My smartphone makes me feel like an idiot. It does too much. For example, it used to
take me five steps to play my iTunes, until someone showed me that I just had to swipe up and tap “play”. Or I could just tell Siri to “open music”, if I could just remember to use it.
Our lives are packed with software, applications and technology that have so much functionality that we barely use 10% of them. And it’s frustrating when we discover that we’ve been doing something the hard way, or wishing we had a solution, when we often had it right at our fingertips.
Why just 10%? Partly because it’s overwhelming, but also because we don’t have a systematic way of learning and incorporating those functions that we want into our already busy lives.
The average person has more than 30 apps on their phone, and only uses five of them regularly. (Messaging, email, Facebook, CandyCrush, and the camera, if you must know–phone calls don’t even make the top five!) They forget that they even have the other apps, and sometimes try to download ones they already have.
How does this relate to your practice?
Digital communication applications like PatientActivator, RevenueWell and DemandForce are perhaps the biggest practice time saver o appear in the past 20 years. Practice coach Gary Takacs, who also owns a dental practice in Phoenix, says their app saves them 30% of the time on the phone, allowing them to focus on the people who do need to have a live conversation. And that is just using the part of the software that does appointment reminders and confirmations by text and email.
The real juicy stuff, the functions that increase production, are grossly under-utilized by most of our clients precisely because they do so much. Adapting new systems in a practice is always a challenge.
My solution is simple: make it a process where you incorporate one new function at a time into the practice behavior. So, if you have or are just getting PatientActivator or another app, this is how I would proceed.
Stages:
The Setup. Here is where you incorporate the basic functions of appointment reminders and confirmations, as well as birthday greetings and other niceties. You also want to make sure that all your social media is active and linked to the app. The app is going to start surveying patients automatically. You will put those responses to good use later.
Updating your Patient Records. Now you want to make sure that you have email addresses and cell numbers for all your patients. This is an ongoing process of updating that information with each patient visit. Make this systematic.
Requesting Patient Reviews. This is for Google and Yelp. The most effective way to get reviews is to email your patients and ask them. Within that email there needs to be a link that they can click on that takes them directly to your practice profile. Don’t do this with all your patients at once! You want to be generating a steady stream of reviews. So once a month, do an email blast to two groups of maybe 50-100 patents. The first group is patients with a gmail address (those are the only people who can do Google reviews) and the second group you send a request for a Yelp review. If you average one review a week you’re doing great, so don’t expect 100% response rate or anything close to that. For more on this read this blog post.
Choose Your Newsletter Topics. There are dozens of pre-written articles that allow you to share all the services your practice offers. You want these going out every month, or every two months. This adheres to the most basic principle of marketing: tell people over and over what you do, so that you catch them at the moment when they care. This can be also done as an earlier step, because it really only has to be done once every six months or a year, but often the dentist wants to write an article or two herself, and this can slow things down.
Posting Reviews on Your Website. These are the reviews that are generated automatically by the surveys being sent out. You want to have them load automatically to a review page on your website. Consumers will want to read them, and it’s huge for SEO. Can’t do that? Then you need a dynamic website like we build with WebDirector. For more on this, read this blog.
Posting Reviews on Social Media. This is a smaller but very valuable step. As the survey responses come in, you have the option to post them to Facebook and other social media with essentially a single click. This should become part of your social media person’s role. Which means that you need someone in the practice who is responsible for social media.
Utilizing the Smartphone App. PatientActivator and one or two other services have a phone app as part of the service, which allows you to see your practice schedule. Each team member should download the app. This will serve two purposes. One, if you have someone who is taking after-hour calls for emergencies, they can see the schedule and tell the person when to come in. But of equal or greater value is that the dentists can now easily do their evening check-in calls, because the app shows the names and phone numbers of the patients you’ve seen that day.
Doing Marketing Campaigns. Because you have increased your email base, you can do occasional marketing emails such as discounts or contests, or simply letting them know what you do. You can do a whole variety of these, from free implant exams to Invisalign discounts, to CEREC awareness, and new patient contests. You can also alert patients at the end of the year to use up their insurance eligibility before they lose it. We have templates for all of these.
Of course, your patients can individually opt in or out of newsletters, texts, emails, surveys and marketing campaigns, so you’ll be adjusting this on a regular basis. But doing these steps will tighten your recall and increase your patient awareness, along with giving you new patient flow. It has become an essential and integral part of your practice marketing.
Do these steps at whatever pace gets them fully integrated into your practice behavior. You can go too fast, but the real risk is not doing them at all, and missing out on all the production and efficiency that you can achieve. If you’re a client of ours, we offer unlimited customer service, so we’ll talk you through each step when your ready.
Another big plus to fully utilizing these tools is it gives your patients the impression of a modern high-tech practice, which is also a good thing.
The worst scenario is to stop at the basic functionality. Just like learning to use Siri has kept me from trying to read a text in the car, and Google Maps is teaching me new shortcuts in my hometown, taking greater advantage of all the functionality that you have around you will make you more productive, successful, and smiling a lot more!
By the way, I think this staged approach is useful no matter what technology you’re deciding to adapt. You may not need all the tools at your disposal, but I’ll bet there are some great functions with a lot of your tech that you don’t even know about or take advantage of.
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