3 Tips For Improving Your Dental Practice

Running a dental practice isn’t an easy feat, and with the recent pandemic hit, lots of clinics were forced to close down due to the low influx of patients. If you’re still open today or planning to reopen your dental practice, then it’s probably time to rethink your business plan.

Improve your dental practice now so you’d be able to retain existing patients, bring inactive patients back, and attract new patients in. Here are three tips that can help you improve the way you manage your dental practice today:

1. Improve Dental Patient Experience

How can you be sure that your first-time patient will return for another dental treatment?  Well, improving their dental patient experience is the key to increasing your patient retention rate.

Here are some of the things you can do to improve dental patient experience:

• Make sure your staff is trained

All dental patient experience starts with your front desk team. Having the appropriate skill would help your staff book more appointments in the future. Remember that their professionalism and attitude towards any patient will greatly affect a patient’s impression of your clinic. So, you better train your staff to make the most out of each patient interaction, whether through phone or face-to-face.

• Stay in touch

Keeping in touch with your existing patients is the best way for your clinic to not be forgotten. Thanks to today’s digital age, engaging with your patients isn’t so difficult anymore. Maximize cross-channel marketing by reaching out to your patients in various platforms, such as direct mail, telephone, email, and social media.

You can either follow up on their pending dental treatments, ask them to give feedback on their previous experiences, or send them curated content or newsletters that encourage them to take better care of their teeth.

• Give out freebies

Create stronger relationships with your patients by giving out small freebies from time to time. Some freebie ideas include toothbrushes, lip balms, pens, hand sanitizers, calendars, and masks. Since there’s a pandemic, giving out unique masks, like a fog-free mask from https://primodentalproducts.com/blogs/news/the-best-fog-free-anti-fog-mask-for-glasses, would be great.

• Offer flexible financial options

Patients will be more inclined to return for ongoing dental care and accept treatment recommendations if your dental practice offers a wide range of payment options. You can bring inactive patients back by ensuring them that their personal financial circumstances wouldn’t prevent them from making dental care decisions by offering them flexible payment terms via debit, credit, personal check, or in-house financing.

• Establish a referral loyalty program

Attract new patients in with the help of trusted recommendations coming from your growing patient base. By establishing a referral loyalty program, your existing patients and employees will be proactive in providing word-of-mouth referrals due to the perks and bonuses that they might earn from doing it.

2. Upgrade Your Internal Systems

Internal systems are essential to the success of your dental practice because having downtimes or delays due to outdated systems will negatively impact the quality of service you can offer to patients.

Check if you have these two internal systems up-to-date: the health information system and the scheduling system. If any of these two are outdated, then it would be good that you consider upgrading your internal systems.

• Health Information System

Considered as one of the most important segments of health care management, a health information system is vital to providing you with an organized system of health and health insurance information of your patients. This would help you come up with quicker decisions on how you’d be able to help patients make the most of their insurance by reducing healthcare costs, while still preserving the quality of dental services you provide.

• Scheduling System

A digital scheduling solution will not only maximize the productivity of your dental office, but it would also make booking dental appointments more convenient for your patients. Having an efficient and up-to-date scheduling software will ensure that your staff can provide patients with superior customer service, such us letting them know their wait time information.

3. Embrace Digital Marketing

There are many ways to market yourself, and the one that’s most effective in today’s digital age would be online marketing. It would be good that you invest in creating your website and improving how you manage your social media accounts. You can share customer reviews, promotions, and dental-care-related blog posts on these platforms to maximize your digital dental marketing tactics.

Also, try to add an email subscription invitation to your website and be sure to send out monthly interesting dental care blog content.

Improve Your Dental Practice Today

Keeping your dental practice a success can be quite a challenge, that’s why it’s still important that you continue to make changes to your business plan based on the developments in the society.

Embrace technology by upgrading your internal systems and engaging on digital marketing tactics. Create a website, invest in online advertising, and be active on social media. Lastly, make delivering positive dental patient experience your priority because they’re the backbone of your entire practice.