Imagine growing your new dental-patient volume by 17% in three months. Chicago Beautiful Smiles did so by focusing on reviews, the online form of word-of-mouth advertising.
Positive reviews affect your bottom line by driving down patient-acquisition costs. The more positive reviews you collect, the more you appear in patients’ organic searches, helping you rely less on paid ads. New patients are looking for you, too.
A survey by PatientPop found that 74.6% of people research dentists online, and 69.9% of patients believe that a positive online reputation is very or extremely important. These prospective patients rely on reviews as social proof of other people’s relationships with a dentist, helping them speed up and simplify their decision-making.
But to get those positive reviews, you need to invest in patient relationships. Dental call tracking helps you do that by showing you how to deliver strong customer service to new patients. At the same time, it helps you nurture relationships with existing patients. Considering that nearly 50% of patients would go outside of their network to a dentist with better online reviews, odds are strong that people in your area are looking for a new dentist to call.
1. Dental call tracking helps you tailor service to each patient
According to the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation (DOCS) Education, the top two reasons people switch dentists are:
- Lack of phone etiquette
- Failure to develop a relationship
Both work against receiving positive reviews, too. But dental call tracking helps you overcome each issue. In addition to showing you which online and offline advertisements drive your calls, call tracking contextualizes what each call is about, so staff enter calls confident and prepared.
CallRail lets you add custom whisper messaging to all of your tracking numbers. These whisper messages provide insights, such as who is calling and what ad or marketing campaign they’re calling from. Your staff now knows what questions and concerns the patient will likely have, making it much more likely to book an appointment and prevent a dropped call.
Imagine you’re running a campaign promoting your cosmetic dentistry services. Your staff sees a call from an ad about veneers, giving them a moment to pull up the right talk track or FAQs list.
This ad for porcelain veneers surfaced from a search for “cosmetic dentistry Cincinnati.” When your staff knows which ad patients call from, they’re better prepared to use that call to provide an excellent patient experience.
That reduced guesswork lessens your staff’s cognitive load, too. Now, they can pivot more easily between helping patients over the phone and at the reception desk.
You can even tailor how you respond to calls during peak times or after hours. CallRail lets you record and upload custom greetings for each of your dental call tracking numbers. So if one person calls from your ad for sedation dentistry, and the next calls after seeing your ad for clear aligners, you can play a different custom greeting for each. That way, you can address your prospective patient’s likeliest questions, let them know when you’ll call back, and point them toward more resources in the meantime, like your blog.
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By getting to the reason behind each call and answering patients’ questions quickly, you demonstrate a friendly and caring attitude. That’s the number one expectation patients have of health care providers, according to feedback management platform Binary Fountain. Meeting that expectation primes patients to give you positive reviews online.
2. Call reports help you plan the right support for the right times.
When new patients call your practice, and no one answers, they’re likely to call another dentist. That’s a missed opportunity to establish a relationship that could lead to a positive review.
Dental call tracking helps you avoid missed calls. By running reports on how many calls you get, when you get them, and what they’re about, you can adjust staff schedules to support your busiest times.
After all, reception can get overwhelming as patients ask for help in person and over the phone, leaving staff bouncing between tasks, from rescheduling appointments to filing insurance. Pain-Free Dental Marketing, a digital marketing agency specializing in helping dentists find and keep new patients, uses dental call tracking to help practices tame this chaos.
One of the ways Pain-Free Dental does this is by analyzing call recordings. “We have been able to help new employees become really valuable by helping them answer the phone well. And we’ve been able to help our dentists figure out if they have the right staff or not,” says Ben Deutsch, head of client services at Pain-Free Dental. “At the end of the day, especially in the dental world, so much business is done over the phone. If the phones aren’t getting answered correctly, the best marketing in the world isn’t going to grow the practice.”
“If the phones aren’t getting answered correctly, the best marketing in the world isn’t going to grow the practice.”
