An Effective System to Respond to After Hours Inquiries from Potential New Patients and for New Patient Calls that go to Voice Mail

Gary Takacs: This is The Thriving Dentist Show with Gary Takacs, where we help you develop your ideal dental practice, one that provides personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Gary Takacs: Welcome to another episode of The Thriving Dentist Show. I’m Gary Takacs, Thriving Dentist Show podcast founder and co-host. we have a great episode for you today. It’s one of those granular episodes with lots of detail. The title of this episode is an Effective System to respond to after hour inquiries from potential new patients and for new patient calls that go to voicemail. this is something that is happening more and more, and we’re gonna give you some great solutions to, make that whole process seamless and more effective for your practice. you’ll really enjoy this, very detailed episode. But before we get to that, a couple announcements to make, coming up, a few weeks after this episode is published, we have a Thriving Dentist Virtual Event. the event is titled, when Digital Dentistry Increases Production and Profit, we’re gonna talk about 3D printing same day restorations and cloud-based systems.

Gary Takacs: if, you’re nerdy like we are, you’re gonna like that event. it’s June 30th, happens at, 6:00 PM Eastern Time. it’s one hour. You’ll get an hour of ce, so six to seven Eastern time. So go ahead and do the time, and the time Translation would be, starts at 3:00 PM Pacific, four, 4:00 PM Mountain, 5:00 PM Central, and, 6:00 PM Eastern Time. come join us. it’s free, no tuition. You do have to register though, so be sure to grab a seat through registering. Go to thrivingdentist.com/events and, grab your spot. the next announcement we have is, we have a guest contributor. this is actually a good friend of mine. It’s, Jeff Buske. if you’re, you may be well familiar with Jeff, but this is the first time he’s contributing, to, thriving dentist show episode.

Gary Takacs: And he’s got a really great tip. And what, Dr. Buske is gonna talk about is why dentists struggle most after work. And it’s subtitled. It’s the transition nobody talks about. And, he’s gonna talk about how to transition from the end of your day to when you get home. That’s something nobody talks about. And Jeff’s got some amazing wisdom, from his experience, as well as, many of his dentist colleagues. So, you’re gonna enjoy, this quick tip from Dr. Jeff Buskey. by the way, if you’d like to actually watch this video, he recorded it as a video. You can hear it now on the podcast, but if you’d like to watch it, in the show notes, there’ll be a link to watch it on the ut our YouTube channel. So if you’d like to watch it, go ahead and, go to thriving dentist.com. Click on the podcast, you’ll see the link, and you could actually watch Jeff, deliver that episode. but with no further ado, here’s Dr. Jeff Buske. Why Dentist Struggle Most after work? It’s the transition nobody talks about.

Dr. Jeff Buske: If you don’t control the transition between work and home, you’ll destroy the place that you’ve been working so hard to provide for you ever. Notice how you can crush a full schedule in your practice, handle a very difficult patient, or navigate staff drama and still walk through your front door, carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Listen, most dentists don’t have a home problem. They have a transition problem. So here’s the move. Before you walk inside, give yourself literally just five minutes transition ritual. Okay? Sit in the car, breathe, pray, maybe journal one sentence, or simply just ask yourself, how do I want to show up for the people that I love right now? Then second, set a decompression boundary. Okay? That might mean no practice talk until after dinner. It might mean the phone stays in the kitchen and not in your pocket.

Dr. Jeff Buske: Whatever it is, it literally will protect the energy of your home. And finally, communicate with your spouse. Let them know the truth. Listen, I had a very hard day. I need like 10 minutes to reset so that I can fully be here with you. Because leadership isn’t just how you run your practice, it’s how you show up with your family. When you master the transition, you stop bringing the worst of your day home, and you start bringing the best of you back to the people that matter the most. If you wanna learn this at a black belt level, DM me leadership, and we’ll connect and we’ll have a conversation. Life is earned daily. It’s never given. Do the work.

