If you run a dental clinic, you can agree that the clinic’s front desk section is busier than other departments. Telephones are constantly ringing with incoming phone calls from potential patients making inquiries about your practice, as well as existing patients seeking your services. If you ignore these calls, you may miss a precious business opportunity or the chance to offer outstanding customer service and care that would earn you positive online reviews.
Since your dental clinic is busy, you could find that you are overworking your staff to the extent they’re struggling to respond to each client call, not forgetting all those phone calls you may miss after you close the business hours.
Whether your office is established and thriving or new and bustling, you can benefit from added administrative support, be it during busy periods throughout the day and after you close your office for the day. An answering service is the most convenient, affordable solution for your administrative staff’s daily challenges. The following are reasons why you should partner with a dental office answering service.
Your Clinic Will Deliver Outstanding Service Via the Phone
No caller likes to be put on hold. Often, they are left with the feeling that their concern or question isn’t as crucial as what’s taking place in the clinic. On the other hand, your staff may feel agitated or confused when balancing patients’ questions both in person and over the phone. If you have a dental answering service working for you, you will achieve a stress-free experience both for your staff and patients. Properly trained answering agents will deliver courteous and professional service each time a patient calls. By elevating your customer service standards, backup receptionists give a standardized and customized telephone experience, notwithstanding how busy the clinic may be.
Your Focus and That of Your Staff Will Shift Back to Patients Awaiting Treatment
Should they answer phone calls or attend to the patient waiting for assistance at the reception? Administrative employees in a dental office face this dilemma too often. In a perfect world, a patient wouldn’t wait too long to be served either in person or on the phone. During busy times, however, this may feel impossible. Fortunately, with an answering service, you and your administrative staff will be able to divert your attention to the patients you are serving in the clinic. By attending to the patients promptly, you will ensure excellent customer satisfaction and experience.
24/7 Patient Support
When it’s lunchtime, you and your staff are out of the office, and so are the new prospective patients. They contact your office to try and schedule an appointment, and instead of talking to someone, a machine answers them. They disconnect the call and try contacting the next dental clinic available. You just lost a chance to make money. An answering service prevents a situation like this from ever happening. With it, you do not have to be worried about your patients falling through the cracks.
Similarly, you may find yourself awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from a patient with an oral health emergency. This emergency may not be indeed pressing. But telling whether or not it’s that pressing may be tricky. As a busy dentist, your eagerness to have a healthy work-life balance can be achieved by an answering service combating these kinds of calls. Properly-trained answering agents scrutinize every call that comes in after business hours, forwarding to dental specialists only those that are critical. An answering service helps separate the paranoid caller who has spent so much time searching on the internet for their signs & symptoms from one who truly needs emergency help.
Save Staffing Costs Without Compromising on Quality Customer Care and Service
It is hard finding a good, hardworking receptionist. The best professionals usually expect high earnings and a lot of benefits. Whereas adding new members to your staff may seem to be the most reasonable way to combat long wait periods and busy signals, it is not as easy as it appears. The process to hire these members may take much time, and equipping a new worker with a computer, desk, office supplies, benefits, etc., is costly. Working with an answering service will be quicker and more affordable. The moment you partner with one, answering agents will start handling your patient’s calls by the following business day.
Because call center workers work from a customized call script, you’ll never be worried about compromising quality customer care and service to provide affordable services. Trained to comply with your office’s precise procedures and policies, virtual receptionists offer a seamless caller experience. Many patents will not realize they are talking with a third party rather than your office employee.
Grow Your Business With a Dental Answering Service
Whether you are a single-person business or have employed several dentists or assistants to work for you, a dental answering service will help expand your practice. From handling calls while you’re attending to patients, scheduling appointments to after-hours services, a committed answering service can alleviate your customer care and service, so you’re left with focusing on what you do best— restoring patients’ smiles and expanding your practice.
Handling Calls While You Are Attending to Patients
If you operate a small dental office, you don’t have an option but to let the telephone ring while attending to the patient at hand. This means that not only will your callers fail to have a live individual talking to them, but you will also have the added duty of going through messages after you’re done with treating patients.
Using an answering service eliminates these problems. When you partner with a professional service, your potential and current patients will have an amiable, live answering agent on the line at all times. Call service agents can give much of the info your customers are calling about, including hours & services offered, without troubling you while you are at work treating your patients.
