Dental problems are tricky. Whether a patient is experiencing a minor tingle or crippling pain, nothing can make their life worse than being directed to the voicemail when they call their dentist. Generally, patients tend to pledge their loyalty to dental health providers who can, at the very least, offer stellar customer care at that point when they need help the most. One of the key reasons why you should use an answering service for your dental office is that your patients will appreciate speaking to a pleasant, courteous, and professional representative to help them schedule appointments, make inquiries or leave important messages for their dentists.

A recent survey shows that 63% of patients who call dental offices want to speak to a real person. About 23% of the clients of any practice will even insist on visiting a clinic in-person to address their immediate concerns during a face-to-face meeting. Currently, the need to provide top-notch customer service in all industries is not being taken lightly. If you are not delivering a positive experience, there is a good chance your competition is.

How Answering Services Can Help You Optimize Your Dental Clinic to Its Fullest Potential

Dental answering services can do so much more than merely help you make an excellent first impression. They can also help you maintain and run an efficient and well-managed schedule.

Reliable phone answering service providers offer appointment scheduling services as part of their standard package. This allows clients to benefit from fully-featured appointment-setting applications where answering agents can help them schedule appointments in order of their priority.

This will ensure that you can:

  • Manage your work calendar better.
  • Keep track of billable hours.
  • Create, move, or cancel dental appointments when necessary.
  • Fill in empty time in your work schedule to avoid lost revenue.

Organizing and managing your appointments will offer numerous enticing benefits. Note that you can always access your work calendar and make modifications where necessary. The perks of investing in an answering service to help you maintain a clear to-do list include:

  • Your patients will not be kept waiting for hours during appointments.
  • Your practice won’t lose revenue because patients couldn’t book appointments.
  • You won’t end up frustrating loyal clients who walk in to find their dentist overwhelmed with appointments.
  • Find a balance between different types of appointments to maintain a healthy workflow for your practitioners and support staff.

 

Telltale Signs That You Should Invest In an Answering Service for Your Dental Practice Urgently

Sometimes, it’s not easy to tell whether you genuinely need an answering service. While an investment can offer you a whole range of benefits, it can still be challenging to decide whether outsourcing your calls is right for your business.

Typically, dental practices invest in answering services to ensure they:

  • Never miss calls from their clients.
  • Manage high-volume calls internally.
  • Get different calls routed to various departments for better work efficiency.
  • Maximize the outcome of peak time during and right after marketing campaigns.
  • Offer a better experience to their customers each time they call.
  • Enhance their image, generate new leads, and boost their profitability.
  • Reduce the overhead costs of hiring an in-house receptionist.
  • Are available to their clients 24/7/ 365.

So, is an answering service ideal for your practice? If you find yourself battling with more than one of the concerns listed below, you should begin your research for the best service provider.

Disorganization

Cell phones and telephone systems help dental facilities to keep in touch with their patients and medical equipment suppliers. While this may be the case, they also create a significant distraction that can easily result in inefficiency and disorganization. Investing in an answering service ensures that dental practitioners and the support staff in your clinic are not dragged from their duties to answer calls.

Losing customers

Research shows that patients in need of dental care will often call the clinic ahead of time to make inquiries or schedule appointments. This is irrespective of whether they need emergency services or routine dental care. If they cannot reach a representative when they call, there is a good chance that they will try to reach out to your competitor.

It could be that you typically don’t need an answering service, especially if your receptionist can handle all calls without much trouble. However, it makes sense to invest in an answering service right before an upsurge in calls caused by successful marketing campaigns. If your receptionist cannot handle the higher volume of calls, this may easily jeopardize the outcome of your marketing efforts.

Poor Professional Image

Whether your business thrives or crumbles may highly depend on your ability to maintain a good professional image. An easy way to enhance your image is to ensure that customers calling your clinic can quickly receive assistance from a polite and helpful representative. Answering agents are trained to maintain high levels of professionalism at all times, which can help you make your practice appear more established and reliable in the eyes of new clients.

How to Choose the Best Answering Service for your Dental Practice

The hunt for a reliable dental answering service is not as easy as many may assume. Simply searching “answering service” on Google yields thousands of results, and all service providers claim to be the best at what they do.

Generally, any company worth hiring should help you to:

  • Save time and increase the productivity of your staff.
  • Take advantage of every opportunity from incoming calls.
  • Appear more established, bigger, and able to provide quality customer care 24/7/ 365
  • Reduce business overheads
  • Make a great first impression and spruce up your reputation.

It is vital to ensure the company you hire can help you enjoy the above benefits. Reliable experts will do more than just answer your phone lines, dispatch calls, and take messages. They will also make your customer service stronger, schedule your work calendar, and generally make your days more productive. Before you commit to any service, here are essential factors to consider

Operator Training

The answering service you choose can make or break your dental practice. It is crucial to ensure that your facility will be well-represented by the answering agents. Dependable answering service companies train their agents thoroughly and ensure they can uphold high professionalism standards at all times. Apart from meeting specific personality requirements, these agents also understand the services you offer and the needs of your clients. This knowledge gives them a good idea of how to respond to questions, direct calls, and respond to different situations.

