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Why Your Dentist Needs Customer Service Software

TMCnews Featured Article


June 23, 2015

Why Your Dentist Needs Customer Service Software

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor


When was the last time you thought about how you could spend more time in the dental chair? I would venture to guess that for the majority of us, we think the exact opposite – stay out of the chair for as long as possible. While the individuals living in my house are forced to be in it every six months, the goal is to make that visit as short as possible.


On the other side of that chair, however, is a professional trying to earn an honest living. While your dentist does want you to have healthy teeth (hopefully), he or she also wants you in the chair when you’re scheduled to be there. As a recent TeamSupport blog highlighted, missed appointments are responsible for the biggest loss of revenue in a dental practice. Manual processes tend to try and thwart this loss, but customer service software could offer a better way.

The blog cited a Software Advice report that analyzed the current state of the dental practice today. For many of us, we receive a postcard and likely a phone call reminder that we have an upcoming appointment. I also add the appointment to my Outlook calendar as soon as I make it or I’ll schedule a conflicting appointment. If all patients did the same thing, there wouldn’t be a need for customer service software to automate the process, but that’s not going to happen. 

In fact, Software Advice found that more than half of today’s dental patients want to receive an alert by text or email of an upcoming appointment. Only 25 percent want a phone call and less than 20 percent want to receive something in the mail. If your family is like ours, the likelihood of receiving that phone message is pretty slim. We still have a landline, simply because my husband works with farmers who still use the number. How often do we remember to check the voicemail account attached to the landline? We’re lucky if it’s once a month.

From the dental office point of view, most are already using a scheduling software platform to make and manage appointments. Why not implement a customer service software solution that integrates with that platform and automatically communicates with the customer base? If it would eliminate the need for the manual process of mailing a postcard or making a phone call and reduces the amount of missed appointments by even a few percentage points, the software has already paid for itself.

The challenge, of course, is getting practitioners to change the way they’ve always done business. But, if lawyers can produce commercials, why can’t dentists send a text?

 







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