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Dentists are among our healthcare professionals with the busiest schedules. That is why many dental offices hire a professional dental answering service to help their practice.

A dental clinic’s schedule can get hectic real quick, real fast. Dental professionals – along with the dental and hygiene assistants work long hours tending to people’s teeth, treating all types of toothaches and gum issues, and taking care of patients’ general oral health.

A Real Issue

It’s no wonder one of the serious issues dental practices face is stretching themselves thin. They’re already treating our oral health, so they are most likely getting maxed up with the administrative duties required to operate a dental practice.

From setting up, rescheduling, or canceling appointments, communicating with health insurance companies, and answering inquiries from potential and existing patients – a professional dental answering service can help with those.

What Is a Dental Answering Service?

A dental answering service can help your practice have an organized scheduling system.

A dental answering service is a specialized type of service you employ to answer your practice’s incoming calls.

There are many different answering service packages you can avail of. Typically, it can be the following:

  • Take incoming calls
  • Screen incoming calls
  • Share general information about your practice, such as operating hours, location, etc.
  • Schedule dental appointments
  • Reschedule appointments
  • Call patients and remind them about their dental appointments
  • Answer out-of-hour calls

There is also a type of dental answering service that is automated. As the name implies, when a potential or current client calls your clinic, they will hear an automated message that will offer them a series of prompts.

For instance, they’ll have to press 1 for your business address, press two if they want to leave a message, press three if they wish to speak with someone, and so on. You can set these prompts yourself to fit the needs of your practice.

However, many people shy away from leaving a message – especially if they are calling a health provider. You may be losing potential clients if you don’t have a real person answering incoming calls to your dental clinic.

Your best bet is to hire a professional dental answering service. When you offer this feature, you are giving potential and existing clients to speak with a real person, which they will greatly appreciate.

While automation and technology are undoubtedly beneficial, they have their place. Still, nothing can compare to sincerity and genuineness, especially when it comes to the healthcare field.

If you would like to know more about our professional answering service for dental clinics, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Benefits of Hiring a Dental Answering Service

Let’s look at the main benefits of hiring an answering service for your dental office.

Better Customer Service

You need to get patients through the door to help your dental practice thrive. If a potential patient calls our clinic and can’t speak to anyone, there’s very little chance that they’ll go to your clinic.

When you have someone always available to answer your calls, especially when everyone in the clinic is busy attending to patients, your callers will appreciate it. This is more important, especially during extremely hectic parts of your day.

Rather than breaking away from your dental health procedures to answer a call, you can have an answering service to take care of that. This way, you and your dental staff can focus on providing the treatment your patients need.

Stress-Free Dental Appointment Scheduling

A dental answering service can take care of after-hour calls.

You want those dental appointments set. However, it can get frustrating when you’re trying to reach a patient, or them trying to contact you, and you can’t seem to catch each other because of your busy schedules. You can have an answering service handle all the scheduling, which will save you time and money.

Most dental offices have an online scheduling system. However, many patients still prefer to speak to someone at the clinic to schedule their appointments for them. There are answering service providers that let you integrate your online scheduling feature with their service.

You can also have your answering service call or send out appointment reminders to your patients so you can avoid no-shows or missed appointments.

After-Hours Care

You want to provide the best care and treatment to your patients. However, taking all “emergency” calls, especially if they turn out to be not an emergency at all, can get upsetting. Still, you want to be available to all your potential and current patients.

Save yourself the aggravation by assigning an answering service to screen after-hours phone calls. Answering service operators are trained to distinguish a real emergency call. If it is truly an emergency, they can immediately forward it to you.