The Top 5 Reasons Successful Doctors Utilize Call Tracking & Call Recording to Boost Total Patient Appointments by 10-50% www.mydoctorcalls.com
Whether running a small practice or a large practice with multiple clinics, successful doctors have started to realize the power of call tracking and call recording to cost-effectively grow their practices. Recent independent studies and polls conducted have determined the following information supporting this growing trend: 10% to 50% is the reported increase in booked patient appointments from doctors who implemented call tracking and call recording. 98% of new patients call before scheduling an appointment. 50% of lost patients are due to poor front desk phone handling. 79% of advertising spend is wasted on leads that do not convert. 10% to 50% is the reported increase in booked patient appointments from doctors who implemented call tracking and call recording. 15% to 55% is the reported share of advertising budget that was found to be wasted on marketing that did not produce a single patient after call tracking and call recording was implemented. 20% to 40% is the reported increase in advertising effectiveness by doctors who have utilized call tracking and call recording to track and test their advertisements. Growing from the INSIDE-OUT The above statistics tell a very interesting story. While most doctors will make the mistake of trying to grow their practices from the outside in; the most successful doctors have learned to grow their practices from the inside out. Growing from the inside out is accomplished by utilizing internal data gathered from technological methods such as web-based call tracking and call recording in order to improve both New Patient Acquisition Rates and Existing Patient Retention Rates. Simply put, you can increase the number of patients you treat by: 1) Improving your staff s conversion rate on new patient phone calls to your practice; 2) Maintaining higher retention rates from your existing patients; and 3) Finding and reducing the money wasted on advertising that isn t effectively driving patients to your practice. www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 2
Below are the Top 5 Reasons doctors have implemented call tracking and call recording to grow their practices: Reason #1: Call Recording Increases New Patient Appointments How well does your front desk staff handle calls from potential new patients? Are they asking the right questions to uncover the primary reasons patients should visit your practice? Are they knowledgeable about your treatments and services? What is being said to patients when you are away from the office? These mission critical questions are answered via call recording. 98% of all new patients will call before scheduling an appointment. Your Front Desk Staff is a Direct Reflection of You as a Doctor 98% of new patients will call before scheduling an appointment. That means almost all of your patients will gain a first impression about your practice from your front desk staff, not their interaction with you the doctor. That is why it is critical that your staff be properly trained before answering the phones and speaking with patients. Furthermore, even if a staff member has worked at your practice for quite some time, it is imperative that they listen to themselves on phone calls to stay sharp and ensure they are constantly improving in their patient handling skills. In the same way a doctor needs to continue to educate him or herself throughout their career, each staff member needs to do the same. Call recordings are an essential component of the process. The Importance of the First Impression in Gaining More New Patient Appointments When a patient takes the time to pick up the phone to explore visiting your practice, there is no room for error. Your staff must have the ability to answer the most commonly asked questions and gain the patient s trust as a result. Listening to recorded calls placed by potential patients to your front desk will allow you to find the areas your staff needs the most work, and establish training regimens that will reduce blown phone calls and increase new patient appointments. www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 3
Your front desk staff is a direct reflection of you as a doctor. Are Your Staff Members Asking the Right Questions? As a doctor, obviously you do not want your front desk staff diagnosing your patients before you ve had a chance to see them in your offices. However, as a matter of proper patient handling, it is important that your front desk gain some valuable insight as to why the patient is calling your practice in order to increase the new patient booked appointment percentages. The only real way for your front desk staff to gain this valuable insight is to ask scripted questions. The goal of the sequence of questions is not to develop an entire case history, but rather to gain some simple information about what condition the patient is experiencing, how long they ve had the condition, what they are trying to accomplish from treatment, etc. Therefore, it is critical that your staff asks the right questions on each call in order to gain the patient s trust and secure the new appointment. While it may seem logical to have your staff ask the new patients calling your office to book an appointment at the very beginning of the phone call; in reality, that strategy can be counter-productive. Your staff first needs to understand the patient s problem so that he or she can walk the patient through the potential solutions your practice offers. In addition, describing the amazing results other patients have experienced from visiting your practice will further increase the likelihood this new patient will book an appointment. By discussing solutions to real problems versus just stating a bunch of facts that may or may not be relevant to the patient, your new patient appointments will increase and your patients will be excited about what you have to offer not skeptical about what may happen on their first visit. This process also serves to solidify the idea that the value your service provides is better than the value they could potentially receive from an alternative service. This eliminates the need for them to look elsewhere to find a potential solution to their problem. In order to ensure your staff is properly trained to handle these conversations, it is critical that call recording be implemented so that you can meet with each of your staff members and go through call recordings in order to train them on real-life scenarios. www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 4
