Weekly Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery: New patient phone calls – ask questions, guide conversations, and aim for scheduling success!
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About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:04
Hi friends, welcome to your weekly motivational moments with Eric Vickery, President of Coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. Today, I wanna talk to you about the new patient phone calls that you get. And we just talked about asking questions last week. And questions become your friend when it comes to these phone calls. We even use the example of, do you accept my insurance? Transition that, I’d be happy to help you out with that. Again, my name is Eric, who do I have the pleasure of speaking with? Get control of that conversation.
00:33
Then later on, come back to it and say, tell me more about this insurance question you have and see where they come from. Now, every time you’re taking through the patient, this new patient process, every step along the way should have a question mark at the end. Now remember, you never want a should on anybody, but it should have questions to it. If you just start answering questions, answering questions, answering questions, they’re in control of the conversation and dictating where it goes.
01:02
you’re dictating where the conversation’s going on a new patient phone call, which is where? Towards scheduling an appointment. So in thinking about asking questions, there’s a lot of questions you can ask on a new patient phone call. So get their name, right? That’s asking for their name. Finding out their new patient or not. When was the last time we saw you in our practice? How did they find out about you? We say, who may we thank for referring you to our practice? Then we start getting into more
01:32
You know, that rapport building, that research, that probing, discovering, questioning stage where you start figuring out why did they call, what are they looking for, how can you help them? No matter what they’re looking for, every step along the way, I’m thinking, how am I moving them closer to scheduling rather than further away from scheduling? Now, I want you to think about that and I want you to…
01:54
push the pause button here for a second and talk about what do you believe is the most important question we’re gonna ask this new patient on the phone call. Go ahead and do that. Okay, so you’ve said a lot of things like, chief complaint, what prompted their call, why now, how long has it been since they’ve been the dentist? All of those things, getting their name and phone number. But in the end, all of that is directing towards the goal of the phone call, which is to get them scheduled.
02:24
And so the most important question we’re gonna ask them is for the appointment. Now I wanna talk about this. I’ve heard of this said a lot of different ways or asked a lot of different ways when it comes to asking for the appointment, which is the goal, which is the focus, which is the most important question. We just have to do it the right way. All too often I hear it come across as either way too nonchalant or way too pressure focused. And you might say, well, do you think you’d wanna get an appointment scheduled? Yes or no.
02:54
wavering or way too aggressive. Do you see any good reason why you wouldn’t wanna go ahead and get your first visit scheduled in our office? So what we wanna do is balance that out. And your best tool to use in asking questions is the word how. So when you’re asking questions, you always think about how can I use the word how in this question? So how do you feel? How much sense does it make? Either one will work.
03:21
So when you get to the point where it makes sense to ask this question, you would say, Joey, how do you feel about going ahead and getting your first visit scheduled here in our office? Now there’s a reason why that’s so important. It’s not a yes or no question. So they’re not gonna go, yeah, sure. If they’re not 100% sure, when you ask them an open-ended phrase, question, they’re gonna keep telling you more information. If you say, how do you feel about doing this? And they’re not, and they go, well, yeah, I’m not so sure I wanna do this. Whatever reason.
03:51
If they’re in and you say, how do you feel about going ahead and getting your first visit scheduled here in our office? And they go, yeah, you know what? That sounds really good. You have confidence that by reserving this time for them, they are in. So remember, use your intake form. Use a guide that helps you through the conversation, not a script, a guide that says, okay, I’m gonna follow this guideline, the great call process, greeting, rapport, engage, ask for the appointment, take the information and.
04:18
Focus in on every single section, having a question processed to it. We’re not doing a deep dive today. This week, I just want you focused on, are you getting research? Are you asking questions? And are you getting them scheduled? What’s your conversion rate on new patient phone call scheduled this week? All right, guys, make it a great week.
04:42
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