Gary Takacs: Well, welcome back to the thriving Dentist show. I hope you enjoyed that, tip from Dr. Jeff Buskey. Lots of really practical wisdom there, and it’s something that, isn’t talked about much, and it’s, it’s, something that we can all likely use as tip, to improve on that transition from work to home. anyway, thanks Jeff, for, making that contribution. Well, let’s dive into this episode. It’s titled, an Effective System to Respond After our inquiries from Potential New Patients. And for those new patient calls that go to voicemail, that go to voicemail, that’s happening more and more these days. Well, as the world becomes ever more technical, more potential new patients are reaching out to dental offices at their convenience after hours to schedule appointments happening more and more. these con, contacts that you’re getting often happen in the strangest hours.

Gary Takacs: It can happen at two in the morning, but we’re not expecting your office to have phone coverage at two in the morning, of course. But how you respond to those inquiries, what happens next, how fast you respond, how well you follow up is what determines whether that new patient contact will actually schedule a new patient with you, or just go on to the next office in their search. So today we’re gonna talk about how to fix your after hours of voicemail follow up systems. So no new patient inquiry slips through the cracks. I’ll make a comment about the calls that go to voicemail. It wasn’t too long ago. I might, I might suggest that maybe pre COVID, pre COVID, if someone reached your voicemail during business hours, you would likely have a message that says, we’re currently taking care of other patients.

Gary Takacs: We value your call. Kindly leave a message and we’ll call you right back. I think pre COVID, there were people that would leave a message and say, yeah, by the way, I’d be a new patient. My name’s, my name’s Gary. Please give me a call back and look forward to speaking with you. I think that was true, maybe up until pre COVID, maybe around 20 19, early 2020. Since then, I think something shifted in the psyche. And I don’t believe new callers are gonna leave voicemails anymore. When they hear your voice message, they’re just gonna hang up and they’re gonna go to the next office on their search. So we wanna talk about what we could do to avoid, those situations when that happens. So, Naren, I’ve got, some great questions to ask. you’ll be on the spot answering the questions, nein, but I’ve got some, what do you think about this topic, by the way?

Naren Arulrajah: Oh, I love this topic, Gary. And I think it’s a really important topic because, you and I work with, dozens and dozens of clients, mutual clients, and, it’s okay to, not get enough new patients, but it’s a crime to miss those new patients from becoming new patients. In other words, you spend all this time, money, not just the marketing team, but the entire practice to get that new patient to contact your office. And when they contact your office, and we lose that meaning somehow, whatever we do or don’t do, results in them not booking an appointment, it’s a crime. And unfortunately, the average dental practice in the US today is only booking one out of three new patient appointments. One out of three.

Gary Takacs: Is that new patient contacts or, calls.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, we, I’m, you’re talking about calls, but it’s even worse with contacts. ’cause at least with calls, there’s a human being and they have to mess up for the patient not to book with contacts, meaning, let’s say it’s digital, especially when that contact is not two way. Let’s say it’s something automated and it’s just something so unhuman, right? You lose that person, like, in hello. And if the

Gary Takacs: Office got the contact, then marketing’s working

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly.

Gary Takacs: If they got the call or contact, we’re, we’re, those are different. We recognize that. But if they, if the office, if your office doctor, as you’re listening to this, if your office got the call or got the contact in inquiry, then your marketing’s working. Whatever that marketing is, whether it be organic, SEOA, Google paid search, patient referral, whatever it is, then your marketing worked. It’s what happens next. Well, now let’s dive into it. Let’s unpack that. My first question is, nra, what happens in a practice that has no timely follow up system for after hour inquiries or for calls from potential new patients to go to voicemail? What happens?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, I’m gonna break it up into two pieces after hours. I get it. I’m not expecting your practice to be working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, being at the backend call of patients and not have a life. So I’m very okay with after hours. Few tips on that. Be very precise on what your hours are, and if possible, try to stick with the normal, what people consider our business hours. That’s nine to five or eight to five Monday through Friday, right? If your hours are not consistent with that, I would recommend having someone answer calls. So let’s say you only open four days a week. You are closed on Fridays. Most patients may not know that you’re closed on Fridays. Maybe some do. The loyal patients, a lot of your new patients don’t. They assume, like every other business you open Monday through Friday, so they’re calling on Friday.

