Are Your Phone Procedures Killing Your Practice?

You only get one chance to make a first impression.  I know it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche because it’s true.

How well you and your staff answer the phone is one of the keys to your marketing and practice management success.

Now you may be asking what do phone skills have to do with marketing?  It has everything to do with marketing.  You are thinking about advertising.  Advertising is one subset of marketing.  Marketing is everything you do to make your business stand out and everything you do to exceed patient expectations and add value to their life.  I think advertising is largely a waste of time for most chiropractic clinics.  I subscribe to this thinking for my practice.

Nobody likes to pay taxes.  Nobody.

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So let’s teach you to be remarkable on the phone with two easy tactics.

The Tone and the Open

First of all, you must have a warm, personable tone when you answer the phone.  I teach staff to make sure they are smiling when they answer the phone because smiling will make your voice sound a lot better.  Don’t be this person.

We say the same thing each time we answer the phone:  “It’s a great day at AFC this is Chris, how may I help you with an appointment?”

Doesn’t that make you smile?  It sets a tone of positivity and the purpose of the call, to get an appointment.

So you need to smile and set the tone with an easy script.  See marketing is super easy!

The Two Options Scheduling Technique

A patient calls to schedule an appointment for Tuesday.  Once you determine what kind of patient appointment they need (new, readmit, active) you proceed to offer them morning or afternoon.  Or since our office is open from 11:30 to 6 pm on Tuesdays we say, “We are open from 11:30 to 6 tomorrow, would you like early or late in our day?”  They say late.  You offer them TWO TIMES.  The patient will either choose one of those two times or won’t.  They may state that they would like 4:20.  If 4:20 is open and in a cluster (more to come on this in a later post) then you schedule them for that time.  If not you offer two more times that are close to the time they requested BUT also fit your clustered schedule.

These simple techniques will help you run a more efficient office and make the in-office experience better for the patient.


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