Top 5 Most Popular Objections to Using Call Tracking in Medical / Dental Practices

Welcome to Practice Treatment Plan’s Bi-weekly New Patient Marketing Tips!

Today’s Topic: Top 5 Most Popular Objections to Using Call Tracking in Medical / Dental Practices

Tracking your practice’s incoming, new patient phone calls is a vital piece of your marketing plan. This is accomplished very easily by placing a unique call tracking number on all of your marketing channels (website, direct mail, billboards, etc.) so that you can track how many new patient calls each of them is bringing to your practice. If you are not tracking where these calls are coming from it is like throwing your marketing dollars into the wind.

Call tracking serves a number of important purposes such as:

• Identifies which marketing channels are giving you the best return on your investment.
• Provides you with call recordings and detailed reports on how well your front office team is converting new patient calls into new patients in the dental chair.
• Gives actionable feedback to your front desk so they can improve their conversion rates and bring more new patients into your practice.
• Lets you know how many calls are being missed and the peak call times in your practice so you can make sure there is enough phone coverage at those times (reducing missed calls).

100% of the time call tracking has helped our clients get more new patients. 100% of the time!

That statement should be enough to convince any doctor that it would be worth implementing a call tracking system for at least a few months. But we still hear objections from doctors. Below are the Top 5 Most Popular Objections to Call Tracking:

My front office team won’t like having their calls recorded. Most customer service departments record their phone calls for quality assurance (and that is exactly the line of work your front office team is in…customer service!). The receptionist is on the “front lines” of your practice. He or she is vital to the success of your business. It is imperative that you know how successfully they are converting new patient calls into actual new patients. Our clients wisely use our daily or monthly call tracking reports as a very effective training tool to teach the front office team how to more effectively convert prospects into patients. The best way to get your team on board with call tracking is to make them excited about being such an integral part of the success of your practice. Give them incentives for converting a certain percentage of new patient calls into new patients in your practice every month!

It’s too expensive. Can your practice afford to miss 40 patient calls every month? That is the average number of calls practices like yours are missing! If you had a way to get those potential new patients back on the phone within minutes so that you could appoint them, how much could your production dollars increase annually? Or, if you could determine your peak calling times allowing you to make some minor scheduling changes to ensure that there was always enough phone coverage at those times, would that information benefit your bottom line? You bet it would! I already know what you are thinking, “We don’t miss that many calls every month.” Are you sure? I bet you would be shocked to learn the truth. Call tracking pays for itself many times over with the number of new patients it helps bring in.

We don’t need call tracking, we have caller ID. Great! If you have caller ID can I assume you are always calling potential new patients back promptly? Probably not. Usually only the callers that leave voicemails get callbacks. Less than 30% of potential new patients leave a voicemail. They will just go to the next doctor on the list, so by the time you do call them back, they may have already appointed with another dentist. Call tracking gives you a systematic approach, through immediate text & email alerts, to ensure missed calls are called back promptly. Most importantly, it provides data to develop a strategy to reduce missed calls overall.

Won’t having a tracking number on my website hurt my SEO? You can use a call tracking system that utilizes dynamic number insertion. What that means is that when a search engine (like Google or Bing) “crawls” your website they will see your real practice number. But when a human (potential new patient) arrives at your website, they will see the call tracking number.

The only people that we aren’t appointing have an insurance we are not in-network with or they have Medicare, which we don’t accept. I bet you would be surprised to find out that a big percentage of potential new patients are qualified and motivated to make an appointment at your practice but for some reason, they don’t. When this happens it is often because your front office team does not know how to “lead” the caller on the path to an appointment. Through call tracking your team will learn better ways of interacting on the phone with new prospects and converting them into loyal patients of your practice.

Call tracking ensures that your marketing dollars are put their their highest and best use. If you would like to learn more about our call tracking service contact us at 888-412-8820 or visit www.opportunitytrack.com.

Practice Success,

Benjamin Suggs
New Patient Marketing Strategist
Practice Treatment Plan, Inc.