Naren Arulrajah: So on Fridays, I would have coverage. It could be a virtual person who’s answering the call. They don’t, you don’t have to have your office open. You don’t have to be there. So I would provide coverage. That would be my first step. But let’s say, what, you followed my tip and the call comes at 7:00 PM on a Thursday or 2:00 PM on a Saturday, right after hours. What do you do? I think the best thing to do in 2026, and again, studies have shown this, is you want to get back quickly in less than 60 seconds. Why? The further away you are from that 60 seconds, the less likely the people are gonna remember you are gonna be excited about you and follow through with that booking. So that’s tip number one. Get back within 60 seconds. Tip number two,

Gary Takacs: You’re saying after hours,

Naren Arulrajah: After hours, at least a response. Hey, thank you for calling our office. this is our office hours. Sorry, we missed your call. How can we help you? Right?

Gary Takacs: Yeah, we’ll get into more of that in the, in the next question, about the after hours. But

Naren Arulrajah: Yes, and you can do that with technology today. We even many other, systems will allow you to send that text message, immediately within 60 seconds. now I think if I want to score bonus credit, I know this is not possible, but there are few companies that provide 24 7 customer service. Of course, these are not dental specific, they’re just, customer service companies. So maybe there is a human being who could have that real time communication through text. But if that’s too much, I think over time we will start seeing AI that’s very personalized. So literally, it starts having a conversation at 7:00 PM when it’s convenient for the patient, even though it’s not a human in your office calling back, right? But at the very least, send a response back within 60 seconds saying, we missed your call. We are sorry about that. Here is our office hours. We will call you back during office hours. If there’s anything else we can do in the meantime, please let us know and we’ll follow up when we get back in the office. so at least they know that you are real and you are somebody they wanna continue talking to. Otherwise, what happens is there’s no response, and they move on to the next person on their list, could be Google, whatever, and they call that office.

Gary Takacs: Now, that leads me to the second question, then. Which is very specific. the second, and it relates more to the after hours things. What

Naren Arulrajah: Are you talking about? The second part of the question you already asked, which is about voicemails. What happens if we get voicemails? Right?

Gary Takacs: Go ahead.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah. So the second part of your question is, what happens if the, phone goes to voicemail, right? One thing I know, having done this for 19 years, today, 95% of your new patients will not leave a voicemail.

Gary Takacs: And you’re saying today, 2026.

Naren Arulrajah: 2026, right? You

Gary Takacs: Agree with my opening comment, that pre COVID people would leave voice messages.

Naren Arulrajah: Yes, but they don’t anymore. Yeah. And the reason is, yeah, and the reason is by picking up the phone, their objective is to talk to a human being. I’m sure when you call a restaurant, you are not calling the restaurant to get a voicemail. You are calling to ask a person some question, whatever that is. Hey, do you have a, can I come in today at 2:00 PM Do you have, a spot for two people? Or when you’re calling a dentist, Hey, I’m thinking I moved into my new town and I’m looking for a dentist. and they have a question about the kind of services you offer. So unfortunately their mindset is, I’m gonna get a human being and I’m going to get a response. So during office hours, do not let it goes to voicemail, because if you do that, people won’t leave a voicemail.

Naren Arulrajah: You lost them at hello. Right? So never, ever like monitor that. Like, find out what percentage of your calls are going to voicemail, and the number that Gary recommends is less than 5%. You know, if it’s more than that, fix it. find out when it’s happening. Is it happening at certain hours during the day or certain days? Find out the root cause. It could be a technical issue, it could be a staffing issue, whatever it is, you need to be a hawk and fix it. But if the voicemail comes after hours, I would follow the same texting sequence. I would just send them the text after hours. Hey, this is our office hours, sorry, we missed you. We’ll get back to you on such and such time. at the very least.

