How to Track, Mine, and Leverage Your Dental Patient Call Data

Patient conversations are full of valuable information. That’s why it’s to your advantage to track, analyze, and use your dental patient call data.

The patient experience often starts with a phone call. That realization helps you maximize a new patient’s first connection with your dental practice.

Speaking of the patient “experience”…

”According to a recent Salesforce survey, 80% of today’s consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Additionally, 57% stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience. An optimized customer experience can be the difference between a caller who converts to a new patient and one who seeks treatment from a competitor.”

Those statistics are a good reason to rethink and retool your dental patient call data monitoring.

Call data tracking and its value to your dental practice or dental organization

Phone calls do not have to be a random attempt on behalf of patients seeking your services. In fact, the more intentionality you build into your phone strategies the greater return you could experience in your dental marketing and dental patient experience.

Let’s start with a basic understanding of what call data tracking is.

”Essentially, call tracking is a system that allows you to organize how patients call into your dental practice. By assigning a unique phone number to each marketing channel, call tracking lets you know where your calls are coming from and which dental marketing efforts are more effective.”

Call data is strategically linked to all the ways a potential patient discovers your dental practice and dental services. A robust system provides a few core perspective-based benefits.

• Perspective into what marketing channels/platforms are compelling the most response (e.g., inbound phone calls).
• Perspective that can help you decide to increase or reduce marketing-spend. If a channel, ad, platform is or isn’t generating calls you can make a change (and save costs).
• Perspective on your practice operations, team protocols, and the patient experience. If a first-impression or follow-up “ball” is being dropped you can train for improvement.

Call data to track and use to your advantage

Channel volume

This metric informs you about the marketing channel(s) that are compelling the calls you receive.

Missed calls

This metric gives you insight into your team capacity for calls and whether you need to increase it through outsourcing to an answering service or creating a call center.

Call duration, location, and timing

This metric helps you segment your calls according to conversation length, where they’re calling from, and when they call. Segmentation helps you gauge motivation, target your marketing, and increase your contact availability.

How to track, mine, and leverage your dental patient call data

Track your call data with “intelligent” resources

There’s a range of tools you can use to cast a tight or wide net. Potential patients find you in a variety of ways.

• Online search
• Online ads
• Direct mail promotions
• Ad campaigns (Billboard, TV, radio, print, etc)

The common denominator strategically built into each is a dedicated phone number. When a potential patient phones your practice you can identify their search mode by the number used (and that’s attached to a particular marketing channel).

This “intelligent” step opens the door to more intel gathering opportunities.

• Call recording (pre-qualified with a verbal notification as the call commences).
• Call “scoring.” Established criteria and your data analytics platform can rate the call according to value, duration, location, etc.

Data that’s tracked is data that can prove useful to your marketing and operational strategies.

”Mine” your call data for improvement and innovation

Beyond the “Hi, how can I help you…” is a gold mine of data you can use as the conversation progresses. The earlier mentioned tools/resources give you the baseline information.

• Caller information (name, number, location, etc)
• Marketing data (channel, ad/promo, keyword and web search info, etc)

This information stream opens the gates to deeper call analytics you can use to establish a potential patient’s initial connection with your dental practice.

• Reason/intention for calling
• Services, questions, concerns
• Insurance and cost related information

These might seem like fundamental discoveries. But what you’re after are the between-the-lines bits of data that helps you maximize the phone call.

A trained, intuitive team combined with data mining/analytics tools can extract more than typical info from a patient conversation (and subsequent follow-up communication). Each data “vein” gives you useful insight into how to communicate and market to certain patient demographics.

Leverage call data “value” over “volume”

It’s easy to consider ringing phones as a sign of success. But not every phone call can be tagged as such.

You might receive a high call volume but lack conversions to scheduled appointments. And a phone call that appoints might not increase your production.

• Look for data threads relative to call location, time, marketing channel connection, tone, call duration, etc.
• Allocate marketing resources to those channels that produce notable value for your dental practice
• Analyze call recordings for training purposes. Isolate the principles that produce appointments, new patients, and that ultimately improve the patient experience and patient retention.

Your dental practice phone system has more potential than you might realize. Each conversation is an opportunity to discover valuable data you can use.

Check out the following resources to gain insight into how you can use data to establish and improve patient relationships:

The New Patient Journey: How to Measure and Monitor What Matters

Create Long-term Relationships with Data-Driven Dental Patient Communication

Data analytics requires effective tools

The Jarvis Analytics platform helps assure that you’re tracking the important metrics and staying on-track with your goals as your dental practice and/or DSO grows and expands.

Experience Jarvis in action. Request a demo today!

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Contact us for more information about data tracking that leads to stand out patient care and organizational profitability.