Whether it’s for their first appointment with your office or one of several as part of a treatment plan, following up with patients is essential to maintaining consistent cash flow and a reliable client base. Without routine follow-ups, people may have no idea that they have an upcoming dental appointment. They may not realize that follow-up appointments are needed to complete their treatment!
However, a dental scheduling service can integrate the practice of follow-ups into your office’s protocols, therefore reducing the number of cancellations and no-shows!
It doesn’t matter how good your dental services are or how friendly or helpful your team members are if they don’t answer the phone often enough. If someone calls during normal business hours and they don’t get to speak with a real person, the chances of them calling back later or even leaving a message are incredibly low.
Whether you’re dealing with high volume or you simply can’t find team members that meet your standards, it can be difficult to find the right support for your practice’s unique needs. Not all employees are capable of performing all the tasks you need seamlessly. Even then, it’s difficult to measure their performance and determine what needs to be changed in order to give patients a better dental care experience overall.
Have you considered limiting or even completely removing insurance from your office because of the fear that your patient’s insurance will get rejected? If so, you should know that you are far from the only dentist to do this. Insurance companies make it increasingly difficult to keep up with their changing plans and terms, making it harder to know what can be covered and what cannot.
These days, it’s hard to find employees that are not only good at their job, but reliable when the office gets busy. Unemployment is lower now than in previous years, so chances are the employee you’ve been searching for is already employed or has moved elsewhere for another job opportunity. With that being said, what if there was a way to get a highly-qualified employee whose only role was managing your practice’s many administrative duties?
As a dental professional, your biggest concern is making sure your patients are properly cared for. You also want to confirm they have the tools to manage their oral health for life. Of course, running an entire dental practice is rarely a simple process. Missing calls from prospective patients and having current patients’ insurance rejected only makes your job more stressful.
When dentists learn about the concept of a dental answering service, it’s common that they have many questions. For example, if answering service employees aren’t required to show up to the office and learn how the practice operates, how are they supposed to help? How is there service any different than an answering machine? How are they supposed to use the practice’s existing software?
If your current dental answering service only answers calls for you and leaves messages, you should definitely take a moment to learn what it should be offering you. While it’s convenient to have extra support when answering patient calls, it’s actually nothing more than a glorified call center. Most of these centers don’t cater to specific industries and will attempt to work with any company that hires them.
When you hear the phrase “dental answering service,” you may assume that it’s only job is to answer calls when your own staff is too busy speaking with patients in the practice. However, it truly is so much more than that. While having a dedicated support staff can catch more calls and take messages as needed, it can also make your patients feel like their part of something bigger when they visit the dentist.
You may have already experienced this at your practice or heard another dentist tell you about an angry patient they had because their dental bill was much higher than expected. When it comes to patients, the absolute worse thing your practice can do is mishandle their money.