Don’t Let Your Potential Dental Patients Go to Voicemail
Optimize your phone call answering procedures to prevent prospective patients from going to voicemail. At Reach, we answer calls when your team can’t, so every one of your dental patients will feel heard after speaking with a live person. Discover why you shouldn’t let your potential patients go to voicemail and how to prevent it from happening.
Why You Should Not Allow Your Potential Patients Go to Voicemail
Most sales professionals will tell you that you shouldn’t let your patients go to voicemail for various reasons. Missing a call makes your staff seem inattentive and makes the patient feel less valued. Let’s explore some of the most compelling reasons to prevent callers from going to voicemail.
1. You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression
When you let a phone call go to voicemail during daylight hours, it gives the impression that you have understaffed your office or put together an inattentive team. Either way, it places your dental practice in a bad light. For many first-time callers, getting sent to voicemail instead of a call answering service will cause them to continue their searches elsewhere.
2. The Best Time to Book an Appointment Is Now
Your staff should attempt to book an appointment on every call, including wrong numbers. And right now is always the best time to schedule one. Every voicemail you receive represents a missed opportunity. However, once your staff goes home, voicemails become inevitable unless you hire a professional answering service.
3. Let Your Patients Know You Value Them
Old, current, and potential patients feel less valued when your dental office fails to pick up the phone. Allowing your patients to go to voicemail only serves to start things off on the wrong foot.
As a professional service provider, you must implement business processes that operate smoothly to reassure prospective patients about the competency of your dentists and hygienists. If your office can’t handle incoming calls, some patients won’t trust you with their teeth.
How to Prevent Potential Patients from Going to Voicemail
Letting a potential patient’s call go to voicemail always represents a step in the wrong direction. Thankfully, you can take measures to prevent it from occurring. Discover five things you can do to avoid voicemails and provide better service to your patients below.
1. Answer the Phone Within Three Rings
Almost all salespeople have received the instruction to answer the phone within three rings. Most consumers begin losing patience after the third ring and may hang up. However, answering the phone within three rings will also prevent potential patients from going to voicemail. The dual benefits of above-average responsiveness always lead to additional appointments.
2. Create a Backup Plan for Your Busiest Hours
Even the best office staff get overwhelmed at times. Hold a meeting with your entire team to brainstorm ideas about how to cover for each other during peak hours. Then, when your office gets hit with a sudden rush of incoming calls, you can temporarily shift responsibilities to handle the excess workload.
3. Answer the Phone During Lunch
Don’t forget to leave someone in the office to answer the phones during lunch. Make your office available to take calls from potential patients when they have time to call you. Lunchtime can quickly become one of the busiest times for incoming calls. Consider staggering your staff members’ lunch hours so you can always have one or two people in the office to answer calls.
4. Everyone Is Responsible for Answering the Phone
No one on your team should consider themselves above answering the phone. Many people harbor anxiety about answering the phone and will do anything to avoid it. Let your entire team know that everyone remains responsible for answering the phone when your receptionist cannot.
5. Engage a Live Answering Service
As the leader of your dental practice, you may want to think about engaging a professional live answering service. When you hire an answering service, they can take calls during lunch, after hours, or even 24 hours a day. If your team is not able to answer a call in the morning or afternoon, an answering service can pick up the slack and book the appointment right then and there.
Reach: Your High-Value Live Appointment-Setter
Never let a potential patient go to voicemail again by hiring the best live answering service: Reach. At Reach, we specialize in scheduling high-value dental appointments, but we also offer a range of crucial services. Some of the services we offer to dental practices include:
● Insurance verification
● Call answering
● Recall
Book more appointments than ever before and boost your dental practice’s revenue with Reach. Call us at 801-901-8852 or email us at info@getreach.co to schedule a free demonstration of our call answering services.
