Teaching Your Dental Staff How to Get Your Patients to Come Back
Working at a dental practice entails a lot, so we often stray from focusing on ensuring our patients keep coming back. This can be the mistake that prevents your practice from growing and reaching its full potential.
When patients are not making their recall visits, setting treatment plans, or scheduling their next appointments, there’s a serious issue within your practice. You must pay attention to how many patients are not coming back and try to tune into why that might be.
If you believe you have too many patients who don’t reschedule, here are three simple ways to ensure your patients come back.
1. Know how many patients are walking out the back door.
The first way to ensure your patients come back is to take the time to figure out how many patients are “walking out the back door” and not rescheduling appointments or continuing with treatment.
Keep analyzing your weekly metrics. Make sure you are tracking your accounts receivable week to week. Take note of whether that number is increasing or decreasing.
Once you know that, you can start to analyze why some of your patients aren’t returning and implementing systems to fix that.
2. Create an experience worth coming back to.
Next, put yourself in the shoes of your patients. Think about the experience they have when they come to your dental practice. How could you improve?
You want to ensure that your patients are getting a consistent and high-quality experience every time they come in.
This can be as simple as offering coffee and tea to your patients in the waiting room or setting up essential oil diffusers around the office. Maybe you invest in massage dental chairs or provide various snacks in the waiting room.
Don’t hesitate to ask your patients for feedback on their experience with you and what you can improve on. Providing the most comfortable experience for your patients is key, especially because many patients get anxious when they have to come in.
3. Focus on verbal skills and training for your dental team.
Many times, the issue lies within our lack of verbal skills. It can be intimidating to confront our patients and discuss what might be holding them back.
More often than not, the main reason why patients don’t reschedule is that their insurance doesn’t cover the entire treatment and they cannot afford it. This is when our patients need us to put things into perspective for them.
We can discuss how much insurance does cover and what the treatment will mean for them. You don’t have to seem like a sneaky salesperson, but be able to relate to your patients and truly connect with them.
Make sure your dental team is trained in verbal communication. This is an extremely effective way to get more patients to keep coming back.
Get more patients coming back.
Take action today and start to implement these three ways into your practice today to get your patients back in the office.
If you’re looking for training or coaching for your team to accelerate your growth, click here to learn more.
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