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961: Metric Mondays: New Patient Call Conversion Percentage – Miranda Beeson

How good is your team at capturing opportunities over the phone? In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Miranda Beeson, ACT’s director of education, to break down new patient call conversion percentage, how it impacts your practice, and what you can do to improve your numbers. To learn how to help your team with their phone skills and save thousands on marketing, listen to Episode 961 of The Best Practices Show!

 

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Main Takeaways:

  • New patient call conversion percentage reflects your team’s phone skills.
  • Listen to recorded calls as a team to evaluate and improve their skills.
  • Winning a patient over starts with the call, not when they show up.
  • A low conversion rate reflects wasted leads and wasted dollars.
  • Create a scheduling system that gets new patients in easily.

Quotes:

“[New patient call conversion percentage] is going to reflect both the team's phone skills and their ability to close and/or capture those opportunities. You can spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on marketing. But if when a caller calls and they don't feel welcomed, understood, or confident in scheduling, if we don't ask them to schedule or we don't close that call with the request to schedule or that directive, then we're losing potential patients before they even have a chance to walk through the door. A lot of our practices will think that that's when we win the patient over, is when they actually show up. But there's so much to be said about building trust and building relationships from the actual phone call.” (4:05—4:48) -Miranda

“A big key factor is guiding that caller into the right path or through that conversation in a way that directs them into the schedule when that's appropriate. A strong [new patient call] conversion rate means that your marketing dollars are working for you and that your schedule is filling efficiently. You're growing with patients who are ready to commit. If you're doing this well, you're growing with the right type of patients that you want in your practice as well.” (4:55—5:22) -Miranda

“A weak or a low [new patient call] conversion rate is going to mean wasted leads, wasted dollars, higher costs per new patient acquisition and, ultimately, slower growth. Now, the caveat here is that you might not be trying to grow rapidly. Like I mentioned, there are some practices that want every potential new patient they can get to walk through the door. Maybe you're a startup general dentist and you're newer out of school. You're like, ‘I just need some patients. I will lean later into getting the right patients. But for right now, I need some butts in the chair.’ Okay. Well, then we want to make sure that that conversion rate is really high. We're going to see a little bit of everybody, but perhaps you're a strongly differentiated practice, a fee-for-service practice. You do primarily comprehensive care, and you don't take emergencies. You only see comprehensive new patient visits. If that's where you're at in your practice, then your goal or your benchmark for this percentage might be a little bit different, because if somebody is calling to just have an emergency tooth pulled, we're not going to schedule that new patient.” (5:23—6:29) -Miranda

“When we look at the benchmarks for this, it's tricky to give a general standard benchmark because it's going to be customized to the type of practice that you have. But it's important to dig into the data. So, it can be as simple as just keeping a manual tally sheet. You make a hash mark when someone calls in one column, and you make a hash mark in another column if they schedule, and do the math at the end of each day and at the end of each week or month. And when you're looking at that, you may have a moderate percentage due to being selective with who you're inviting into the practice. But the most important piece of this metric isn't the metric itself. It's more like, what is the meat behind that metric and really knowing what is happening when people say yes or no. If you're at 50%, why? If you're at 60%, why? If you're at 80%, why? What is it about what's happening with those phone calls where you're at that metric?” (6:29—7:24) -Miranda

“[Work] with your team to align on your new patient call process and how to build relationships over the phone, how to gain trust and commitment before they walk through the door. On our last Metric Monday, if you didn't listen to that, go back and do so. We talked about your team building a new patient process system. Like, what happens in that experience when the patient is here? But ultimately, the very beginning of that system is this piece in itself: what is this new patient call process, or what is the new patient call experience really all about in our practice, and making sure that your administrative team members who are going to be on the phone really understand what we're trying to do with that call.” (7:59—8:40) -Miranda

“It's really great to listen to calls . . . Listen to those recorded calls, if possible. You can coach your team on tone and word choice, and you guys can collaborate on it. I have a lot of teams that will pull calls and listen together, then discuss what was good and what we could do a little bit better. It's great, if you're not able to hear your counterparts or colleagues on a regular basis, to pick up on the little tips and nuances of what they do well. Then, we have a self-evaluation form. That generated from something that I did on my own years ago when I was in private practice where it's broken up into the greeting. Are we really discerning what that patient needs? It's basically a rubric that you can sit and listen and do a self-evaluation of your own calls with new patients to say, am I hitting the mark? Sometimes, it's great. You don't realize until you listen to yourself on the phone where you might be excelling or where you might need to develop a little bit further.” (9:55—10:51) -Miranda

