What Do Your Patients Experience When They Call or Visit Your Dental Office?

When a dental patient calls your office, how long does it take for your staff to answer the telephone? Does the patient have to navigate through a complicated telephone system to speak to a human being? How does your staff sound on the telephone? Are they friendly and helpful? When a patient visits your office, is the patient’s experience pleasant or distasteful?

The reality is that if a patient is not treated well, he or she has a lot of choices other than your practice. As a dental specialist you have a lot more to lose than a single patient or their family. If a patient is referred to your practice and has a negative experience, how many more referrals do you think you are going to receive from the referring dentist or physician?

We phone dental specialists all over the United States and Canada every day. For the most part, we speak with forward-thinking dental specialty practices that have a real interest in marketing themselves. Yet we find all too often that telephones ring and ring before anyone picks up, and worse yet, some practices give the impression that they are doing you a favor by taking your call. That may be all right for us, but are you willing to tolerate your patients’ and prospective patients’ being treated that way?

One solution is to use a health care mystery shopping service to systematically measure your telephone interaction and the actions and attitude of your front desk. We recently spoke with Jodi Manfredi, Manager of Healthcare Client Services at TrendSource. She described a range of services that TrendSource provides, starting with six unrecorded calls to your office for $390 to multiple visits to multiple locations to measure the complete patient experience for as much as $20,000.

Some dental practices try to measure patient satisfaction directly by surveying patients. The problem with this is that patients often do not want to hurt anyone’s feeling or get someone into trouble, so they tend to be less than forthright. The advantage of using a mystery shopper is that they are well trained and completely objective.

If you do engage a mystery shopping service, you should be completely transparent with your staff. Explain that you are not trying to “get” anybody but that you want to determine whether your staff might need additional training or you want to reward staff members who are doing a particularly good job.

According to Jodi, 68% of patients who leave a dental practice do so because of problems with the front desk. The number two reason is that they are kept waiting on the telephone for too long. Mystery shoppers from TrendSource can report on the full patient experience, which also includes parking, cleanliness, the appearance of your reception area, how quickly they are greeted and even whether your staff makes eye contact with arriving patients.

Patients really have no way to assess your clinical skills. Dental patient acceptance, retention and, for that matter, continued referrals from other dentists and physicians depends almost entirely on the personal relationship a patient establishes with you and your entire staff.

For more information, you can contact Jodi Manfredi at 619-718-7467, ext. 134. Her e-mail address is jmanfredi@trendsource.com, and her cell phone number is 858-952-2245. TrendSource works with dental practices throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada.