CRM: A customer relationship management tool, or CRM, is technology that helps you communicate with and manage your practice’s relationships with patients and prospects.
As dentists begin offering high-value procedures like airway or sleep dentistry, they run into the problem of gaining quality airway patients. If they cannot attract airway patients, they risk losing their investment in airway training.
One fantastic way to gain higher quality leads and expedite the patient’s journey is to use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Airway leads typically go through a long process before they commit to treatment, and it takes even longer for the payment to reach your practice. You should do everything you can to speed this up.
Plus, airway leads managed through a CRM tool tend to become avid promoters for your dental practice. If you were a patient, you would want to work with a practice that follows up on time, understood your journey, gave you the support you needed at each step of the process, and always spoke your language. Not a practice with spotty communication that forgets details about your life.
So, to speed up success for your airway practice and gain high-quality patients who become advocates for you, follow these four tips for customer relationship management:
1. Get a CRM Tool and use it to automate your nurturing process.
Without CRM, you and your team need to do everything manually. This ends up being inconsistent at best. In the busyness of running a successful dental practice, some patients get left behind and fall through the cracks.
Instead, get a CRM tool and input your airway leads. Many programs these days are “freemium,” meaning they have a base service that costs nothing to use. You can use this to test out a couple of platforms and decide which works best for you.
The “nurturing process” simply means the journey a prospective patient goes on from being a lead to accepting your case. Many elements of this process can be automated thanks to technology. A good CRM tool uses several automations including welcome and follow-up emails, reminders to call prospective patients on the phone, and even purely relational things like special birthday emails.
2. Follow up on every patient.
Set up a sequence that automatically helps you stay top-of-mind with airway patients while delivering value and information they need to move forward with treatment. Having a CRM tool is the first step of the process to make sure no patient gets left behind. The second step is to have you or someone on your team taking care of the manual tasks within it. This could include scheduling consultations, answering turnkey questions that come in, and leaving voicemails.
3. Standardize your script and verbiage.
Templates make everything easier. CRMs allow you to find messaging that works for desired patients and send it to many at once or at a determined time along their journey. Speak the language of your ideal patient so that your marketing appeals to them. It could be worthwhile to hire a professional copywriter to look over your scripts and tweak the language.
The best part is that you can tweak your templates over time. If you think your messaging can be more effective, you can easily edit it and make your marketing that much more powerful. Ultimately, you don’t want perfection to get in the way of progress. Craft a quality script for your follow-up sequence and get going.
4. Set up a sequence that helps patients move forward.
With dental CRM software, everything is automated and you can still touch base with time-sensitive communications. This is where so many airway leads slip through the cracks. If they’re not guided down the patient path by a trusted source, they’re almost guaranteed to lose their way.
Ideally, you should set a general framework of the airway lead’s journey that each patient follows. Then, you can determine where each patient is on that journey and make a note of it within the CRM tool itself. Through a mixture of automation and manual follow-ups, you can help leads find their way.
Consider partnering with a marketing agency that specializes in CRM.
At Driven Dental, we specialize in customer relationship management. We even use a proprietary CRM tool that automates the process and maximizes quality airway leads.
Our promise? We deliver airway patients, not just airway leads. If you want to find out how you can get a major boost to your airway practice, book a free strategy call with us today. At the very least, you’ll walk away with more knowledge of best practices in this arena. At the best, though? This could be the start of an extremely profitable partnership.