Gary Takacs: Well, let’s, let’s, unpack that for the after hours. The second question mm-hmm . What does a strong new patient response blow look like or responses that happen after hours? that’s

Naren Arulrajah: A, that’s a great question, and I would use an analogy. And, the gentleman who founded, Airbnb talks about this, level five experience and level six and level seven and level nine, and he says level nine is Elon Musk. Let’s say you are a Elon Musk fan. He comes and picks you up from the airport, and he takes you and shows you around, right? Like, that is like, you will never forget that experience. if you, if you had that kind of an experience with an Airbnb. So what is like a level nine experience? I think a level nine experience would be office hours, after hours, you get a text, but it’s a real human who you are communicating with, who knows what’s going on, who know, who knows dentistry, who knows your practice, and can have a meaningful conversation and help you arrive at something, Hey, let’s book an appointment for you to see this patient tomorrow morning because you are in pain. if that’s the outcome, or, and he can make it happen, or she can make it happen, right? That’s

Gary Takacs: About as real, that’s about as realistic. Naren is having Elon pick me up at the airport. ,

Naren Arulrajah: Yes. you’ll never forget that practice in your life, right? a, you picked up a, somebody got back to me at 7:30 PM and they booked that appointment at 8:00 AM shop. So as soon as I wake up, I go to the office and I’m, I’m I’m in a great place. So that would be like level nine. Now that’s really hard. You need to have, you need to have a company you work with, or you need to have people and a lot of logistics.

Gary Takacs: It could be outsourced, but it would be likely outsourced offshore. Yes, it would be likely, different than, you know, having one of your own team members responding. So bring it down to maybe more of, real world, success stories there. What would be, level 6, 7, 8?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, so a real world would be, it would be AI that is smart. By the way. We are developing some of these tools, through e Ekwa labs, which is a separate part of our business. And that AI would be intelligent. It would have a meaningful conversation again, through text, understand you and hopefully can find a solution for you at least 70, 80% of the time. It won’t be like foolproof like a human who can make things happen. But for most cases, like let’s say they’re a new patient, it knows when the new patient slot is available, and after going back and forth, it books you in. Right Now that technology is still nascent. I don’t think anybody’s doing it well. Well, I’ve heard tons and tons and tons of horror stories with doctors who are trying to use AI for this. So I think it’s still experimental. I think hopefully in two years, three years, we will have something like that. That’s,

Gary Takacs: It’s getting better by the minute.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, it is getting better. just still not there. So that could be like a level five. It’s AI powered as opposed to human powered. And it gives you 80% of that Elon experience we talked about, where the patient is really happy at the end of that interaction, right? but the more likely response in 2026 is, at the very least, a response goes out, explains when your office hours are. And then there is a CRM system that follows up, meaning your team gets alerted and they have a list of patients who you missed, voicemails, et cetera, et cetera, who haven’t booked an appointment, and they go through that list every day till that patient is in the books. Either the patient says, what? No, thanks, I’ve moved on. I’ve found somebody else. Or you keep following up till they get into the books.

Naren Arulrajah: To me, that would be a good level five experience in 2026. You can do that. Every practice can do that. You just need a, some kind of a CRM system and good verbal training for your team so they can follow up and make that appointment booking on a, on a Monday morning, when, the next business day, whenever that happens to be. So to me, that would be a good system. But unfortunately, most practices that I work with, and I think you would agree with me, Gary, they don’t even know what a CRM is. They don’t even know what customer relationship management is. They know the patient once the patient is a patient, but they don’t know the person till they become the patient. So there’s this vacuum where they go into this ether and it’s on a piece of paper somewhere on a Google sheet, some other place, and nobody checks it.

Naren Arulrajah: There’s no process. And unfortunately, the practice management systems haven’t catered to this CRM idea. they only lo look at the person once they become a patient. So I think you can still put it together and you can still like, develop a process. I would be tracking it. Like I would know how many people who called our office who did not book an appointment for whatever reason, whether it’s voicemail, after hours, whatever, and how many of them did end up booking an appointment within three days, within five days. And I want that number to be very high. So let’s say 10 people call your office and within three days of their first contact, they have booked an appointment and that number is 70%. That would be a win. But right now, nobody’s thinking that way. And I think that’s really essential. If you are a practice that’s determined to, play an a plus game with marketing.

