The Best Phone System for Dental Practices

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We work in a range of sector but we hold quite a few clients in the healthcare industry, particularly dental surgeries.

As such, we have become familiar with the dental business model and UDA’s. We know that you need to be as efficient as possible to maximise your Dentist’s time and available appointment slots.

We have found that something as simple as a phone system can make a dental practice run so efficiently that our clients have been able to effectively fulfil their UDA.

It’s not just about any phone system, it’s about the right phone system. In most cases, we recommend an hosted (VoIP) phone system called Horizon.

About Horizon Phone System

We have found that Horizon which is a Hosted Phone System offers you all the features you need to maximise efficiency with minimal capital costs. It also has the flexibility for growth which is ideal for dental practices.

Horizon has the following features which really benefit dental practices;

  1. Hold – you may not want to subject your caller to background noise, so you can pop them on hold.
  2. Hold Music – you can choose what hold music you have. Perhaps a jingle that reflects your business image? Some even upload their own promotional messages.
  3. Voicemail-to-Email – a recording of the voicemail is sent to your email which means you don’t have to listen to the voicemail attendant.
  4. Call Monitoring and Reporting – essential to know if you need extra resource either by employing someone or outsourcing to a call monitoring service.
  5. Door Entry – you can connect your phone system to your entrance system so you can talk to someone at the door and/or permit them entrance.
  6. Instant Messaging and File Sharing – ideal for dentists to send messages to reception about follow up appointments or send across x-rays.
  7. Page – you can page multiple phones with the same message which is ideal when you need to chase for lab work.
  8. Monitoring Barge – you can have someone listen in to a call, with or without the caller knowing. Ideal, if a colleague is new and still learning.
  9. Ring Hunt Groups – simply put, if you were to dial the main line for the practice, it would ring on multiple phones either all at once or on one phone first, then another, and another until it is answered.
  10. Do not Disturb –a great feature for those on reception because when you deal with a lot of incoming calls you sometimes need to stop calls coming through so you can type up your notes or refer to a colleague.
  11. Call Recording – you can record all calls and listen back to them for quality control purposes or to verify what was said.
  12. Call Queues – rather than customers going to voicemail, or hearing a busy tone, you can arrange call queues so they can wait in a queue until someone comes available. You can also set rules on this, e.g. you can set it so they only wait for 1 minute before being offered to leave a voicemail.

So, how can a Horizon phone system help me fulfil our UDA?

We have a client who is a dental practice based in Wolverhampton. Their main issue (apart from extremely poor service from a previous provider) was that they had 2 handsets in place which meant the reception staff would need to physically walk to the surgeries to hand the phone over. The practice is over three floors. They would then have to wait until the call was finished and then return back to reception to start receiving incoming calls.

Likewise, at the end of the day, they would also need to physically go to each dental room to see if there were any lab work that needed to be sent off, that day. Each time, this would leave the reception down on resource and most likely; losing calls as a result.

The client had 2 Analogue lines which meant they could only have 2 concurrent calls at any one time. This means that if someone was on one of the phones, it would divert to the other but if both lines were busy, the call would be lost. There was no facility to capture the call.

Horizon is a brilliant alternative to having a whole new system fitted. It has a low monthly cost and it makes a big impact to a business.

Learn more about Horizon

Great, but how has this helped them?

The key benefits to the client have been:

  • The team no longer have to physically run to the surgeries to check for lab results with the paging and transfer feature.
  • They can now summon the whole team in an emergency situation at a push of one button.
  • The Horizon Phone System has a basic call reporting suite built-in. During the first full week of the install, the client received 755 calls. Due to the configuration, we have put in place; the client has not missed any phone calls. We can confidently state that the original the 2 analogue lines that were used for inbound and outbound calls would not have been able to handle that volume.
  • Additionally, with the call reporting feature in place, they have identified a business case to open on a Saturday due to the number of enquiries coming in.

This means they can now handle more patients.

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FREE Phone System Demo

Once you decide to choose a phone system, the best next step is to demo different types of phone systems to see which one will suit your Dental Practice.

We can offer a demo of the Horizon phone system but we also have two other hosted phone systems, Wildix and Mitel which may be of interest. We can carry out a demo this via screen sharing technology or we can come to your practice.

Get in touch to book in a demo slot.

Book a FREE Demo
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