According to Invoca, 65% of customers prefer contacting a business via a phone call instead of through email or message, which means that most of your customers and potential customers will first get in touch with you via a telephone call.
Most customers will make a call to confirm or reschedule an appointment instead of sending an email. Therefore, letting your phone ring strikes not only at the heart of your current customer base but also puts off potential customers.
When you don’t have staff dedicated to answering your business calls, you run the risk of overwhelming your existing customer service staff with demands during peak seasons. When the team is overcome, the attention given to each caller is significantly reduced, and this can lead to the loss of a customer and a subsequent reduction of your dental practice cash flow.
In today’s competitive world, you want to give your dental practice an edge over your competitors, not only in the dental service you offer but also in customer service.
This article discusses how letting the phone ring hurts your business and what you can do about it.
Reasons Why Your Phone Rings Without Being Answered
The following are reasons why business phones are answered:
- Your staff is overwhelmed by work, and they are unable to answer the ringing phones. The front desk staff has other responsibilities other than answering the calls. During the busy hours when they have to contact insurance companies, adjust the schedules, receive patients, and take care of the office operations, they cannot answer all incoming calls.
- The call is made after the office has been closed. Many dental practices don’t have updated systems that can automatically inform the callers when they are closed instead of the phone ringing without an answer.
- Your front desk staff is on break and away from their desk. If a customer calls during the designated break hours, the call is likely to go unanswered because your front desk attendant is away from their desk.
- Your customer service staff can be on call with other customers or other business associates. This leaves the customer on hold for a long time, and they might eventually give up.
How Letting Your Phone Ring Hurts Your Business?
1. Creates a Bad Atmosphere in the Waiting Area
When your customers visit the dental office, they are usually nervous or uneasy, and a quiet waiting room helps calm them down. A waiting room where the phone rings continuously without being answered is not serene and can become stressful for your patients.
Your customers may develop the perception that you have lousy customer service when they see the calls going unanswered or waiting for too long before they can get an answer.
Customers in the waiting room are very attentive to what is happening around them.
Our dental answering service will ensure that the waiting rooms remain serene by answering all calls off-site. We also guarantee that calls are responded to faster, and customers are not put on hold for too long.
2. Loss of profit for your dental practice
According to NewVoiceMedia, businesses lose $75 billion annually due to bad customer service. When the phone rings without being answered, the callers create a wrong perception of your dental practice’s customer service.
In many cases, when the call is answered by a customer service agent overwhelmed by work, they fail to address the customers’ concerns. This leads to potential customers going to your competitors who have better customer service.
Customers who are not called back or who call your competitors will, in most cases, lead to direct loss of revenue to your business. It is critical that your dental practice handling of phone calls is efficient to avoid losing guaranteed profit.
Our dental answering service will ensure that your dental practice’s customer service reputation remains intact and protects your profit.
3. Leads to other in-office inefficiencies
Customer service handles scheduling and rescheduling, which ensures that the office runs efficiently. An efficient dental practice means that your customers’ waiting time is reduced, and the dentist’s workload is spread out to allow for sufficient rest time.
When the customer service staff is overwhelmed, they may miss important calls on rescheduling or make mistakes when scheduling the appointments. This can lead to customers being rescheduled after they’ve already arrived at your practice’s office or having to wait for hours.
To ensure that the office operations and appointments are running efficiently, you must address the issue of the overwhelmed customer service. Our dental call answering service frees up your customer service staff to handle the clients in your office, and we also ensure that the scheduling data is always up-to-date.
4. Reduction of Customer Satisfaction
When customers call your business and note that the call has gone through but is not being answered, they become frustrated. This creates a negative perception of your business’s ability to deliver quality dental and customer service.
People who call your business and fail to get an answer are likely to reach your competitor. If your competitor answers them and gives them the answers to the questions, you empower your competitor and lose a customer.
When calls are not answered because the customer service staff is overwhelmed by work, there is a slight possibility that the customer will be called back within a reasonably short time. Customers play a crucial role in marketing your business. Therefore, the loss of one customer can result in a loss of other potential customers if that customer shares the bad experience they had with your business.
Our dental answering service will ensure that all your callers’ questions and concerns are addressed politely and professionally.
What To Do About It
Outsourcing call answering to professionals who are specialists ensures that you eliminate phone ringing problems in total. With this, you position yourself to leap the benefits of having your business calls handled by highly qualified customer service agents.
It is impossible to continue growing your dental practice profit with demoralized customer service staff and a lousy customer service perception. Remember, customer service is the first contact point between your practice and the patients, and first impression matters.
Engaging our dental answering service will increase your employees’ morale, increase your profit and make your office more efficient.
Our dental call service has highly trained staff professionals who will handle your potential customers’ questions in a way that is likely to convert them to regular customers. With tested scheduling systems, you are guaranteed to improve your practice’s efficiency.
You will also get regular reports on how your calls are being handled to help you evaluate our performance.
Conclusion
Letting your phone ring is hurting your business’ profitability, customer service reputation, and employees’ morale. Failure to address the constant ringing of the phone without an answer will lead to you losing skilled employees and paying customers.
Our dental service will improve how your customers view your business and also increase your revenue.