Ability to Provide a Personalized Caller Experience

Choosing a dentist is a very personal affair. Similarly, an answering service for a dental office can only make sense if it offers a personalized caller experience. While call scripting is common and sometimes beneficial, the agents should have what it takes to customize their scripts to match different callers’ needs effectively. Trust me; your clients won’t appreciate the use of generic call templates.

Technological Competence

The whole idea of investing in professional dental answering services is for your practice to benefit from the best expert knowledge and the best telecommunication technologies. The right company to hire should invest their resources, time, and energy in ensuring that everything is set up correctly and tested before agents start picking calls. Between poor quality phone signals, failed transfers and forwarding errors, experts who cannot safeguard against these concerns may end up doing your facility more harm than good.

Still on technological competence, it is crucial to have some control over the service you acquire for your dental practice. The right answering service will use the best apps and ensure you can access a portal with features that allow you to:

  • Review the call/message logs.
  • Listen to live calls or call recordings.
  • Review scheduled appointments on the work calendar.
  • Update or modify your work calendar.
  • Review the performance report of an answering service.

Effective Emergency Dispatching System

For an answering service to enhance your operations and boost profitability, it must have a sound emergency dispatching system. You need agents who can partner with your in-house team to ensure that dental emergencies are handled with the urgency they deserve. To be on the safe side, ask about the applications used by different experts and their features.

Moreover, affirm that the 3rd party app is compatible with the equipment and software you are currently using in your dental office. It pays to confirm that urgent messages and updates will get to you in real-time. While it is essential for answering service companies to use the most advanced technology, the best experts will still find ways to keep everything dead simple. After all, they are offering services to dental healthcare providers, not technophiles.

Security

Your dental answering service will handle plenty of sensitive information about your patients and your practice. This makes it essential to find experts who are HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and/or PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant. Remember that confidentiality violations can result in serious legal tussles that commonly attract hefty fines, jail time, or a business permit loss.

An answering service that is PCI compliant will safeguard the credit card information of your patients. The service provider will complete self-assessments yearly and pass security scans every three months. Additionally, the company will create a paperless work environment for dental office answering agents and ensure call recordings are turned off when collecting payment information.

On the other hand, a HIPAA compliant answering service will protect your patients’ health information and ensure it remains confidential. The company will not send sensitive information via voicemail, text, or email. It will also ensure that all calls and messages are stored in a secure online portal that can only be accessed by authorized persons using a username and password.

Reasonable Pricing Model

Even dental practices are not the same when it comes to the number of calls they receive daily. Some clinics only receive a few calls, so they try to reduce unnecessary overhead costs by investing in answering services.

A dependable dental answering service can provide outstanding customer care, but it cannot generate new leads. The answering agents will only handle the calls coming in, which makes it unreasonable to settle for a flat rate structure. A company that charges based on line activity ensures that you only pay for the service you receive.

There are two billing structures commonly used by dental answering service companies. Note that the right billing model for your dental practice will highly depend on your call volume, budget, and the benefits you hope to reap from your investment. Consider both structures carefully and determine the most cost-effective option for your facility.

-Per Minute Billing

This billing structure works quite similar to cell phone plans. You get an allotment of minutes monthly and settle the minimum rate for a service package as long as there are no overages. Typically, companies will offer different service packages ideal for businesses with different needs. For instance, there will be a package ideal for dental practices with low, medium, and high-volume call needs. Simply choose a plan that suits your usage threshold.

-Per Call Billing

Companies that don’t receive many calls may find the per-call billing structure ideal. This structure bills you for each call received, irrespective of its duration. Typically, an additional fee is charged for calls that need dispatching and messages.

Contracts

This is arguably the most crucial factor to consider when choosing a dental answering service. You cannot be sure that a service is right for you until you try it out. This makes it best to select experts who will not tie you down with a long-term contract. Any company worthy of your trust will have short-term contracts and will only require a one-month notice to close your account. This ensures you are not at risk of getting stuck with services that no longer suit your business needs.

Working With a Dental Answering Service

The best answering service can help you scale up your customer service operations to avoid missed calls and delays in answering calls. Qualified agents can lend a hand with sharing service knowledge, appointment scheduling, and generally ensuring that the first impression you give helps build loyalty.

Are you still wondering why you should use an answering service for your dental office?

Well, one fact we can all agree on is that practices that strive to provide a meaningful client experience tend to promote word-of-mouth advertising. About 92% of dental patients believe suggestions from family and friends more than advertising. Professional dental answering services will not cost you a fortune, yet they can increase word-of-mouth advertising by a whopping 10%.