Having a fragmented patient acquisition system can cause potential leads and patients to fall through the cracks, something all dental practices want to avoid.
Creating a more streamlined and concise way for patients to start that first conversation is crucial and can lead to more patients coming through the door, according to Rob Odell, owner of wpDuo.
Mr. Odell, recently joined the Becker’s Dental + DSO Review podcast to discuss the trends he is seeing in the dental patient acquisition space.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are some of the biggest issues in the dental space that you’re following so far this year?
Rob Odell: One thing I’m still noticing with practices is fragmented patient acquisition systems. Some leads get emailed in, some people call on a phone, and then they get managed in a different way. I think there’s still a lot of opportunity to create a more concise way for people to reach out to your practice and really just start the first conversation. That’s kind of being ignored. It’s almost an accepted fact that some leads come from emails, some from phone calls and others from social media and there’s just not a central way to collect all that, which creates a lot of chaos for the practices.
Q: What impact does that fragmentation have on practice’s patient acquisition?
RO: Leads fall through the cracks really easily or they don’t get followed up on right away. If you’re thinking about urgent issues or things where a patient needs to be seen, but you’re not monitoring that, or you don’t have a system to give you an alert for that then you drop the ball and you lose that lead. I think for a practice to standardize, at least for as much as is possible, to say, no matter where leads come from, we have this one system where they all come through.