Gary Takacs: Naren, I’m suggesting that this podcast episode could be a mindset shift for many of our listeners. Let me take a minute and explain. Yeah, I know there listeners right now that are saying, that’s not a problem in my office. People don’t call me after hours, right? They’re saying no. They know, wait, we’re stabbed. They know the dental offices are, you talked about hours. They’re an eight to five, yes, my fav my favorite hours, favorite hours, patient hours are seven to four, 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM. and you know, our patients know that those are, those are the hours seven to four, but they’re listeners that are thinking, oh, that doesn’t happen. And I’m going to say, unless you have the data, you don’t know. Yes. If you, if you don’t have the data, and the data is what, how many calls last month came in after hours.

Gary Takacs: Yes. And what happened to them. and if you’re the one that’s sitting there, saying, well, that, we’re in, we’re in small town America, we got different, it’s not like a big city. It’s 24 hours a day, our patients. So they’ll just call back the next day and then all of a sudden you discover that last month you got x number of inquiries after hours with no response back. ’cause you don’t have any system for that. And those are patients that you’ll never see as a patient in your practice because they went somewhere else. So the first step would be to have the data. Now Naren in our mutual clients, you provide that data to us. Qua provides the data. So we know how many of those calls came in after hours, and what did we do and how did we recover those? How did we respond? So, the next question, we’ve kind of

Naren Arulrajah: Just one tip, Gary, just while you’re speaking, it came to me. Some people know that you’re close. So they’ll say, I’ll call on Monday, and they never call back. what ? Because Monday comes around and they have seven projects to finish and screaming kid in the morning, and they don’t even remember that, oh, they were thinking of calling the dentist on Monday and morning, right? So it slips and then one week becomes two weeks and two months later they’re like, oh, I don’t even remember. So one of the things you can do to prompt them is to have a chat bot. So let’s say 7:00 PM I’m on your website, I am on your Facebook page. What if it pops up and say, how can we help you? And the patients start talking and you start capturing their name, their email, their phone number.

Naren Arulrajah: So now you have a real patient or potential patient who by name, by email, by phone number, and assuming you have a CRM system, you talked about the mind shared shift, Gary, like now you can follow up with them. So you can also create new leads, almost like your manufacturing interest. Otherwise, they would’ve said, oh, I’ll call on Monday. Now you’re like, no, I don’t want them to forget me on Monday. Let me just figure out who these people are today and let me follow up. But the key is that chat bot and the CRM system for this to work.

Gary Takacs: Well, the next question we’ve kind of answered, how fast should a practice respond to a missed call or inquiry? And the answer to that is quickly.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah. 60 seconds, I think, say eternity in 2026. I know people used to say five minutes, but I don’t know. I personally think 60 seconds feels like an eternity. Like, you are

Gary Takacs: So response of some sort, even if it’s automated. So yeah,

Naren Arulrajah: It’s automated. Thank you for calling. We, sorry we missed your call. this is our office hours. How can we help and start that communication going?

Gary Takacs: Well, let’s dive into another piece of, piece, technology that is something all of our listeners should be interested in. Naren, what role does two-way texting play regarding calls that go to voicemail during business hours? It’s a very granular question. what role does two-way texting play?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, this is an excellent question. And I think, there are people like, I know because we work with veterinary practices as well, like in the veterinary SPL space, it’s very popular. A lot of, pet owners communicate with their, you know, pet daycare or, vet, let’s say the vet has the pet over a few hours, some long procedure through text. How is, how is, how is Merlin doing? by the way, Merlin is our pet who passed away. Like, and it’s kind of comfortable and easy and, so I think, but the thing is, you have to be ready for that. Your team has to be trained for that. You have to be looking at these messages. You have to be getting back to people. So I think if you are, and there might be certain practices, in certain maybe urban areas with a lot of young people who love that text communication piece right now, you can’t automate it.

Naren Arulrajah: You can’t just check it once a day at 4:00 PM or 12 noon and hope this is gonna work. This has to become another communication method, just like your phone and answering phone becomes part of who you are and what you do. simultaneously using text to communicate with patients, have to become part of who you are and, what you do. So my advice is either you are all in or you are not. If you are all into texting and you have that capability of communicating with patients, during working hours seamlessly through text and phone, then do it. But if you are not, I think use text selectively for specific situations. Let’s say missed calls. So you have sequences, maybe it’s AI powered or not to at least get them to a certain point. And then the human takes over.

