With patients to focus on, dentists can use some help when it comes to improving front office staff’s phone skills.
Most dentists don’t choose their career path to be a manager or train office employees. They get into the practice to help patients. Although it may not be a dental professional’s primary focus, the performance of front office staff is important to ensure that the rest of the business runs smoothly.
Front office staff must have superior phone skills to be able to procure new patients, keep existing patients, and even to gain referrals.
We’ve already rounded up a few reasons how call tracking can help a dental practice, so now let’s focus on how a call coach can help with front office staff performance, and ultimately help a practice gain more patients. Below are three reasons that any dental practice can benefit from a call coach.
1. Free up time for the dentist to focus on their primary tasks
When a dentist is busy with patients, they don’t have the time to take out of their busy schedule to listen to recorded phone calls and sit down one-on-one with call handlers to review their phone skills.
Improving employee focus is necessary to have successful phone calls and acquire additional patients. What to do when there is no time to dedicate to working on employee performance yet it is vital to the practice? Use a third party call coach, of course!
| Although call coaching takes up time you may not have, check out this infographic to see how you can utilize call tracking metrics for your dental practice – in only 30 minutes a week! You’ve got time for that, right? |
2. Deliver learned skills to call handlers
Besides not having the free time to put aside to train and coach their staff, dentists most likely don’t even have the skillset to give viable feedback to call handlers, since they are trained as a dentist – not a call handler or a call handler coach.
Call coaches exist for a reason – it is a niche skill that needs to be learned, practiced, and perfected. There is much more to call handling than simply picking up the phone, talking and listening. Certain approaches and phrases must be used to stay in control of the conversation, build rapport, and ultimately have a successful phone call that ends with an appointment. Call coaches know the ins and outs of these skills – and help deliver their knowledge to each employee depending on what areas of the call they need to improve.
3. Give unbiased feedback and improvement suggestions
While some leaders may try to find time to coach their staff or to add this responsibility to a specific top-performing employee, it can cause internal tension.
With a third party call coach, no one can feel like they are being “called out” or reprimanded for an area that they need to improve upon in their phone handling. This is especially important in a small office environment where everyone works and interacts in close quarters.
By giving this responsibility to an unbiased party, employees should be more receptive and accepting of advice and feedback given to them to help improve their skills and book more patient appointments.
Curious to learn more about how call coaching can help your dental practice? Contact a CallSource representative today and find out how it may be just the solution you’ve been looking for.
