by Sponsored Content: Call Box
By Steve Kettig, Marketing & Media Manager, Call Box
Understanding your patients’ concerns and expectations is essential for more efficiently booking appointments and providing the best overall experience at your practice. However, despite your practice’s best efforts, many factors prevent appointments from being scheduled. Discover 4 strategies to help your practice convert more calls into appointments.
Did you know scheduling conflicts are responsible for 44.64% of unbooked dental appointments, and failing to follow up with patients accounts for another 17.51%? The best way to avoid calendar conflicts is to prioritize scheduling flexibility by offering extended hours, weekend availability, and online booking tools in addition to the phone. Cancelations do happen, so it’s important to have a system in place to automatically follow up with your patients and confirm appointments. Call Box recommends sending a follow-up message within 24 hours of the initial call to address any outstanding concerns. It’s best practice to send follow-up messages on multiple channels, such as SMS or email, and schedule follow-up calls during peak hours to increase the likelihood you will reach your patient. Call Box also recommends using an automatic alert system like Call Box’s Missed Opportunity Call Alerts which proactively sends your practice text message and email alerts when callers do not connect. This allows your team to quickly salvage missed appointment opportunities.
In addition to making scheduling appointments more convenient for your patients, you also want to audit your practice’s phone process. A great way to audit your front desk’s phone handling skills is to call into your practice and experience the process firsthand. Calling into your own practice gives you insight into any bottlenecks with call routing and see how well your team handles the phones. While calling in manually is an effective strategy, it does not paint a full picture of how well your front desk handles calls. Luckily, AI solutions such as Call Box’s AI-powered Mystery Shop Scorecard automatically evaluates each unique appointment opportunity phone call and provides feedback. AI Mystery Shop Scorecard allows managers to quickly see what areas the team needs to improve in.
Once you identify the holes in your phone process, it’s important to address them with ongoing training. It’s not enough just to equip your staff with the skills necessary to handle the phone; you need to establish optimal phone handling metrics to measure success and see who on your team needs further training. Training is very important, but it can be time consuming for managers to manually review each call. However, Call Box’s AI-powered call coaching solution streamlines this process by coaching your staff’s phone skills after every call. AI call coaching provides actionable suggestions on how your phone handlers could improve at requesting and booking more appointments so staff can see continuous growth in phone handling performance.
Ensure your dental practice’s phone handling skills don’t get in the way of booking appointments by streamlining your appointment booking process, sending follow ups, auditing your phone process, and call coaching. Check out Call Box’s full report HERE to learn more data-backed strategies behind the reasons your practice isn’t booking appointments. Speak with one of Call Box’s experts HERE to see how you can start Owning the phone today.
Steve Kettig, Marketing & Media Manager
Steve Kettig is a Marketing Manager at Call Box, where he helps healthcare practices optimize their phone communication and improve customer experience. With a keen focus on data-driven strategies, Steve specializes in creating content that empowers organizations to leverage call tracking for better decision-making and operational efficiency.