“We have to remember too that our team only knows to mimic what they've heard or experienced. So, if they're just mimicking their experience when they've called a dentist, or when they've called a medical provider, or a veterinary clinic, or their cable company, or all these customer service calls that we might be making, the majority of them are not wowing us. So, we really do have to look for opportunities to introduce concepts to our team to help them see that there can be a different way in which this goes.” (12:24—12:53) -Miranda

“Here's how it works, office managers that are listening. The schedule is crazy. Your admin team needed a break. Hygienists think that administrative team members can eat and potty whenever they want to. But guess what? They can't either. They do occasionally also have to step away and take a break. So, you're the office manager. You pop up front. You say, ‘I'll cover for you. You go take your 15 minutes,’ and you answer the phone. And guess what? It's a new patient. You're just as frazzled because you're in the middle of a million things. Maybe you didn't have the best new patient call. You can use your call when working with the team. We always say “the leader eats last”, whatever, all those phrases. But if you're the leader and you put your vulnerability in front of the team, ‘Hey, let's all rally around this call that I just took. I think I could have done this better. I think this was pretty good. But what do you guys think?’ and you really put yourself out there as the first person to take that step into that vulnerable space, then in the future you can start to really work together as a team.” (13:11—14:10) -Miranda

“Dentists listening . . . if you're teaching someone to do photography, and the picture didn't turn out just right, and you ask them, ‘Tell me a little bit about this picture and what you think you could do better,’ and they say, ‘Well, I think it's pretty great,’ and you know it's not, you're in trouble. You’ve got a whole different place that you're starting from. Then, if the person can say, ‘Well, I see that it's canted a bit. I'm supposed to be focused on the lateral, but I noticed that I'm focused more on the premolar,’ if they can point out those things that aren't exactly right, now you have somewhere to start from where you know they're going to be more open to learning and growing and developing that skill. It's no different for the call. If they listen to the call and think it's fantastic, you're going to have a long road ahead of you. If they listen to the call and they go, ‘Gosh, I sounded like I was sleepy,’ or, ‘I didn't even ask her any questions,’ now we have somewhere to start from and we can really grow and work together towards making it better.” (14:33—15:29) -Miranda

“The last and very simple, logistical piece is that we do need to make sure that our scheduling system is easy for new patients to get in. We always say we want new patients in the schedule within two weeks. I know you like seven days. Anywhere in that range of one to two weeks . . . If it's much more than that, your patients are probably going to keep calling, and they're probably going to try to find somewhere else to go — unless we've really wowed them. So, we have to make sure that our scheduling system allows the team to schedule new patients easily and have the availability that they can get in really soon. We don't want technology, or that lack of new patient blocks being held, or anything like that to get in the way of a new patient being able to say yes and us being able to have them scheduled, and then therefore have a higher conversion percentage rate.” (15:30—16:20) -Miranda

“What this metric doesn't show is how good the value perception is on the other side of the patient. So, think about this: if you have a Susie come in and her new patient call conversion percentage isn't great, maybe it's 25%, she works hard with your help and with all the resources we have in the BPA, and she gets it up over 50%, and then eventually approaches 75%, I can promise you one thing that's going to happen. Those patients on the other side are going to go, ‘This is going to be expensive. Wow, she is good.’ You never want somebody to be really good at this and have patients on the other side go, ‘This is going to be cheap!’ They're going to like you before they even meet you.” (16:23—17:06) -Kirk

“The power of having somebody at the front that's good at this, that knows the metric, good at verbal skills, and can create value on the phone is tremendous. It's on us, the leaders, to find, grow, and develop those people.” (17:11—17:25) -Kirk

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

1:56 New patient call conversion percentage, explained.

4:00 Why this metric is important and how it impacts your practice.

7:45 Tips to improve this metric.

17:29 ACT’s BPA.

Miranda Beeson, MS, BSDH Bio:

Miranda Beeson has over 25 years of clinical dental hygiene, front office, practice administration, and speaking experience. She is enthusiastic about communication and loves helping others find the power that words can bring to their patient interactions and practice dynamics. As a Lead Practice Coach, she is driven to create opportunities to find value in experiences and cultivate new approaches.

Miranda graduated from Old Dominion University, and enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck, and her children, Trent, Mallory, and Cassidy. Family time is the best time, and is often spent on a golf course, a volleyball court, or spending the day boating at the beach.
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