Dental practices have come under intense scrutiny and pressure during 2020. When lockdown meant many dental practices were forced to close, it meant that many patients and those due a check-up or routine dental work, were pushed back in the schedule. Add to that, missed dental appointments due to Covid-19 guidelines and you can see how the scheduling for dentists has become chaotic at best this past year. If you own or run a dental practice, you’ll understand the importance of good patient management and scheduling. This is where it could be the best approach to outsource certain aspects of the booking, scheduling and appointment planning to an outsourced call centre team with experience of call handling in many different tough environments.
We’ve heard stories so many times this year. As soon as a dental practice was reopened after one of the lockdown periods, they found that phonelines were swamped with patients looking for dental appointments. It was hard to keep up for many practices, with phonelines clogged up and patients lost to other practices or just forgoing dental treatment at all, even in the most serious cases. Hiring an outsourced call centre for a professional dental practice is a good way to help in this situation, but it also stands the practice in good stead for the future and long-term productiveness of the practice.
Think about how many different aspects of daily tasks at a dental practice require the phone. There is quite a lot. Patients must be called to make follow-up appointments or for annual check-ups, calls are constantly received from prospective patients and those wishing to book a new appointment, calls must be screened before placed through to senior management or dental practitioners, and all of this must be conducted with a consistent level of professionalism and courtesy.
A professional contact centre has the tools and the highly trained staff with which to undertake all of this and take some of the burden away from the in-house reception staff and other dental practice staff members. It might be that you have a dedicated phoneline that is outsourced to a call centre to manage brand-new patient bookings, or to manage the follow-up calls for patient appointments. Whatever it is that will help your internal staff run things in as smooth a way as possible. By using a call centre team, you can maintain a positive brand image and level of professionalism and consistency, as that is what they are specifically trained for.
Working with professional call centres for dental practice call handling will provide your practice with that professional edge and consistency, even at times when your internal phonelines might be jammed. Especially with the way this past year has gone, you do not need to be worrying about losing clients or failing to manage the schedule effectively because your provision for call handling internally has been overwhelmed recently. Take the plunge and find a professional contact centre with experience of helping professional practices. What you’ll receive is a consistency of performance and quality that ensures you never miss a call again from a patient and that you can keep the dental health of your existing patients on an upward trend.