Chatbots are changing the dental practice for the better! But let me reassure you from the outset, this article is not about dentists hanging up their plaque removers and chatbots carrying our complex molar extractions!
The chatbot market is one of the fastest-growing sectors in commerce today, with predications that it will quadruple to over $10 billion/year by 2024!
Dental chatbots figure in those predictions. Why? Because people like to chat!
The Rise of Chat
As of 2019, if you’re under 35 your primary channel of communication will be chat. By 2024, everyone’s primary channel will be chat.
Let’s consider the patient experience for a moment. A phone call to make an appointment (and the difficulty of finding an actual telephone number on ,any dental websites!); a note in your diary; a reminder through the post. There’s something wrong with this picture – it’s not how people live any more.
Today, people are much more likely to engage with dental services from the comfort of their easy chair, through their cellphone while halfway through the latest Netflix drama, and they do this through chat!
Here are five benefits that any dental practice will gain through implementing a chatbot.
1. Dental Practice Open 24/7
If there’s one service you want open 24/7, it’s your local dental practice, right? After all, toothache, cracked crowns and other dental mishaps happen round the clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year – and throughout our waking hours, not just 9am till 5pm Monday to Friday when surgeries happen to be open! We’ve probably all experienced the heartache of missing closing times by ten minutes, the uncertainty of what the next day will bring and the inevitable wait and hold on the phone as you desperately try to get through at 8.59am.
If you want your dental practice to do great customer service and turn enquirers into new patients 24/7, then a chatbot is a must.
And it makes total sense that, if chat is now our primary channel, people would want to be able to chat to their dental practice 24/7. It’s fair to say that there have been some great solutions available for dentists for the last few years, but unrealistic software costs and investments have really only made them the preserve of the few.
At Gabba we’ve worked hard to build a solution that works around a monthly subscription and can literally cover the return on investment in several weeks.
2. Educate & Inform
The death of email is often predicted – but in fact email is growing, if only ever so slightly. There’s no doubt that that, as a communication tool, email has been hard to its older cousin, the traditional mail-out. Why send a catalogue, brochure or price list through the post when we can now do this electronically? And that’s before we even get to video!
Chatbots are now changing the game again. A chatbot can do everything email does, from delivering pdfs through showing videos and delivering forms to sign. If you take these capabilities and add them to a dental chatbot you’re essentially able to help, guide and reassure patients through every procedure, option and alternative and what to expect. One of the biggest challenges dental practices have is the limited time they get to introduce patients to their services. In the chair is never the best place to run through the latest bridges and implants. Nor is handing out a leaflet on reception of sending through the post. Chat provides the perfect intuitive platform for these services and it lets patients consider these services in their favorite place – on their phone!
3. Streamline Appointments
What’s the longest you’d wait for an appointment? Dentistry has a unique place in the pantheon of appointment waiting. I think we can pretty much put it at the top table when we say – if you need a dentist, you’ll wait!
But what if we could flip this on its head? What is we could offer appointments through chat 24/7? A natural feature for dental practices is to seek the automation of appointments, and chatbots allow this.
They can seamlessly integrate into your current systems through an API. No holding, or waiting, and no dreaded phone tree to navigate through. On their phone, 24/7, patients are able to find out when the next appointment is. And this is how it should be!
If dental practices want to build their businesses around patients, then this would surely be the number one priority.
4. FAQs
Why should I go to the dentist regularly?
Why should I floss? Isn’t brushing enough?
How can I get my kids to brush their teeth?
Do dentists get tired of giving the same answer? Do they get tired of hearing the same question? Do patients get tired of having to wait for an opportunity to ask these questions because they can’t find the answer they’re looking for?
So here’s the thing about chatbots. They can answer patients’ FAQs and they can even start to learn and grow their own knowledge and vocabulary! People don’t want to wait for answers to things that are important to them, such as their kids’ dental health.
According to Forrester Research, 63% of customers will leave a company after just one poor experience, and almost two-thirds will no longer wait more than two minutes for assistance. This applies to dental patients too.
For a chatbot, answering FAQs is bread-and-butter work, done effortlessly and with panache.
5. Patient Experience
The dental industry continues to innovate and respond to patients’ expectations. In just one generation, practices have continued to innovate and respond in line with the latest marketing, fashions and technologies. The introduction of chatbots as an additional member of staff – one who never gets sick, and is happy to work 24/7 – fits in nicely with this evolution.
We started this article by outlining the predictions for growth in the chatbot market. It’s a very fair assumption to make that dental practices will contribute to this, but what’s unclear is just which innovations dentists and their patients will demand from our robot friends going forward.
But change is guaranteed – and it’s an exciting time to be working in and be part of this sector.
