Webinar Recap: 4 Ways Top-Rated Practices Deliver Great Experiences

Dental offices that offer a great patient experience grow faster and generate 50% more revenue than others. But, what’s a great experience and how can you use the latest software tools to give patients what they want? We analyzed hundreds of patient reviews to get the answer and presented our findings in a recent webinar. Get a high-level overview of the information below.

Practices that Deliver a Great Patient Experience Are More Profitable

• 70% of patients say that a prior experience with a practice matters more than marketing.
• 55% of patients say they rely on reviews when booking.
• It costs 5-25x more to attract a new patient than to keep one.
• There’s a 350x greater chance you’ll sell to an existing patient vs a new patient.
• 84% of practices focusing on experience have more revenue.
• Practices with better experiences have 50% higher financial performance than their peers.

Dentists Don’t Usually Provide a Great Patient Experience

• A high net promotor score (NPS) is associated with greater customer/ patient satisfaction and is one of the greatest predictors of future success for a business.
• Industry leaders in NPS see 2x greater growth than their peers.
• Dentists, on the whole, have an NPS of 1, compared to retail at 46, insurance at 39, and financial services at 36.
  • This is on par with companies like Wal-Mart, which has an NPS of -4, as opposed to a brand like Nordstrom at 80 or Costco at 79.

Interesting Finds from Patient Reviews

• We found that all non-DSO low-star dental practices from our data pull had fewer than ten reviews.
  • Key takeaway: the more reviews your practice has, the better it’s likely to rank.
• Reviewers for top practices almost always mentioned the dentist by name. Reviewers for bottom practices never did.
  • Key takeaway: Patients who feel more connected to their dentist rate them better.
• Around 20% of the low-star practices are now closed. None of the top practices are. We actually found that some of the top practices had notices that they couldn’t accept any new patients – they were full.
  • Key takeaway: Practices that deliver a better experience boom, while practices that lag go bust.

4 Main Takeaways from Analyzing Hundreds of Patient Reviews

We analyzed hundreds of reviews to identify commonalities and differences in the language used with both good and bad dental patient reviews. Our four main findings and how practices can address them are detailed below.

1. Self-Service Options Are Crucial to the Patient Experience

Online Scheduling

• 80% of patients want to schedule online.
• 40% of appointments are scheduled after hours.

ThriveCloud’s Online scheduling links can be added to your website, social media profiles, and review sites, or send them via email and text to allow patients to schedule anytime without having to pick up the phone.

Digital Forms

• In our analysis, 7% of bad reviews mentioned paperwork issues, while good reviews didn’t mention paperwork at all.

Patient Portal

• In our analysis, the word “call” was used 6x more often in bad reviews than in good reviews. Patients hate calling! A portal empowers them to help themselves and eliminate a friction point.

2. Waiting Kills the Patient Experience

Fun Fact: When we filtered the reviews for mentions of “time” and time increments, happy reviewers rarely mentioned “time,” but unhappy reviewers often did. There were also major differences in the increments used. Unhappy reviewers often mentioned minutes, hours, and days, while happy reviewers used years. The reason is obvious. Unhappy reviewers were complaining about waits and how long it took to accomplish something. Happy reviewers boasted about how long they’d been with a practice.

Automation eliminates tedious and redundant processes and gives practices time back, so they can apply the time to engaging directly with patients when it matters most. It also eliminates unnecessary costs.

Automate Scheduling

• It takes an average of 8.1 minutes to schedule an appointment by phone.
• A typical practice pre-appoints 54% of the time. If the remaining 46% book online, the office saves 484 hours and $9,852/yr.

ThriveCloud’s online scheduling tool automatically adds patients to your schedule where they fall into your native automated pre-appointment workflow.

Automate Appointment Cards

• Assuming your practice gives out 9 appointment cards per day, and only spends one minute on each one, you’re losing 39 hours per year, which amounts to $793 in labor. The cost of the physical cards is roughly another $702 per year.

Automate Health Histories

• Assuming a practice spends two minutes entering a health history and sees 30 patients per day, your team is losing 260 hours to manual entry each day.

Automate Reminders and Confirmations

• A practice seeing 30 patients per day loses 260 hours per year calling patients to confirm, plus an additional $2,340 in additional costs related to mailing postcards.

Automate Insurance Verification

• Insurance benefits were a major sticking point for reviewers. As highlighted in earlier reviews, it’s not always an issue when a practice says something isn’t covered, but it is a problem when patients get a surprise bill or the practice doesn’t understand the patient’s coverage.
• On average, it takes ten minutes to verify eligibility and benefits, which means a typical practice will lose 1,300 hours each year if this is done manually.

3. Patients Rely on Your Expertise But Want to Make the Final Call

Our analysis showed that unhappy patients were more likely to use phrases like “told,” “tell,” “sounds,” and “said,” while happy patients used words like “explain,” and “show.” In other words, patients have a better experience when you take the time to teach them what’s happening and show them with visual aids versus simply telling them what they need.

In addition, unhappy reviewers never said they didn’t understand what they needed. Instead, they gave cues that they weren’t given options. This combination – seeing the evidence and being given treatment options – is a major defining point in how a patient perceives the dentist and the overall experience.

Show Patients Their Images

• Patients who rate their dentists well often mention seeing their x-rays or images. (Bonus points to the hygienist who bragged about the dentist’s restorative work and showed the patient!)
• Patients show signs of distrust when they’re not shown x-rays or images.

Show Patients Their Tooth Charts

• A simple tooth chart makes it easy for patients to understand their overall oral health and needs.
• Periodontal charting helps patients understand which areas are showing signs of disease and why you’re making a diagnosis, so they’re more likely to commit to treatment and comply with your recommendations.

Use Patient Education Tools

• Dentists report case acceptance rates jumping from 60% to 90% after adding educational videos to their presentations.

4. Finances Should Be Frictionless

Unhappy reviewers mentioned “money” or “cost” 4 times more than happy reviewers. There’s a difference in why they mention it too. Unhappy reviewers mostly talk about inaccurate estimates and billing or lack of autonomy. Happy reviewers mostly talk about how glad they were that the practice gave them a clear estimate and/or verified insurance and almost always mentioned that they were happy to pay out of pocket because they were uninsured or insurance didn’t cover the procedure.

Make Payments Easy for Patients

• When patients were asked why they didn’t pay on time, 36% said they forgot to pay, 25% said they were waiting for the final bill, and 11% said they were unsure about which payment methods could be used.
• When patients are billed electronically by their preferred method, 50% will pay within an hour of receiving a bill. Up to 32% will pay within five minutes.

Bonus: Reviews Matter

Automate Review Requests and Stay on Top of Your Reputation

• 95% of patients say reviews are important when choosing a provider.
• Each additional star your practice earns on Yelp increases revenue by up to 9%.
• Patients will pay up to 31% more to visit a practice with good reviews.
• On average, people read 10 reviews before deciding to book with a provider.
• Our research shows that practices with a low rating online typically have fewer than ten reviews. Even if they were good reviews, they still wouldn’t be enough to encourage bookings.

Elevate Your Patient Experience with ThriveCloud

ThriveCloud is loaded with features that your patients want and helps you save time, so you can focus more on engaging with them and building relationships. Best of all, there are no additional charges for anything we’ve mentioned here. All this, and more, comes with the software at one affordable price that literally saves dentists thousands each month. Click here for a complimentary one-on-one demo and we’ll give you a tour.