As the marketer of a Canadian dental practice, you naturally want to know why prospective patients call. However, this information doesn’t quite go far enough. You need data that you can act on as well. Before Call Intelligence, it was difficult to track the journey of people who found a business by using both the telephone and Internet to gather information. That is because marketers only had access to insight from a single campaign, which meant that call tracking was helpful but not quite enough for their needs.
Introducing Call Intelligence
Integrating your data from external sources enables you to achieve results that provide much richer data. Your team of marketers can now understand every aspect of the patient’s journey. This could include analysing a PPC campaign, seeing which pages he or she visited on your dental website, how long the patient remained on each page, and at what point in the journey the prospective patient decided to place a call to your practice.
When you know why people call your dental practice, you can make a connection between certain marketing campaigns and sales conversions. This provides you with insight to optimise future marketing campaigns and budgets.
It’s easy to see the benefits of Call Intelligence, but can it impact the branding experience for your patients? Yes, it can.
How Your Marketing Team Forms a Brand Experience for Patients
It’s important for marketing teams to understand how they contribute to creating and then managing the brand experience for current and potential patients. They also need to realise that the patient is the one who sets the brand agenda. Your marketing team must know how to communicate effectively with your intended patient population for optimal results.
Having personalised and data-rich technology enables your dental practice to increase how many people visit its website and to provide a better experience for each one. People visiting your website can complete a form to request more information about your services, but many still prefer to speak to someone who live who can answer their questions right away.
When you enable Call Intelligence, it gives you immediate access to dynamic telephone numbers that track each caller’s journey from the time of his or her first click to the first call. Call Intelligence automatically routes the call to the agent or receptionist most qualified to answer the caller’s questions without him or her having to wait on hold or endure multiple transfers. Best of all, the caller doesn’t see the location data and request type happening behind the scenes that personalises the call.
No one enjoys calling a business only to listen to multiple rounds of voice prompts and then get connected with the wrong person anyway. Your patients’ time is valuable, and such a system conveys the message that you don’t respect it.
It’s also important to realise that paid search conversion rates continue to increase. Despite all the technology available to them, people still prefer to speak to a business by phone to get the information they need.
Understand the Phone is Still a Valuable Tool
While it’s important to provide patients with online methods to reach your dental practice, understand that many prefer the old-fashioned telephone. It provides them with a greater sense of connection in the age of the chatbot. Because of this, your practice must provide continual phone coverage, answer in a helpful and friendly manner, and track calls to truly get a sense of the patient journey.
When you handle phone calls professionally by routing callers to the right person and resolving complaints right away, the reputation of your dental practice improves. People still appreciate competent and helpful staff responding to their enquiries when they call any type of business. We can’t overstate the importance of this enough. It only takes one rude representative or a customer experiencing the frustration of multiple transfers to lose him or her forever.
Patients are in charge, and your dental organisation must do everything necessary to ensure their satisfaction. With Call Intelligence, it’s much easier to build loyalty and personalised experience for your patient base.
Phone Call Facts Every Dental Practice Should Know
Canadians love their smartphones and they rarely go anywhere without them, but dental practices aren’t paying as much attention to this obvious fact as they should. People use these devices to look up information about a local dentist and often place a call immediately afterwards from the same device. If you’re serious about growing your dental practice, you can’t afford to ignore the importance of phone calls any longer. Below we set the record straight about phone call facts and misconceptions.
Phone Calls Are Here to Stay
Texting and chat are certainly convenient, but both have their time and place. People love these options when connecting with a friend. However, they still prefer to pick up the phone to contact a business to ask questions or to schedule an appointment. Perhaps that doesn’t seem right to you in this age of hyper-connectivity and electronic messaging. If so, consider that people placed 30 billion phone calls to businesses five years ago. Today, that number is more than double at 73 billion annual phone calls.
Making a Phone Call is Faster and Easier Than Completing an Online Form
Whether you’re at the grocery store, sitting in a waiting room, or enjoying a meal out at a restaurant, it’s common to look around and see most people engrossed with their smartphone. To say that Canadians are attached to these devices is an understatement. These mini-computers do everything from give them directions to pointing them towards reviews for a business they’re considering patronising. When a prospective patient uses his or her smartphone to navigate to your dental practice website, he or she must decide on one of the following actions right away:
- Fill in contact information on a form and request a call-back
- Interact with a chatbot
- Speak to someone who can answer their questions immediately by tapping on the click-to-call button
The last option requires the fewest taps for the website visitor, which often makes it the most attractive one. If you choose not to publish your dental practice website online, a potential patient might get the idea that it’s less than reputable. The fact that more smartphones exist in Canada doesn’t mean that people make fewer calls. They actually make more, which ultimately means your practice earns more money.
Increase Conversion Rates by Focusing on Inbound Calls
Telephone calls produce a conversion rate of approximately 50 percent, while other contact methods might see two percent. It generally takes online prospects more than two business days to receive a response to their enquiry. That might as well be forever in a society that expects and even demands instant answers to their questions.
With phone calls, you have the advantage of knowing that the caller already has an interest in your services. He or she simply needs more information to follow through with scheduling an appointment. You’re much more likely to gain a new patient when the person answering the phone at your dental practice can answer the questions with authority.
Not Tracking Inbound Calls is Leaving Money on the Table
Why do you need call tracking when you already use Google Analytics to discover how each online lead discovered your practice? We hope that we have demonstrated why when describing how you lose a prospect’s trail once he or she goes offline. When that happens, you don’t know anything about the prospective patient who appeared quite promising from his or her online activities. You could avoid this knowledge deep hole by having a path for phone calls as well.
Approximately two-thirds of people who go to a website to gather information complete the transaction off the Internet. While it still increases your profit, it also means that you have no valuable data on the majority of your patient base. This missing information means that you lose out on the opportunity to tweak future marketing efforts. It also means that marketers don’t get the credit they deserve for bringing the prospect this far along in the pipeline. Call tracking solves both problems.
Additional Benefits of Call Tracking
Call tracking provides you with a comprehensive picture of every patient’s path to calling your practice and scheduling a procedure. Our software gives you access to data regarding every phone call the patient made to your practice. This includes the keywords he or she originally entered to find you along with the marketing campaign that prompted the search.
With this information available, you can make better decisions about future marketing campaigns. This includes eliminating the ones that produce poor results and improving the ones that could do even better. When you run an effective campaign, you can expect more phone calls, higher sales, and a seamless effort sorting it all out from an accounting perspective.
It’s time to stop wasting money on marketing solutions that don’t work. We invite you to contact CallSumo to learn more about our intelligence and tracking options today.
About the Author
Ahmed Reza, Founder of Call Sumo and DentalWebNow, Milken Scholar, Entrepreneur, Hacker, Designer, Builder, GearHead, Mad Scientist & most importantly: DAD!