Naren Arulrajah: The human has the leads to call or do whatever they need. And the human also could text, assuming they have the capability. So instead of calling back, they’re like, Hey, we promised to call you on Monday at 9:00 AM Just, I called your office two minutes ago, you don’t answer. So I’m sending you a quick text. So I think that’s the way I would think about this. Gary, I know I’m, I’m, I’m talking about new ideas and new concepts that we don’t use in dentistry today, but the world is changing and the consumers who we cater to are changing. So these might be things you may want to think about.

Gary Takacs: I’ll register, a fan of two-way texting. Yes. ’cause we used it. We’ve used it in my own practice. and, I think today, again, depends on your location, depends on your, patient base. Depends on the, technology quotient of your patient base. Yes. But, in our area, two-way texting’s now expect it. And it’s pretty easy to do with, the right phone system and the right system process. but I’ll register a fan, of that. If we can’t answer it, I wanna answer it. But if we can’t, then two way texting can be, a nice way to acknowledge and have more immediacy in that response.

Naren Arulrajah: I think the key is, the follow through. Just sending one text and then ignoring the next reply means you might as well not have sent the first text in the first place. So it’s

Gary Takacs: Gonna be a threat. It’s gonna be, it has

Naren Arulrajah: To be back and forth Exactly. Immediate back and forth. Yes.

Gary Takacs: It’s going to be, it’s not gonna be a one and done. It’s gonna be back and forth, and you’ve gotta be committed to carrying that all the way through. Absolutely. Is our setup that you can do that now.

Naren Arulrajah: Yes.

Gary Takacs: So, Naren, I’m gonna get very granular here. It’s a, it’s a term I’m using throughout this episode. What are your thoughts about using a real time scheduling link on the website for potential new patients? To schedule a new patient appointment, for example, it will literally be a button on the website that will say, click here to make your appointment. And that would then open up your, it would connect with your practice management system. It would open up, an appointment for a new patient appointment. and it would be, we would forego the call. Someone might just click that to make an appointment. What’s your fan, what’s your position about using that for potential new patients in the

Naren Arulrajah: Practice? This is an excellent question, Gary. I hope you don’t mind me, spilling the beans and sharing some of our secrets. So many of Gary runs a coaching program, the Thriving Dentist Coaching Program. I’m the CEO of Ekwa marketing, and we have many clients, dozens of clients who work with both Gary’s coaching as well as our marketing. And one of the objectives our mutual clients have is to get a certain number of new patients coming in consistently. And one thing we

Gary Takacs: Realized, we actually define it for ’em based on their history, based on their goals, based on their marketing. our, every one of our clients has a new patient goal per month.

Naren Arulrajah: Absolutely. And then we realized just because they’re doing great on SEO doesn’t mean they’re gonna get new patient. They’re totally two separate things. A lot of other things have to go right for them to get the number of new patients they want. For example, how many Google reviews they’re getting, for example, how many calls are getting missed during working hours, for example, what’s their conversion rate? How many of those people trying to book an appointment are actually booking an appointment? How is their follow through? So are they following up with the people who didn’t book? Are they booking? So there’s a lot of pieces, or maybe they don’t have appointments in the book. Maybe the next available appointments is two weeks away, and half the patients who are calling don’t wanna wait. Or maybe your team is not trained how to answer certain questions. There could be a hundred reasons why your new patient goal is not being hit.