Easy Scheduling of Appointments
A voicemail or busy signal can make new patients call your competitor rather than waiting for you to call back. When even one missed call translates to the possible loss of a patient, you cannot afford to have a machine receive the phone. If you have an answering service, your patients, both new and existing ones, will experience prompt and professional appointment scheduling. Abolish the phone tag games and provide your patients with the customer experience you have always wanted to offer. In turn, you’re likely to experience an increase in the number of appointments set and, eventually, business growth at a constant rate.
An answering service also helps remove the back & forth time-consuming that usually occurs when your callers leave messages about setting up appointments. When this happens, you can rest assured that you will be utilizing your time as efficiently as possible and keeping a full appointment calendar.
After-Hours Services
What will happen if any of your patients have a dental emergency after working hours? An answering service is operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year to answer calls. This means that regardless of what time it is, day or night, holiday or weekends, your patients have a live individual on the line listening to their concerns and providing accurate info about how they should proceed if they have a dental-related emergency.
The answering service ensures that your patients know what they should do and how to access late-night dental help. Additionally, they can schedule a patient for follow-up visits so that you can personally monitor their situation and reassure them. Not only is this the most significant way to create patient loyalty, but it is also an ethical means to run your business. It ensures that your business is always operational, and therefore, constantly growing.
Relieve the Pressure on Your Staff
Life does happen— A few of your staff members may go on vacations, maternity leave, or opt to leave your clinic to work in other places. Particularly during times like this, your remaining employees may feel the pressure of maintaining the same burden of work, customer service, and efficiency as when your clinic is fully staffed so they can take good care of the patients that come or call for appointments. An answering service picks up the slack and takes the pressure off our staff, so they attend better to those who come to the office for appointments.
Build a Positive Relationship With Your Patients
An initial call is critical since it’s the first point of contact for most patients. Should you miss this chance, you might not have another with the same patient again. An answering service ensures that none of our patients is put on hold or sent to a messaging machine to make them move to the next available practice. It represents your clinic well from the start and gives your new patients an excellent first impression. This way, the patients will establish a positive relationship with you. They will feel that you always have time for them and will be at ease and comfortable even before coming to your office. When this happens, patients like this won’t hesitate to recommend your services to other patients like them.
Enjoy Bilingual/Multilingual Services of a Dental Answering Service
Language can be a barrier as far as providing stellar dental services is concerned. The population of Spanish-speaking patients is constantly increasing. In case you wish to offer quality services, you have to overcome the language barrier first. A bilingual/multilingual service offered by an answering service allows non-English patients to access the dental services you provide. Bilingual/multilingual services are beneficial since they help you to:
- Impress clients— Although most American citizens speak one language, having a multilingual customer service exhibits aptitude and intelligence to patients, and it also excites and impresses them. Most dental answering services have bilingual and sometimes multilingual virtual receptionists who can speak to callers in Spanish, French, or other languages even if they understand English. The capability of communicating in another language that’s not English delights many callers who don’t speak English.
- Retain current patients— Patients want their illnesses to be treated faster and completely. It’s common for your patients to contact your office after working hours. Using an answering service with bilingual services ensures you don’t miss any patient’s call. Regardless of what time a patient calls, he/she will always be met with a live individual pleased to interact with them. As we mentioned earlier, an answering service provides 24/7 customer service. This means you don’t need to worry about phone calls at night, during holidays, or on the weekends.
- Put New Patients at Ease— We have patients who can communicate in English but don’t understand it very well. Speaking in their native languages makes them comfortable as they will explain their concerns and needs more effectively when it comes to these kinds of peoplely. Word of mouth is the best publicity. Hiring a bilingual answering service attracts new patients to your clinic and makes your staff’s job as well as your job simple. Additionally, it will help the non-English speaking patients schedule appointments and receive answers for their general questions and concerns more easily.
- Tap new markets— Based on where you’re located and the geographical demographics, you’d be missing out on a significant number of patients who don’t speak English. For instance, in the midwest part of the country, many people speak Spanish. Additionally, most areas do not have Spanish-speaking dental clinics for patients who require them. By hiring a dental answering service that offers bilingual services, you could reach Spanish-speaking patients and attend to them. The Spanish-speaking patients would be pleased to talk in their preferred language when contacting your dental practice. This makes your practice attractive. Thus, most people won’t have to go far from where they live to access the Spanish-speaking practices.
Final Thoughts On Dental Answering Services
Running your dental clinic can be exciting and empowering. However, it can also be loads of work. Let a professional dental answering service help you. It will take care of any of your phone service needs by providing patient-focused solutions so that your job remains watching your business and patients’ dental health improve dramatically.
