We know that recurring production is critical to the health of any dental practice. But do you know how much of your patient base is currently scheduled? For world-class practices, it’s above 80%—that’s some incredible peace of mind!
We also know that evaluating your reoccurring production can take a back seat when you’re in a climate like 2020 and constantly reacting to new guidelines and social norms.
We’ve been there and so have hundreds of other offices. The good news is we’ve got the data behind best practices that make evaluating your practice painless and growing your reoccurring production easy. All while giving your office the insight it needs to benchmark against peers and successfully reactivate patients.
Top 10 Best Practices For Dental Offices in 2020
Here are the top 10 best practices we see Weave customers doing everyday that help them reset, reactivate patients and grow their reoccurring production:
1. Do more with your ready- to-call list of patients.
Do you have a list of patients you need to call? Phone calls are 10x more expensive than texts. Take your ready-to-call list and break it into segments. Segment who you want to market to, reactive or follow up with. Once your list is segmented, scale your communication with targeted channels that match the goal of your segments. Your call list is now broken into a list to email, text, call and recall with automated systems.
2. Have you evaluated your practice’s business health?
The key to breaking the cycle of constantly reacting to our current culture and climate is to take the time to know your business. If you have access to dashboards that show your percentage of patients scheduled, number of cancellations, dollar amount of production waiting to come through the door etc. then you know where to focus your time, who to contact first, and how to connect with patients regardless of what’s going on in the world around us.
3. Make the most of your morning huddle.
Do you huddle as a team in the morning to talk about to-dos and the days schedule? Have a set agenda that you touch on every day with automated data that supports your discussion and goals. The most widely used morning huddle data points used by Weave customers include: number of new patients, number of canceled patients, percentage of hygiene reappointments, percentage of treatment diagnosis and unscheduled treatments along with estimated production left for the month.
Do you huddle as a team in the morning to talk about that day’s to-dos?
4. Do you know when your office gets the most calls?
Do you know when your office gets the most calls and what times during the day you need to staff up? If you experience a hygiene reappointment dip, do you know the best means to reach out to your patient base to get them back on the books? Communication analytics are key to answering these questions – create dashboards that give you insight into your patient demographics, call volumes, and response rates. If you’re a Weave customer these are automatically generated for you but if not, you can always manually create a log to track these metrics and adjust your staffing and outreach accordingly.
5. Know your competitive advantage.
70% of Weave practices say that contactless payments are their competitive advantage but your advantage could be your hours, specialty services or even your customer service—whatever it is, know it and make sure everyone in the office merchandises it.
6. You’re in the business of caring for others.
You’re in the business of caring for others so a patient first approach comes naturally to you. But do you carry this patient first care all the way through your customer journey from marketing to billing? Arkansas Family Dental is a flourishing dental practice because it lives up to its motto. By allowing this motto to inform everything that they do, from marketing to bringing on new patients to providing the best possible dental care, Arkansas Family Dental successfully brings on 325 new patients per month and sustains a 4.9 star rating on Google Reviews. 70% of practices say they could provide a better experience if they could improve their client contact rate. Weave gives customers 2x more touch points with their clients.
7. You know what works.
You know what works—you’ve now sustained a business through a global pandemic, civil unrest, climate change inducing wildfires and murder hornets. Thanks 2020! Now that you’ve learned from 2020’s rapidly changing circumstances, take what worked well and drop what didn’t impact your bottom line or increase your quality of care. Whether it’s paperless forms, curbside waiting, contactless payments or text-to-pay, practices adapted a lot of their protocols for 2020 and in ways that absolutely deserve to be carried into 2021.
Take what worked well and drop what didn’t impact your bottom line or increase your quality of care.
8. Join the club—2020 is hard enough as it is.
You don’t need to navigate it on your own on top of that. Be a part of a community that facilitates insights, best practices and protocols, so you can quickly know what’s working across the country instead of guessing in the dark. If you have a friend or colleague you trust, go over your data dashboards together so you can continually adapt (without having to reinvent the wheel) if that colleague doesn’t have data as readily available refer them and you’ll receive a $500 Visa gift card and they will get $250 when they sign up. See website for details (terms may apply).
Protect your time.
Protect your time —Your time is your most valuable asset since it’s what you can not buy more of. An average office misses 34% of incoming calls, which means dollars left on the table. Offices have seen over $250+ a day from new appointments by using Weave’s missed call text feature. Use missed call texts to stay in touch with clients no matter how busy your office gets or the Weave mobile app if staff is working remote. The Weave mobile app forwards incoming calls straight to a team member’s smartphone and we see on average 20+ more calls answered per day. Talk about making the most of your time!
10. Cash is king, everyone knows that but no one wants to be a bill collector.
So don’t! Shoot a text and be done with it. We’ve seen offices collect over 100k+ in just 12 months exclusively over text to pay. Offices also see 30+ billing hours saved a month by using text to pay. The more avenues you have for collecting the easier it will be to get cash today that you can leverage tomorrow.