There s no better way to improve phone handling skills than to listen to call recordings with your team to point out what is being done right, and what is being done wrong. As they say, recordings never lie; so take advantage of the available call recording technology to improve your team s performance. 50% of lost patients are due to poor front desk phone handling. Figure Out Why Patients Are NOT Booking Appointments with Your Practice Doctors can learn more from the patients that call in and DO NOT book appointments than they can from patients that call in and book appointments. Why is that? Understanding the patterns established by patients refusing service allows you to uncover trouble spots in your marketing and patient conversion strategies. It forces you to micro-analyze your first conversations with your patients, your issues with your front desk, your pricing, your service offerings, special promotions, and more. By monitoring recorded phone calls, you will gain valuable insight as to the ways you can increase the booked appointment percentages of your practice, which will of course result in more revenues without increased capital spend. Now ask yourself: How many additional patients will I treat if I increase my appointment percentage by just 10%? What about if I increase it by 50% as some doctors have reported? These are substantial gains for any doctor. Reason #2: Call Recording Helps Maintain Existing Patients While most doctors want to focus solely on new patient appointments; a critical mistake can be made when too much time is spent monitoring what s coming in the front door and not monitoring what s going out the back door! Half of All Lost Patients are Caused by Poor Customer Service on the Phone One of the most alarming statistics derived from patient surveys is that 50% of patients that choose to discontinue being treated by a doctor indicate that poor front desk customer service skills are the reason for their decision. That means that half of existing www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 5
patients are lost because front desk staff members lack the ability to maintain the patient base. Nothing is more frustrating for a doctor then spending valuable time, energy and money acquiring new patients only to find out they are leaving the practice to go see another doctor because they are frustrated with the way they are handled at the front desk. Are you monitoring how your staff treats your existing patients? Figure out why patients are calling you and NOT booking an appointment with your practice. Don t forget, your existing patients are also your best form of advertising for your practice. They are your #1 referral source. Treating your existing patients like family members is a fundamental role of your front desk staff. That is why it is important you record your phone calls to ensure all of your patients are treated properly. Just Knowing the Calls are Being Recorded Can Do the Trick While it s great to listen to as many calls as possible with your front desk staff; if there aren t enough hours in the day to listen to all of your calls, don t worry. Statistics show that simply making your front desk aware that the calls are being recorded improves front desk performance in itself. Of course you will want to establish regular training sessions so that staff members know the calls are not only being recorded, but they are being listened to. However, the frequency of those training sessions is entirely up to you. Reason #3: Call Tracking Removes Wasteful Advertising Spending In today s online and offline marketplace, all doctors have a need to advertise. Whether the practice has been in business for years, or it s a new practice looking to grow quickly; the need to advertise has never been greater. However, how do doctors truly know if their advertising is effective or not? In recent studies, doctors polled indicated that after implementing proper call tracking and call recording technologies, they discovered that 15% to 55% of their advertising budget was being wasted on advertising placements that did not produce one single new patient. Obviously, that is a horrifying statistic to read. www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 6
As any advertiser will tell you, there are countless places to gain exposure for your practice. But if you don t know which ones are working for you, then you are trying to navigate in the dark without a flashlight and that can lead to a lot of wasted advertising spend. Doctors who properly tracked the performance of their advertising eliminated this wasteful spend before it became catastrophic. 15% - 55% is the reported share of advertising budget that was found to be wasted on marketing that did not produce a single new patient. However, don t confuse limited reports sent directly from the advertisers themselves as proper tracking techniques. That s exactly what they want you to think! Why Call Tracking WITHOUT Call Recording is a Dangerous Statistic Many advertising services are sold with the premise that they will include detailed reports about the success of the ads so that you can judge their performance. These reports may include statistics on cost per click, clicks to the website, phone calls placed, duration of calls, etc. However, do not be deceived by these reports. Keep in mind that not every click leads to a phone call; and not every phone call leads to a new patient. In fact, the majority of clicks and calls listed in the reports will be from solicitors, competitors, or users who will not be candidates for your services. Therefore, these statistics are deceiving. While it may look like there is a lot of activity from your advertisements; the ads themselves may be producing very little results, if any. That is why listening to your call recordings is the only viable way to determine the effectiveness of your advertisements. It is impossible to tell how many patients were delivered from an advertisement unless you take the time to listen to your phone calls to determine exactly what types of calls you received. The doctors who have implemented advanced call recording and call tracking strategies were able to adjust their ad budgets overnight and shifted money from the places that were not producing new patients, to the places that were. www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 7