Naren Arulrajah: So what Gary’s team and the qua team does is they work together to find out what are the things that are slowing down the number of new patient bookings and fix them one by one by one. It never ends. Just keep improving, keep improving, keep improving. And one of the things we noticed lately is this button book, now button that a lot of clients are putting on their websites and sometimes even in Google Maps. So when you go to Google Maps and I see 1200 reviews, there is a book now button. And for fun, Gary and our team clicked on some of those buttons and we realized it doesn’t work. At least nine out of 10 buttons we clicked on doesn’t work for new patients. Let me explain. It’s

Gary Takacs: Just for, to get nerdy on it for a minute. It’s an api. Yes. So what that it’s a, it’s a plugin that plugs into your pri it plugs into Dentrix, they go soft, open dental, whatever your price management is, and it opens up the calendar. And in theory, it’s supposed to work great, but so many of them, are actually dysfunctional. They don’t work. Yeah. So the patient clicks and then it fails. And if that happens, and it’s a new patient,

Naren Arulrajah: , and I’ll explain

Gary Takacs: Why it, well, so it, for example, it’ll present the first available new, patient appointment. The first one, which is good, that’s how present the first available. But let’s say, it’s two o’clock on a Tuesday and the, and the potential new patient, oh, that doesn’t work for me. And then they can go to the calendar, theoretically go to the calendar and find a new patient appointment that works. And then very often these plugins fail right there. We’ve seen it happen many times. in theory it’s a great idea. you know, instead of calling the restaurant, just, click here to book your appointment, book your reservation. In theory, it’s great, but because the dental schedule’s complicated, it does work. So I’m gonna register. As much as I love the technology, I don’t think we should be using that for new patients,

Naren Arulrajah: For new absolutely. I’ll tell you lots of reasons not to use it. And I agree a hundred percent don’t use it. Number one is the new patient doesn’t know you like you, trust you. And most of these forms are very complicated. It’s like 15 minutes to fill, you wouldn’t do it. And the mistake I think practice owners make is they never try to use it themselves to see if they would fall, go through with this process. They just heard some, Dentrix guy or some person say, oh, you should put my new patient button. And they tell the marketing company to put it, and it blows up in their face. So instead of new patient numbers going up, now all of a sudden many people click on that button, they get frustrated for lots of reasons, technology issues too complicated, too cumbersome, doesn’t help, you know, whatever it is. And then they just bounce. Meaning they’re not calling your office anymore, they’re like sick and tired of your office. So all of a sudden, the new patient numbers used to be, I don’t know, 14 new patients goes to 20. And we are like, what’s going on? It’s this button, it’s this button to book now button that’s killing their new patient.

Gary Takacs: Where I am a fan of it though, Neen is yes for hygiene

Naren Arulrajah: Perfect,

Gary Takacs: for reactivating people that are passed through hygiene. We can send a text message, Hey, Mar, we’ve missed you. I’m reaching out to you to schedule your next hygiene appointment. You can call me back if you like, as you always have, and I’ll find a good appointment for you. Or click this link and make your own hygiene appointment. Now, that’s easy. It’s, it’s a one hour appointment. Pick the one you like, go for it. I think that’s a perfect application for a real-time scheduling link. I just wouldn’t use it in two applications. I wouldn’t use it for new patients, and I wouldn’t use it for restorative. The patient doesn’t know how much time they need for restorative appointment. So they might book an hour when in fact it’s a two hour appointment, in your office. So it doesn’t work, in my opinion, in those applications.

Gary Takacs: It does work for hygiene, Naren, and I we’re in agreement on that, and it’s one of those cases where both of us are nerdy and we wanna push the envelope on technology. But this is a case where the technology sort of fails us, because there isn’t that connection. and there isn’t that, relationship voice, on which is where we need to start with for sure. Naren, this question I is, worth, our listeners, getting to this far in the podcast, episode, how can a practice find out if their after hours and voicemail follow up system is actually working? How can they find out?

Naren Arulrajah: That’s a great question, Gary. I think, I’m a math nerd. I like data. So these are things we would analyze when we start working with a new client. We would literally, like, click on their book now button, as part of our reviews and see if I were a patient, would I go through with this in book? Now we would ask questions like, what’s your missed call percentage? And a lot of clients have no idea. That’s a red sign, red alert that, hey, this could be a problem. It could be really bad or exceptional, but we have no clue. It’s kind of like, you don’t go to your annual physical for 20 years. You could be awesome, healthy, or you might have all kinds of diseases and drop debt tomorrow, right? So we would do that kind of an annual physical, and that’s what we call a marketing strategy meeting to really dig deep. Another number I would be paying attention to use a conversion percentage. In other words, what percentage of new patients who are calling your office, who are trying to book an appointment, actually are successful in booking that appointment? That, again, is a huge, place where a lot of practices, fail. What

