New Patient Experience

In the business world, many companies struggle to find ways to build relationships with customers, or prospective customers. Relationship marketing, as this is known, can yield substantial profit over the long term. Such connections will form naturally between dental practices and their patients, but making the dentist patient relationship strong and productive requires a conscious effort and a certain amount of skill on the part of you and your team.

The very last step in the New Patient Experience is, in a way, the most important. Let’s suppose that your front desk coordinator has handled the initial new patient call skillfully… your entire team has helped introduce the new patient to the practice in a warm and trust-building way… and you have excelled chairside. Even so, the new patient could turn out to be no patient at all if you don’t schedule the for their dental follow up.

In the course of a practice-patient relationship, the first dental appointment is a momentous event. Handled well by you and your staff, it will affirm the patients’ decision to make an appointment at your practice and it will create an excellent, lasting impression.

The New Patient Experience—with its relationship-building first phone call and warm welcome to the office—has a strong customer service focus. But the main event occurs in the treatment area when you examine new patients for the first time. What you do at the dental exam stage can have a tremendous impact on your patients’ oral health as well as on practice production for years to come.

Of all the non-clinical activities in your office, taking the first phone call from a prospective patient may very well be the most critical. Your dental front desk coordinator—or anyone else who may be covering the phones—must be ready to shift immediately into a carefully scripted conversation with several important objectives.