Reason #4: Call Tracking to Test New Advertising Each day it seems like some new advertising vehicle emerges and announces that it s a can t-miss marketing solution for your practice. With the growth of the Internet and Social Media, the number of places to advertise is expanding exponentially. While navigating the advertising landscape can be a difficult challenge, it also provides a unique opportunity for you to gain unlimited exposure for your practice. Which treatment, service, coupon, discount or offer works best for your advertising? However, the biggest problem doctors are faced with is that not all advertising is going to work. In fact, on average, 50% of it fails. Retail magnate John Wannamaker (considered by some to be the father of modern advertising) stated decades ago, Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don t know which half. Decades ago there were no easy solutions to the wasted advertising spend problem. Now, technology is available to eliminate this problem for good! Testing Small to Minimize Risk Utilize this simple strategy and you will never go wrong. In today s world, you have the ability to pinpoint the places to advertise your practice rather quickly and without a lot of risk; and here s how: By spreading a small amount of your advertising budget across multiple areas and monitoring the effectiveness of each ad through call tracking and call recording, you gain the ability to quickly locate the places that produce the most new patients without risking a large financial loss. It seems like a pretty simple concept, but it s amazing how many doctors fail to implement this strategy. By testing small, once an effective advertising placement is located, the rest of your ad budget can be shifted in order to gain the most new patients for your practice at the lowest possible cost. How Do You Test Small? In order to test properly in short periods of time, it is critical that you use a unique local or toll-free phone number in each of your new advertisements. The most successful doctors have local and www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 8
toll-free phone numbers available at all times in order to test new marketing strategies. To implement the test, simply use a unique tracking phone number in your ad and listen to the recordings of the phone calls derived. Give it a month or two, and you will have a better picture of what type of new patient leads you can expect to receive as a result of the advertisement. That s it - pretty simple, right? 20% - 40% is the reported increase in the advertising effectiveness by doctors who have utilized call tracking and call recording to track and test their advertisements. Reason #5: Call Tracking to Improve Existing Advertising As the old adage goes; if it ain t broke, don t fix it. However, while that may seem to be the case in advertising, the true marketing professionals will beg to differ. They would argue that if an advertisement is working; continue to test new strategies within that successful ad placement to increase its success rate! How can this be done? Most doctors offer many different treatments and services to their patients. Sometimes the challenge lies in determining which service or treatment registers with the highest amount of potential new patients. By implementing call tracking and call recording strategies, you now have the ability to advertise more than one treatment or service in order to determine which one brings in the greatest Return on Investment (ROI). Which treatment, service, coupon, discount or offer works best for your advertising? Offering a deal or special promotion is a great way to ignite new appointments but what type of offer or deal appeals to the most potential patients? You may want to know whether or not offering Free Consultations is going to be worth the sacrifice to your revenue stream. Or maybe a discount is better than a free service? By utilizing unique phone numbers in your special offers or promotions, you can now determine the overall ROI for your practice. The options are endless when it comes to testing and optimizing your advertisements, offers, and marketing strategies. The doctors that run the most successful practices have one thing in common they aren t afraid to try new things; and when they do, they track their performances down to the penny to understand the exact ROI from each new place they advertise their practice. www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 9
In Conclusion It is said that necessity is the mother of all invention. During these difficult financial times, the need to innovate has never been greater. Therefore, more and more doctors have learned to utilize advanced technologies to cost effectively maintain and grow their practices. To illustrate the potential you stand to gain by implementing call tracking and call recording strategies, please calculate your increase in income if you were able to improve in 3 key areas. What would happen if your practice improved by just 10% in the categories below: 10% increase in your New Patient Acquisition Rate =??? 10% increase in your Advertising Effectiveness Percentage =??? 10% increase in your Existing Patient Retention Percentage =??? No what would happen if your practice improved by 50% as has been seen by many doctors: 50% increase in your New Patient Acquisition Rate =??? 50% increase in your Advertising Effectiveness Percentage =??? 50% increase in your Existing Patient Retention Percentage =??? To learn more about how to implement MyDoctorCalls, the leading call tracking and call recording application designed specifically for doctors, please use the contact information printed below: Visit us online at www.mydoctorcalls.com To schedule a FREE Demonstration of the Product, call 800.250.3612 www.mydoctorcalls.com Page 10