Even dentists need to make sure they know a thing or two about customer engagement tactics.
One organization that clearly recognizes the importance of turning first time clients into loyal brand proponents is the Internet Dental Alliance (IDA (News - Alert)). Following the results of a dental marketing survey called “The Wealthy Dentist,” IDA decided to unveil a new Call Quality Review Program because survey results indicated that up to 50 percent of new dental patients are won or lost depending on how initial calls are handled by the front desk. Thanks to IDA’s new Call Quality Review Program, which is based on its LeadFire technology, doctors can now monitor incoming calls and improve conversion rates.
"Over the past few decades, I've seen doctors spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on elaborate marketing strategies - then lose their investment due to lack of training, lack of systems, and lack follow-through by their front desk teams," said dental marketing expert Jim Du Molin, founder of IDA. "Generating the high-value new patient lead is merely the first step. Converting that phone call into an appointment completes the process."
For IDA, successful customer engagement involves two steps when it comes to creating new patient appointments. The first step is to generate phone inquiries from qualified patient prospects using New Patient Portals, powered by IDA's LeadFire technology. Each portal is optimized based on a dental practice specialty, such as cosmetic dentistry, orthodontics, dentures, dental implants, gum disease, tooth whitening, and sedation dentistry, according to IDA. The second step is to convert phone calls into appointments.
As opposed to receptionists monitoring the data that is collected, doctors will sift through the information. As part of the new system, the dentist call review feature can be turned off completely or left on to record each incoming call. Recordings can also be reviewed at a later time and relied upon to determine desk performance best practices.
"Implementing call quality review into front desk management can add from 5 to 20 new patients per month to a dental practice. It's our most frequently requested feature," said Jim Du Molin.
In addition to call monitoring, the New Patient Portal Control Panel equips doctors with a multitude of reporting tools to bolster dental marketing campaigns. Specifically, the "Reports" section and the "Review Leads" page summarize new patient leads in a graph, grouped by month. Moreover, IDA's LeadFire technology allows lead sources to be filtered to display results from a particular Web portal or directory or for a specific practice location, according to IDA.
Results can also be filtered to include leads from Web forms, emails, and telephone calls. Other lead reports can be created based on geographical markets (state, city, Zip Code).
This commitment to customer engagement is just what ACCENT Marketing Services encourages all companies to embody. According to ACCENT, when it comes to finding out if your customers are happy and if they are loyal brand proponents, your first strategy should be to listen. Listen to what you are doing right, to the areas where you can improve and to what your customers’ true needs are.
“Listening is more than just listening to phone calls or tapping into what is going on in a variety of channels,” Tim Searcy, chief executive officer of ACCENT Marketing Services, told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “We want to see not only what the customers say about the brands but how they feel about them. We find this includes a lot of social networks and community components like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter and the Blogosphere. You can also listen by requesting feedback from the customers – kind of a more classic market research and customer satisfaction – but capturing those inquires through both direct and indirect channels, creating a singular strain of customer information around each customer and then being able to batch those pieces together to come to some conclusions and draw some ideas around how to do more.”
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Edited by Chris Freeburn