Next-Generation Text Messaging With the Power To Transform Your Medical Practice’s Bottom Line
In recent years, many technological advancements in the medical field have improved and built upon the knowledge and capabilities of doctors and healthcare workers all over the world. The way doctors and medical practitioners take care of their patients is constantly evolving, incorporating new strategies that involve the latest in scientific and technological discoveries.
You may be among those practitioners or business owners who have seen firsthand how these amazing advances have changed your patients’ lives for the better, and I’m sure that has been an incredible privilege for you. What you might consider next is whether or not your communication methods for keeping in touch with existing patients, as well as reaching out to prospective customers, has improved alongside these great advances in medical practice.
Do you feel confident that new patients can easily find you and effortlessly communicate with you to learn about all of the services and health benefits you offer? Is your practice taking advantage of modern messaging channels to make it quicker, easier, and cheaper to interact with new and existing patients on the channels they prefer, like text messaging over landline, Facebook Messenger, and website live chat? Do you think your practice provides easy methods of contact to patients who demand higher than ever levels of convenience and service when doing business?
If you hesitate, it might be because you know that some of your communication modes might be a bit out of date. This might even be the first time you’ve given this some serious thought.
The good news is that advancement in conversational and automation technologies has transformed the way medical practices communicate and disseminate information to their patients. The power of artificial intelligence and machine learning have contributed to intelligent conversational platforms that greet patients, provide information, make appointments, help consumers shop and even pay bills on a 24-hour basis without human intervention.
Medical practices will find unique uses and benefits with this technology. We know this because we’ve learned a lot about human behavior when it comes to engaging and interacting with businesses, including your medical facility. Research shows that 9 out of 10 consumers prefer interacting with businesses via text instead of getting phone calls, and 92% would be open to purchasing products or services directly from text messages. It goes further, because over 90% of consumers are also open to hearing from brands regarding personalized offers, discounts, specials, etc.
People today are given options that take into account the highest level of convenience for consumers, and it has gotten to the point where this level of convenience and bring-everything-to-me attitude resonates throughout every need and market, including medical needs. That means, if you and your business choose to harness the improvements that new conversational technologies have to offer, then you too can broaden your horizons, welcoming new prospective clients every month to engage with your business via modern communications channels like messaging.
So how does messaging for medical practice work?
New school communications channels include website live chat, social media messaging, text messaging for business, and popular messaging apps. Patients can effortlessly contact medical offices by sending quick messages over text, Facebook messenger, live chat, etc. Agents monitoring these channels will receive the incoming messages in realtime and can respond to them from a web portal.
Here you can see an example of a conversation between a prospective patient and a dental office over live chat:
Chatbots trained to handle customers’ needs can respond to incoming messages in real time with no human intervention. Exciting developments in conversational technologies can transform business operations, breaking the limitations of office hours and human availability to eliminate wait time.
Supporting more contact channels broadens access to more patients and increases the number of potential appointments. A well defined communication system integrates with various contact channels to unify messages into one engagement platform. It eliminates the need to frequently login to different sites to manage your business’s social interactions. Do it all from one unified Web Portal!
Among different messaging platforms, good old text messaging is the most popular. Text messaging for business services work via landline telephone numbers! Without activation, the text channels of landline telephone numbers are not active. Which means when someone sends a text, that text gets lost.
Once optimized for texting, however, text messages sent to a medical office landline will be received just like receiving texts on cell phones. The inbound texts are displayed in web portals that can be accessed from anywhere using any internet-connected device. Practices can also send text messages to patients’ cell phones using the same portals.
How can you send and receive text messages on your office phone line?
The first step is to activate the text messaging channel of your practice’s landline telephone number. You must claim and own the texting channel of your main telephone numbers anyway, as the laws around ownership of the text channel of phone numbers are somewhat loosely governed. I recommend every business at least secure the ownership of the texting channel of their own numbers to avoid any misuse by unauthorized parties. It’s your asset, so you should protect it.
No matter who services your telephone number(s), you can still activate and register, under your name, the text messaging channel of your landlines. Optimization of landlines for texting is easy and affordable. It’s a no-brainer for any business to utilize this tool.
When you support new contact channels, such as texting and live chat, you can leverage conversational technologies to help automate business transactions that otherwise have to be performed manually by staff members. With automation, you and your patients will not be limited to business hours. The days of just being able to serve customers during business hours are over. With the help of today’s technology, the days of having to solely rely on human resources to serve customers are also gone.
Artificial intelligence helps automate many of the things we had to rely on humans to do in the past. With the use of new technologies like chatbots that can converse with people much like a human would, you can serve your patients, answer their questions, help them make appointments, pay bills, buy products, and much more around the clock.
Imagine new patients contacting a plastic surgery office after hours who may be interested in learning about facial rejuvenation services. When everyone is gone, they get nothing more than a voicemail. But in a modern office equipped with new school technologies, they are greeted by a trained chatbot who can converse with them, provide rich information with pictures, videos, etc., and help them make appointments with no human help.
This is the way of the future: Taking business operations to the next level and servicing patients for non-PHI-related matters, regardless of the time of day, without making them wait. This is what we call augmenting operations, with a virtual workforce that is always available to take care of business.
Since automation is a big advantage of using messaging, we will point out the advantages of using chatbots through some real-world use cases of text messaging for medical practices throughout this article.
Keep your calendar filled with confirmed appointments
The most obvious use case of text messaging for medical practices is sending text reminders to reduce no-shows. Since people don’t bother to answer their phones and don’t even check voicemails, reminder telephone calls are ineffective.
