End Front Desk Headaches: Reengineer Your Patient Experience

Key Takeaways

• High-performing front desk teams can lead to higher patient satisfaction, and increase production, collections, and cohesiveness amongst team members.
• Video-based content can help practices eliminate repetitive front-desk communication and ensure patients receive the right messaging.
• Efficient front desk teams can spend more time on activities that free up their surgeons’ time.

The past two years have shown more turnover than any other in the Oral Surgery industry, with practices across the country struggling to hire and retain top talent to staff their front desk teams. Roughly 40% of practices in the dental industry report having open positions and 90% report that it is extremely difficult to find workers to fill them.

As the first touch point with the practice, the front desk team plays a critical role in setting the tone for the entire patient experience. Poor initial interactions with front desk staff can lead to:

• Fewer new patient consults
• Negative reviews on your social media pages
• Poor reputation in your market

In addition, the process of searching, hiring, and retraining can be extensive, sucking even more time out of your already busy schedule.

What if you could engineer your front desk team to be a high-performing team in the midst of the biggest staffing shortage?

Impact of Front Desk Interactions

Let’s face it: the front desk team is one of the busiest in the practice. From fielding phone calls with questions from patients, scheduling, checking patients in, organizing registration, collecting insurance details, and everything in between, it can be difficult for teams to give any one task their undivided attention and do it well.

The most common patient complaints about Oral Surgery care are often generated by poorly organized and trained front desk teams, including:

• Rude interactions
• Poor communication
• Not feeling heard/listened to
• Lack of information
• Long wait times

Patients want to know that they have the full attention of the team members they are interacting with and to feel reassured that they are making the right selection. In a time when staffing shortages are high, surgeons need to find new ways to create the right experience for their patients.

3 Steps to Streamline Your Front Desk

Transform your front desk from erratic and unorganized into a polished, professional, and high-performing team. Surgeons who activate their teams and streamline their front desk are seeing:

• Higher overall patient satisfaction
• Increased production and collections
• Increased cohesiveness among team members

Follow these three steps to engineer your front desk experience in a way that takes work out of your front desk team’s hands.

Eliminate Repetitive Communication

How many times does your team answer the same question over and over again each week? The amount of time that your team spends answering patient questions is significant. And when you constantly have new team members, ensuring your patients are getting the right answers becomes more difficult.

What if you could encapsulate all of the information your patient needs into a single system that ensures they get the right message every time? Investing in video-based educational content allows you to control the message your patients receive and provide all of the right information to them, in the right way, every time. And the best news—video never has a bad day!

When you create an experience for patients that encapsulates all of the information that they need in one place, you can free up your team to focus on patient interactions in the office and create a 5-star experience in your practice.

Level Up! Rather than using a library of content with a generic provider, create your own custom videos. Hearing from the provider that the patient will be seeing will increase their trust in them, make patients feel like they spent more time with their provider, and condition patients to feel confident meeting and accepting treatment.

Lower Training Barriers

Imagine training your team to be similar to making copies on a copy machine. The first time that you make a copy, it’s not a perfect replica, but it is close to the original. Now imagine you made 20 more copies of that copy. The quality of that copy decreases significantly.

The same thing goes for your team. Every time that a team member trains someone new, key pieces of information and the perception of that information can change. Especially when studies show that employees will forget 90% of the information learned during training within one month! This can lead to inconsistencies in how your team communicates with patients, and the way that they execute your practice’s processes, ultimately creating a poorer experience.

Just like your patients, investing in video-based training and education for your team can significantly increase team competency. It also helps you ensure that team members get trained exactly the same way, every time AND frees up other team members’ time who would have been training. This is exceptionally important when you already have an overloaded, understaffed front desk team.

The Numbers. The amount of manpower that goes into replacing an employee is estimated to be about 15-20% of that employee’s salary. A large multi-location, multi-doctor practice in West Virginia estimated that they saved an estimated $1,320,000 savings in a single year leveraging video-based training. In larger markets where the average base salary is even higher, these savings become even more significant.

Establish, Track, & Incentivize

Practices that incentivize their teams to be top performers are less likely to deal with turnover, providing even greater time savings for the surgeons. Teams united by goals that improve teamwork, create efficiency, and improve outcomes are the most likely to help you get time back in your day.

WUWTA’s team leaderboard and patient dashboard provide practices with real-time data on team performance over a 90-day period. Receive important patient engagement benchmarks, incentivize your team to hit them, and enjoy the new efficiency it creates in your schedule.

Freeing up the team’s time allows practices to ensure they’re focused on things that save the surgeons time, such as:

• Phone scripting
• Proper scheduling protocols
• Appointment confirmations
• Patient appointment flow
• Transcribing dictations

This also minimizes the level of training required for new team members to get up to speed and begin performing their jobs at the highest level for you.

I’m ready to streamline my front desk!

If you’re ready to eliminate repetitive communication and engineer your patient experience to create a more efficient front desk team, WUWTA is the only platform on the market that supports practices in achieving these goals. Surgeons using WUWTA are reporting that it delivers:

• Time back in your day
• Front desk communication efficiency
• Superior patient education & experience
• Shorter consult times & elevated case acceptance
• Instruction compliance
• Superior treatment outcomes
• Increased 5-star reviews
• More referrals

The best news: you can begin enjoying these results in your practice immediately with our 24-hour implementation.

Request a 30-minute presentation to experience the power of WUWTA.