How do you check the quality of your front desk, discover training opportunities and improvement possibilities for your practice?
onitoring incoming calls is a powerful management tool. It’s an opportunity to improve and expand a dental practice in a multitude of ways. With call monitoring you can improve employee performance, make yourself aware of new training needs, discover practice improvement and expansion opportunities, and identify your best and worst converting advertising channels.
1. Improve the Performance of Your Front Desk Staff
The way in which the front desk staff communicates with callers tends to improve as soon as they know each call is being monitored. This doesn’t mean the employees answering the phones were unconcerned, rude, or careless before the system went in; we all simply have a tendency to be on our best behavior when we’re being watched or listened to.
If, when listening to the calls that have come in, you find one or more of the reception staff sounding disinterested, unfriendly or unprofessional, you now have an opportunity to correct them. You’ll find this change alone can improve caller conversion rates.
Sometimes a receptionist is confronted with questions he or she can’t easily answer. When you hear the staff member having to place someone on hold to answer a certain type of question, you can place that question and its answer on a list to be kept at the reception desk. After a while, every general question and the answer will be readily available to anyone answering the phones.
The flow of calls into a dental practice varies, depending on the day of the week and the time of day. Do you know when your lines are likely to be overloaded and the front desks staff overwhelmed by calls? Call monitoring can help you figure this out. Then you’ll know when your reception staff is likely to need help.
2. Convert More Callers Into Patients
 By not monitoring calls, you may be missing great opportunities to convert callers into patients. The receptionist, busy answering calls, and taking care of patient questions or scheduling doesn’t have the time to make note of services or products that prospective patients are asking about.
For instance, by monitoring the front desk calls you may discover your losing too many potential patients because the practice isn’t open on a certain day or at a popular time period.
Or you could find that many people are asking about a certain type of insurance that you don’t accept. You could have your office manager or insurance specialist look into the requirements of accepting insurance from that provider.
It could be that prospective patients have heard about a certain brand of product or a cosmetic care solution that you don’t offer or promote. Becoming aware of this is a great tool to increasing practice expansion.
3. Increase your ROI by Controlling your Advertising Channels
 Chances are you market your practice in several different ways. You may be advertising the old-fashioned way with mailers and flyers, bench ads or radio. You’re likely also utilizing Healthgrades, Facebook, YouTube and other social media outlets. Knowing which channels produce the best results and which ones are a waste of your advertising dollars is one of the more vital parts of practice management.
Intelligent analysis of the information you obtain from this call monitoring added to any other marketing analysis will greatly increase the return your get on your investment in advertising.
 These are just a few of the reasons it’s so important to monitor front desk calls.  Your staff, your public, and your practice itself will all benefit from the extensive information this monitoring provides.
