the person on the other side of the line and instills positive feelings about the environment in your dental practice. It also projects authority.

An easy tip to convey a bright and cheery mood is to physically smile as you talk. The act will carry over into your tone and encourage the patient to speak openly about their needs. It’s also advisable to use words like “we” and “let’s” to show patients that you’re invested in helping them solve their oral-care issues with empathy and understanding.

Knowledgeable Staff

You can increase your chances of patients retaining you by training your staff to answer a wide breadth of questions about the services you offer. This goes a long way to easing patient worries about unfamiliar procedures that are in fact quite common and no cause for concern. A knowledgeable staff will also be able to:

• Ensure patients that they will have options that will give them control and help them feel secure with their dental decisions
• Inform patients about what they can expect during their appointment such as who will be seeing them, what services are available, all the way through to resources for children and adults who are nervous about their dental visit
• Provide patients with answers to their dental questions arising from their treatment plans, insurance coverage, right down to practical tips such as alternate routes during road closures that affect your particular location

The Power of Software

If it’s a busy day in your dental practice, it’s completely normal for calls from new patients to go unanswered. But those calls are extremely valuable and should never ever be lost opportunities.

Find yourself a dental marketing company that will use software to track your missed calls and notify your staff to follow up as soon as possible. Thorough dental knowledge and a positive attitude are valuable assets only if you deploy them through timely communication. It’s a bonus if the program can also identify which marketing campaigns are driving most of your call volume so you can make data-driven decisions to ensure you allocate your marketing investment accordingly.

Follow these basic tenets of speaking over the phone in a business context and you’ll soon be increasing your new-patient flow, production, and revenue with an ever-increasing number of new patients.