The lifeblood for any dental practice is its loyal patients. Without their regular patronage and reviews of your outstanding services, your business growth would be unsustainable. When you consider that patient retention is less expensive than initially converting them, it becomes clear that your marketing efforts should include providing a superior patient experience.
Your dental company needs to provide more than flexible appointment hours and oral healthcare that features the latest technologies and techniques to achieve this. Ease of access to your services is also crucial, especially when it comes to booking. Implementing online scheduling software for dentists that enables appointment setting from any device at any time of day can meet this expectation and streamline your office.
Read on to learn a few benefits and best practices of integrating this software into your marketing efforts.
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Ease of Access
One of the biggest benefits of using dental appointment scheduling software is how easily your patients can access your services. With the digital world we live in, this marketing tool can provide ongoing opportunities for your patients to receive your services at their convenience. Coupled with automated appointment reminders and two-way text messaging, your office will remain at the forefront of their minds.
Reduce Patient No-Shows and Last Minute Cancellations
One of the most frustrating issues that any dental practice faces are appointment no-shows and cancellations. Whether your patient simply forgot or had a family emergency pop up that prevents their coming, when you don’t receive an adequate warning, you lose money on that wasted time.
Online scheduling easily complements your other practice management software to help reduce these occurrences. With engaging and informative messaging that expresses your valuing of their upcoming appointment and automated SMS reminders of their forthcoming treatment 48 hours in advance, you can minimize the amount of lost revenue due to no-shows. Your patients will also appreciate your efforts to ensure they receive essential oral healthcare and the convenience of adjusting or canceling their scheduled visits in advance.
Staggered Scheduling Improves Productivity
While it’s exciting to have a busy dental office, wasted downtime can bog down the efficiency of your practice. If you book patients side-by-side for extractions, for example, there is downtime when anesthetization occurs, and a procedure can begin. By staggering what times these patients come in for their treatment, you can maximize your productivity.
While one is waiting for their anesthetic to take effect, you can be finishing a procedure on another. You can move the finished patient to post-op procedures where your team can take over while you then begin the next.
You Can Prioritize the Quality of the Patient Experience
You want your patients to have a superior dental care experience, which makes it crucial that your team not only has professional training but the tools to do so. Whether you run multiple branches or are a new solo practitioner, every element of a patient’s visit will impact their treatment outcome and whether they will remain loyal to your brand.
Online scheduling provides advanced communication with your staff to ensure no details about a patient’s needs when booking their initial appointment. Not only does it save your team time in preparing for their visit, but this personalized focus will improve the quality of care they receive from your office.
Book Appointment Time on Procedure Demands
If you have a patient visiting for an x-ray, do they need 40 minutes of appointment time? Probably not. Knowing the amount of time your dentists need to complete a filling, extraction, or simple whitening procedure can help you better manage productivity and use of your dentists’ time. Backlogs are the bane of any dental practice and can impact patient reviews and loyalty to your brand.
Decrease Distractions for Your Front Office Team
The beautiful thing about online scheduling for your dental office is that it doesn’t replace your team members who normally handle this task. Instead, it decreases the numerous distractions that can pop up throughout their day while multitasking between patient inquiries, assisting other team members, and other important duties.
Phone calls are easily the most distracting occurrence for your front office team throughout the day, and this disruption can lead to mistakes in billing, coding, and even patient care. By using dental appointment scheduling software, you can enable your staffers to focus on the tasks in front of them better.
Gain More Patient Insight
Adit provides online scheduling that offers more than easily accessed booking features. In addition, we have created an entire system that provides an extensive range of benefits, including:
- Intuitive digital access that can guide your patients who aren’t computer literate through the booking process more straightforward.
- Provide your patients with staggered automated reminders via email, text, and phone, days and hours before they are due to arrive.
- Provide crucial answers to their dental care concerns and avoid wasting valuable appointment time that ultimately won’t require treatment.
- Automate insertion of new patients on your waiting list when an appointment cancelation occurs.
- Get crucial medical information with pre-registration forms uploaded with their appointment scheduling. This can help in reducing the length of their appointment by 15-20 minutes on average.
Online Scheduling Software that Simplifies Online Booking
At Adit, our team of experienced dental marketers understands that your office is unique and needs scheduling solutions that can be tailored to your appointment demands. This is why our Online Scheduler is designed to integrate with your current practice management software and display your schedule in real-time.
Ready to learn more about Adit’s Online Scheduler? Contact us today to schedule a free demonstration and sign up for one of our special offers!
