Do You Know The Exact Number Of Phone Calls Coming In To Your Dental Practice Each And Every Day?

I wrote an article at the start of the year about the Five Essential Numbers I’d be tracking and measuring in my dental practice as we start into the new year of 2021.

Last week I shared an article about monitoring daily production and collection numbers.

Today we are going to talk about monitoring the number of phone calls coming in to your dental practice.

You need to ask yourself these questions:

And you need to know these numbers on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. [Some may even say on an hourly basis]

Because you want to know when your phone is ringing, and when it is not ringing.

How many phone calls are coming in to your dental practice each day?

Is your dental practice phone ringing?

The number of calls coming in to your dental practice each day determines how many people you need to be employing to answer the phone when it rings.

If your dental practice is receiving only ten calls per day, then you probably could get by withy only one designated person answering your practice phones.

However, if your practice is receiving thirty or more incoming calls of any type per day, then you will need to have more than one skilled person answering your phones to adequately service those people calling your office.

Once we know the number of times your dental office phone rings, the next thing we need to be looking at closely is the dissection of what type of calls exactly that your dental office is receiving.

This means keeping a record of the conversations had with each and every caller, and the purpose or intention of each one of those calls.

How many of those calls are new patients calling to make an enquiry or an appointment?

Remember, a request for an appointment, and an enquiry about a dental procedure, are the same thing.

This is because nobody phones a dental practice to find out about dentistry, when they can Google search the answer they are looking for.

The reason a caller phones a dental practice and asks the cost of a procedure, is because that person is in need of that procedure.

Once we a cognisant with this fact, then we can answer price enquiries by leading the caller to the appointment that they are in need of.

Knowing how many people are calling for an appointment allows our dental practice to schedule and plan the size of our practice as well as the hours of operation of our dental practice, so that our practice can satisfy that demand.

How many of those new patient enquiry calls result in a made and kept appointment?

The ratio of made and kept appointments compared to the number of enquiry phone calls is our CALL CONVERSION RATE.

The Call Conversion Rate is an indication of the conversational skills of those people answering your dental practice phones.

As I said before, nobody phones a dental practice for the fun of it. Everybody phones a dental practice because they have a dental problem that they need solving. And the role of the person answering that dental office phone is to schedule an appointment for each caller in such a way that when the phone call has ended, the caller thinks to themselves:

“I am so glad that I have called this dental practice and made an appointment, and I am so looking forward to that appointment that hope that they will call me and bring that appointment forward if possible.”

The Call Conversion Rate will be a number that each person answering the phone will have, as well as a number that the practice will have.

How many existing patients are calling to make an appointment?

All patients leaving the practice following an appointment should leave with a future appointment made.

The only patients [existing patients] who should be phoning the dental practice are those experiencing pain or discomfort or have a broken filling or tooth.

Knowing this number on a monthly basis allows us to schedule sufficient emergency flex time in our days so that we are not turning these patients away in their “hour of need”.

How many patients with appointments are calling to reschedule or cancel those existing appointments?

This number should be as low as possible. There are reasons why this number does get high in dental practices, and there are ways to keep this number low.

When this number is high, it means we need extra staff to be taking these calls and to be reshuffling appointments.

Ask yourself these questions:

What are these numbers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?

When we know these numbers and how they compare over time, we can forecast rather than react.

The ability to reliably forecast allows us to be ahead of the curve, rather than to be reacting AFTER the horse has bolted.

Knowing these numbers allows us the luxury of knowing which of our staff members are better at scheduling appointments, and knowing which of your staff members are allowing patients with treatment booked to cancel or reschedule their made appointments.

When we know these numbers it allows us as practice owners to be able to educate and train our team accordingly.

Having a detailed knowledge of these numbers allows practice owners to remove the guesswork from their forward forecasting.

And that’s a much better place to be coming from.

Measuring your incoming phone call numbers on a daily basis will take you a long way towards building the dental practice of your dreams in 2021….

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"How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021"

If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it... or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”... then register for this unique online ZOOM workshop Saturday March 20, 2021

Click here for more details.

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Need your phones monitored?

Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?

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For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better....

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Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.

You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order

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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.

Email me at [email protected]