When we work with dental practices, only a few have a Treatment Coordinator whose full-time job is to follow up on treatment plans. Most Treatment Coordinators are also front-desk admins who have a lot of other responsibilities. Here are our tips to help those front desk admins follow up with patients to add more appointments to your calendar.
Track Daily and Weekly Outbound Contacts
I ask dentists that we are considering partnering with this question: “How many outbound contacts does your current Treatment Coordinator reach out to daily and weekly?”
Almost always it’s, “I don’t know.”
Or “Maybe 5? or 10 on a good day?”
Peter Drucker, one of the most insightful minds on business management put it perfectly: “What gets measured, improves.”
By giving your Treatment Coordinator a goal, this person knows what to aim for. If that person is very busy, it could be 10 contacts per day or 50 per week. 100 is better. Our team makes 300-400 outbound contacts per week, per client. We even track it hourly, which is about 15-20 per hour, depending on if the patient picks up the phone or not.
Give your TC (Treatment Coordinator) a realistic goal, and track it weekly. Meet with them each Monday and ask him or her if the 100 outbound contacts were made. If they weren’t, then that leads to…
Designate Time On The Calendar Specifically for Follow-up
I’ve been running companies for 14 years and when I ask one of my staff WHY they didn’t do a specific task that they were instructed to do I get several responses like:
“I didn’t have time!”
“I’m already doing XYZ”
And many more.
The perfect response I use is, “That’s fine, let’s make sure this is a high-priority item. What specific day and time can we add this to your calendar so we ensure it gets done?”
If it’s NOT on the calendar, it won’t get done. This is true for me. A lot of my key meetings and To-Do items are baked into my Google calendar so I know between 8:00 am-10:00 am on a Tuesday I am creating helpful content to share with my audience of dentists to help promote Net Profit King.
For a TC, go to their digital calendar and set an appointment (I like using Google) and budget 90 minutes for follow-up on Tuesday from 3:00 pm-4:30 pm and Thursday from 10:00 am-11:30 am. You can choose a 2-hour block, or 1 hour, or whatever works. Just make sure it’s on the calendar.
Then your staff knows with certainty they have that time to get follow-up completed and nothing can stand in their way…except other people and “more important to do items” which leads me to…
Alert Your Team About the Importance of a Treatment Coordinator Making Outbound Calls
Now that the “time is blocked out” the next step is to tell your team not to disturb your TC during that period.
It could be a group message or email.
This way the TC has no reason to say “Something important popped up!”
Also, you can make sure that a TC’s other responsibilities are covered. I.e. You can make sure the phone lines are received by someone else.
Another bonus is to make the TC’s goal of X amount of contacts per week public knowledge. In your weekly meeting, which you hopefully run with KPIs (link to weekly meeting post) you can have that person share Key Performance Indicators.
At Net Profit King, we have each Patient Specialist (aka Remote Treatment Coordinator) report.
Daily:
- Total outbound calls were made yesterday.
- Total production booked (with deposits) from yesterday
Weekly:
- Total outbound calls to Patients
- Total production booked (with deposits)
- Total number of procedures booked
We also these numbers monthly and quarterly. Each of our Patient Specialists knows the target.
Setup an Easy CRM System To Manage Results
Most software like Open Dental, Dentrix, and even Dental Intel aren’t good at tracking results per user. This is why we like to have our Patient Specialists use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool to track their work.
We use Pipedrive because the setup is easy.
