Patients now look for greater convenience while booking dental appointments. Any dental practice restricting patients from scheduling appointments won’t be able to keep up with the tough competition. You need to embrace a dental software program to improve customer experience. Keep reading why online scheduling guarantees an enhanced experience for customers.
1. Flexibility
Your patients remain busy throughout the day, and it might not be possible for them to make dental appointments during conventional office hours. Consumers in every industry expect to use chatbots, present 24*7 to assist them. The healthcare industry is not alien to this expectation from patients.
When your practice offers online dental scheduling, patients will be able to book an appointment whenever they are free. Whether in the middle of the night or while riding a cab, a dental application offers maximum flexibility for booking appointments.
2. No Putting on Hold
If patients are required to book appointments online, they will have to call or, even worse, visit your office physically. Making a physical visit to your clinic during conventional office hours seems like a nightmare. Getting time to make a phone call isn’t easy for patients with a hectic schedule.
Besides, if you provide your patients with fixed hours to book appointments, everyone will be calling at the same time. Some of your patients will be put on hold, and around 42% of the state that it is their biggest nuisance. You should not forget that everyone calling at the same time will put too much pressure on your office staff.
But online scheduling ensures that patients can book appointments from your official website. Some dental applications even allow patients to book appointments through a text message directly from the website using the web-to-text functionality.
3. No Errors
With online scheduling available on your website, there’s no need for human intervention. Imagine the burden on your employees when they have to attend to the phone calls of patients trying to get appointments. Some patients might get angry for being put on hold for so long, while others might be too desperate to get an appointment.
In this situation, you cannot blame your employees if they commit a mistake and give the same appointment time to two patients. Suppose you attend ten patients in a day. But patients desperate to get an appointment might keep calling your office and irritate your employees.
With online scheduling, your employees will not have to tell patients that the slot is full for the day. Instead, the software will show customers that the slot for the day is filled. Therefore, customers can start looking for another slot.
As your staff no longer need to manage customers, they can focus on more important tasks. They will be able to accomplish more tasks during the day without having to work overtime. With happy employees at your clinic, your patients will also enjoy a smooth experience when they come.
4. Patients Can Attach Photos
While trying to book appointments, patients might not be able to express the issues they are facing. A pictorial representation might be better to describe the dental issues they are facing. Online scheduling helps patients upload photos, prescriptions, and other information related to their issues. It will give you background information regarding their oral issues before they come in.
The Bottom Line
If you are not offering online scheduling, you are losing prospective clients who land on your website and go away without finding the feature. Therefore, invest in a dental software program and improve your patients’ experience considerably.
