The Dental MeTaMorphosis - The Profitable Dentist

Your New, Low Cost employee ...
sMiLe reMiNDer TM !
By Craig Callen
Last year I signed up for Smile Reminder TM after hearing
a couple of colleagues say some good things about it. It has
become one of the best investments in my practice from a
marketing and management standpoint that I have made. For
those of you who haven’t yet heard of it, Smile Reminder TM is
an Internet-based program that integrates with your existing
practice management software to help boost your practice. How
does it do this you ask? After a short live phone training program
and set up you are ready to take advantage of all that Smile
Reminder TM has to offer including:
1.) It automatically confirms patients’ appointments by e-mail
and/or text messaging. When and how is determined by you.
The messages are all customizable. When the patient sends
back the confirmation you are notified by e-mail. In our
practice with three hygiene schedules to confirm five days
a week, this is a huge time savings for our front desk staff.
They know for a fact that the patient got the message, not
just hope that they listened to an answering machine. That
extra time can be spent taking better care of the patient in
the practice.
2.) The program will send e-mails and /or text messages to
your patients on their birthday. This has been a nice PR tool.
Some patients have told me that this was the ONLY birthday
greeting they got.
3.) After a patient’s appointment they will get a post treatment
survey. They can respond either by name or anonymously.
There are standard questions, or you can design your own.
This has been huge for our practice. Not only have we
learned what we are doing right, we have learned what
we are doing WRONG. We have been able to head off
misunderstandings, or just plain screw ups on our part and
make it right with the patient to salvage our relationship. The
program keeps track of all of the responses and maintains a
running percentage for you to track. I will regularly print out
a survey, highlight the good or bad comments and post it in
the staff lounge for all to see and learn from.
4.) Custom surveys can be designed and sent out at any time. If
you are considering adding Saturday hours, you can survey
your patients to see how many would avail themselves of the
new hours.
5.) As many times as you would like you can send your patients
an e-mail newsletter. You can write your own stories and
import any images you would like to include. I try to
send one every month and sometimes two for a special
PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
event or news. Not only can you keep your patient base
informed and educated about your services, but you can also
communicate important changes affecting your patient’s
health. For instance, when the American Heart Association
changed the recommendations for pre-medication, I was
able to communicate this to my practice almost immediately.
Generally I will try to educate/motivate them towards
treatment, focusing on one main thing per newsletter such
as bleaching or facings. I will often then tie in some sort
of offer such as $100 off take home bleaching. Patients
are encouraged to refer their friends and family through
the newsletter. Personal information about someone in the
practice or one of the doctors is included occasionally to help
the patients get to know us a little better.
6.) Custom Marketing Messages can also be sent as often as
you would like. These postcard like messages are meant
to announce a new product, technique, or to get a new
promotion out to your patient base. The average cost of a
postcard mailing to your patients is about $.50 per mailing.
With Smile Reminder TM you are basically getting this for free!
7.) Send notices to patients of last minute openings in the
schedule. Just had a bridge appointment cancel? You can
broadcast a message to those patients willing to come in on
short notice that you have an immediate opening.
8.) Recall reactivation is streamlined with automatic messages
set up by you. These reminders encourage patients to call and
return for treatment.
One of the challenges we had was to collect the e-mail addresses
of as many of our patients as possible. While our new patients already
registered their e-mail addresses, the more established patients had
not all registered their e-mails. After begging and threatening, I
decided to set up a reward system to encourage the staff to ask
for and enter the addresses into our system. What I did was to put
$1 in the pot for every new address entered over a three month
period. We collected enough new e-mail addresses to take the whole
staff out for dinner at a nice local restaurant.
The system continues to grow and evolve with us and new
features are being added all the time. Smile Reminder TM will
save valuable staff time, reduce no-shows, encourage referrals
and increase patient loyalty to your practice. This is a NO BRAINER
decision at a one time set up cost of $399 and a flat monthly rate
of $249. You will save this much just in saved postage the first
couple of months. The more you use the system, the more you
SAVE and the more your practice will GROW! You can contact
Smile Reminder TM at 866-605-6867 or www.smilerminder.com.
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