Ben Deutsch, Head of Client Services at Pain-Free Dental Marketing
Dentists with multiple locations or practice areas can also optimize their customer service with call routing through tracking technology. If you do general dentistry alongside pediatric dentistry, periodontics, and oral surgery, you could use CallRail’s Call Flow Builder to route calls to specialized staff. Or if you serve multiple areas with multiple office branches, Geo-Routing can route calls based on location. These tools connect patients with the right person the first time, making them feel prioritized and cared about so they’ll be more likely to post a positive review online.
3. Conversation Intelligence surfaces recurring issues and helps you resolve negative reviews.
By reviewing call recordings, you can identify opportunities to improve patient relationships and increase your odds of getting positive reviews.
Of course, it’s time-consuming going through call recordings one by one. But with Conversation Intelligence, you never have to listen your calls. Instead, Conversation Intelligence levels up CallRail’s call tracking by spotting trends and opportunities in patient calls for you. Here’s how.
Conversation Intelligence helps you analyze call quality by scanning transcripts for terms and phrases important to your dental practice. For instance, Conversation Intelligence includes a tool called Call Highlights that automatically recommends keywords based on your conversations with customers. Use these phrases in call scripts to speak to your customers in their language, helping you win their trust.
Imagine that calls about dental implants, one of your most profitable procedures, aren’t closing well. Conversation Intelligence shows you why. Patients may have questions staff can’t answer, leaving callers unconfident about booking an appointment. But knowing the words and phrases patients will likely use when they call can help you tailor talk tracks so your staff feels confident answering the phone.
Conversation Intelligence even helps you recover from negative reviews. If a patient posts negative feedback, run a call history report to better understand the patient’s experience and reach out. PatientPop found that 51.8% of patients who leave negative dentist reviews don’t receive a response. But when dentists do respond, disappointed patients rebound to a 60.3% satisfaction rate.
4. Automation Rules show you what messaging resonates with patients.
Establishing and maintaining strong patient relationships — the kinds that result in positive online reviews — are ongoing processes with multiple touchpoints. A new patient’s experience starts when they see one of your ads.
With Automation Rules, included in Conversation Intelligence, you can develop advertising and marketing campaigns that connect with new patients before they call. Whereas Call Highlights recommends words and phrases likely to be important, Automation Rules listen for the words and phrases you define as most important to your practice. For example, specify keywords such as “checkup,” “teeth whitening,” or “Invisalign.” You can then assign actions to each keyword, such as tagging it with a dollar value, to automatically qualify your calls.
But perhaps even more valuable, Automation Rules help you optimize your content by showing you how customers talk about your predefined keywords. What are their most frequent follow-up questions? What objections, concerns, or comparisons regularly come up? Knowing that, you can write ads, landing pages, blogs, and more that address what patients care most about, making them feel confident about choosing you.
Say you’re running a promotional campaign targeted at new patients. As calls come in, you notice prospective patients consistently ask how early they should arrive, what they need to bring, and how long the appointment will last. You can now update your marketing content to answer those questions in advance, delivering a positive patient experience before the customer calls.
That does more than help you book more appointments. It also sets up strong patient relationships as customers call from your ads, receive quick and thorough service from your staff, and then receive excellent care at their appointments. That flywheel of positive patient experiences increases your odds of positive reviews, leading to more new patients and repeat appointments.
Get more positive reviews with the help of dental call tracking
Dental call tracking helps you create strong relationships with your customers. With this foundation, don’t be afraid to ask patients for positive reviews. Dentist Kyle Roderick Hornby reported a 56% success rate when asking customers personally for a review or sending a personalized request.
Positive reviews create a virtuous cycle that improves the performance of paid ads and organic searches. Review ratings show alongside your dental practice when it appears in Google’s Local Pack, drawing attention to you as one of the top local practices. Google’s algorithm also rewards dentists who respond to patient reviews with improved rankings, helping you compete in patient searches even more.
To learn more about the benefits of dental call tracking, download our free “Dental Guide to Call Tracking,” no email required.