Gary Takacs: We do, what we do in our coaching, and we teach our clients to do, run a simple test, run a simple test, have someone, call someone from your team, call, as a new patient during a busy time, or send, an inquiry after hours and then find out what happened. Try to reschedule by text, find out what’s happen. You’re gonna have a test, right? Find out what’s happen. You may think everything is running smooth as silk and it’s not. Then once you run that test track what happens? How fast did the team respond? was it easy to book? did the process feel smooth? did it just drop at some point? Did the ball get dropped? most practices will run that test, find they have gaps, that they didn’t notice before. and this is where you can start to now solve those gaps. So run a test. it’s, it’s really a perfect way to, find out if your system is working. It’s not just, it’s not a matter of what you think is happening, it’s a matter of actually having a test. to find out. Gary,

Naren Arulrajah: A couple of other points. One is, I had a meeting yesterday with one of our largest clients. They do 15 million in revenue, multiple locations, many providers. They are missing 1400 new patient calls a month. 1400 calls a month. We don’t know if it’s new patient. We don’t know if it’s existing patient, because these people did not leave a voicemail. They call nobody answers. They hang up, right? And the funny thing is, we have been talking about this with this client for two and a half months, and the client was pushing back and saying, it’s not real. It’s not real, it’s not real. And why? Because he went and talked to his office manager and he is like, oh, yeah. These are people calling from, other cities, meaning they’re not from our local area. All spam calls and maybe some spam number has our number.

Naren Arulrajah: And they have all these explanations. Of course, it’s anecdotal, there’s no evidence to it. But then I said, okay, let’s, fine, let’s play these calls. you’re gonna play 1400 calls for you. You’re gonna play 10 calls for you. And let’s look at the number. Actually, we can’t play the calls because there’s no recording, but we know the from phone number. All of those are local numbers, local numbers, local numbers, local numbers. And he finally understood the problem he has. And the problem he has is, because none of this data is getting recorded on their, they don’t have a practice, they don’t have a sophisticated 20, 26 point system. It’s the old system. So he has no data. So he assumes everything is great. So another tip I would recommend is have data. And by the way, if you want to book that Marketing Strategy Meeting, it’s ekwa.com/td and Coaching Strategy Meeting. It’s thrivingdentist.com/csm. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

– Wondering how many calls YOUR practice is missing?

The $15M practice in the story above had no idea they were losing 1,400 calls a month until Ekwa pulled the data. Same question applies to your practice – and the answer is almost certainly more than you think.

A free Ekwa Marketing Strategy Meeting will pull your actual call data – answered, missed, after-hours, voicemail, by hour, by day – so you can see exactly where new patients are slipping through the cracks before another month goes by.

Gary Takacs: This episode makes it abundantly clear that any new patient inquiry needs to be handled in a very timely manner, creating a simple step-by-step process to respond to after our, calls, after our contact, after our emails, after our chat bot conversations, creates a protocol that allows you to be successful with that, I would strongly encourage our listeners to schedule a marketing strategy meeting with Ekwa, if you’d like, more information about that to find out how you can button down this process. and again, if you’d like, help on the operational side of your practice, to help you develop your ideal practice of which these details are part of, schedule A coaching strategy, meeting with me, go thrivingdentist.com/csm. that’ll open up my schedule and you’ll schedule, we’ve checked it works.

Gary Takacs: it’ll open up my schedule, you’ll schedule an appointment with me. I’ll do a zoom call with you and, I’ll get to learn more about your practice. And, happy to talk about any details related to areas you’d like to strengthen and improve in your practice. Naren, thank you. This has been a very useful episode. I also wanna thank our listeners, thanks to all of our listeners. we truly appreciate the privilege of your time. I hope you learned a bunch of things. I’ll bring it back full circle, come back and join us, coming up for a thriving dentist, virtual event on, June 30th. go to thrivingdentist.com/events and grab your seat. we look forward to connecting you on the next Thriving Dentist Show.