Text messages, on the other hand, are seen, read, and reacted to within minutes of delivery, making it the most effective method for appointment reminders. This helps keep your calendar filled with confirmed appointments. It’s remarkable that, according to many of our medical clients, responses to reminder messages often start pouring in within seconds after using this method.
It’s not like patients want to miss their appointments. According to studies, half of missed appointments are because people simply forget about them. An efficient tool like text reminders can help dramatically reduce no-shows.
Let’s take Miranda, for example. Miranda has been coming to your practice for several years for regular checkups. In the past, she has forgotten appointments a few times and then received several phone calls during the day while she was at work. She comes home to find voicemails on her answering machine or on her phone, and it adds to the stress of having forgotten her checkups. It’s after hours when she gets home from work, so she must wait until the following day to make a phone call to make an appointment.
When she makes her phone call the next day during her lunch break, she is put on hold, as your staff are hard at work with several patients who are already in the office. When she does get through, she goes through a few minutes of working out an appointment time that is available for both her and your doctors. Eventually, Miranda is able to make the appointment and scrambles for a piece of paper and a pen to write down her appointment time, then puts it on the fridge. Hopefully, this is enough for her to remember to come in.
Well…perhaps this scenario could be improved upon? I think so.
Miranda doesn’t miss her appointment the first time around because she gets a convenient text message letting her know a week in advance that she is due. She responds easily to the text to confirm that she will be there, and she gets two more quick reminders on the days leading up to her appointment. When she is finished with her appointment, she schedules her next appointment at her convenience through text instead of having to call in and talk to someone. The system generates and schedules the best time for her to come in, and she is already scheduled to receive more appointment reminders for when she is next due into the office. Best of all, she can even make her payments online through text if she prefers, or perhaps she will go to your website and chat with one of your friendly chatbots! All of these options offer Miranda a stress-free experience and level of service that goes above and beyond to keep her comfortable and informed, creating a loyal customer for you and your practice.
Chatbots can handle responses to the reminders or recall messages to reduce office staff involvement. With detailed reports, practices can track the appointment reminders within minutes of message delivery.
Let’s talk a bit about the mechanics. The text reminder system pulls appointment data from your practice’s management software on a daily basis and puts together a list of appointment reminders for that day. Sure enough, the system will send personalized reminder messages to each patient relaying the date and time of their appointment, which office to go to, who to see, and can even include links for office directions, patient forms, etc. You can craft the reminder message based on your preferences and customize it however you desire. Patients can confirm their appointments by responding according to instructions provided in the text message. As mentioned before, detailed reports of reminder campaigns will be ready to view shortly after delivery.
Recalls:
To get in touch with patients who are due for checkups and follow ups, the same feature can be used for creating recall campaigns. The mechanics of this is pretty much the same as the text reminder campaigns that we discussed before. What you need is to incorporate a different report that includes a list of patients due for checkups and follow ups to a recall text messaging campaign. The list is then accessed by a recall campaign that sends recall messages out. Once again, trained chatbots can engage in conversations with patients who respond to recall messages and make appointments for them as requested with no human help.
Collections:
Let’s discuss collections! Before you send a list of unsettled accounts to the collection agency (who will take a bite out of the money they collect), you can run your very own text collection campaign and collect from some of these accounts.
The collection text messages, automatically customized for each recipient, include payment links so people can tap to follow and pay using a secure method.
Before we continue any further, it’s very important to note that you have to gather your patients’ consent if you wish to initiate contact via texting. This is a gradual process that can be sped up using different opt-in techniques that we cover in a separate webinar.
Market your new services using texting campaigns:
Let’s say you have invested in fantastic technology or training that enables you to provide a breakthrough treatment to your patients and you want to spread the word and market it to all or a subset of your patient base.
You can create a marketing campaign and craft a powerful message to send to patients, who will then see and interact with it in real time. Once a conversation starts via text, the engagement creates an opportunity to book appointments for the new wonderful service you have to offer.
How about gaging interest from your patients? Isn’t it important to know who is interested in the information provided in your message? Of course it is. Inserting web links inside text messages adds another dimension to SMS campaigns, making it possible to track and identify recipients who click the links to view more information. Each link is specific to a recipient’s telephone number, which allows the source of the click to be accurately tracked.
Again, the power of chatbots makes it possible to automate the whole process, from delivery of the campaign and engaging interested patients in real-time conversations to booking appointments, all with no human intervention.
There is always a challenge when it comes to encouraging happy patients to submit online reviews. We know from experience that people usually take the time to write negative reviews when they feel strongly about something, but they don’t always expend the same energy when it comes to letting the world know what excellent service they received through an online review. But if you provide a super easy way that only takes a few clicks and a few seconds, you will see a surge of positive reviews from this group of patients. The key here is to make the process very simple. You guessed it! Since text messaging has such a higher rate of reading and responding than phone calls or emails, you can be sure to see an uptick in positive reviews by simply sending those text messages to patients who have completed appointments. Using the text messaging campaign feature, a medical practice can send personalized text messages to patients after they receive their treatment, asking them to click a link to submit a positive review. The simplicity of the process will make the magic happen.
You can also use different links for different review sites. You don’t have to be limited to only one review site. You can use links to ask people to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, or elsewhere.
Click-to-text buttons turn anonymous website visitors into actionable leads
When people browse your website, their identities remain unknown to you unless they submit their information in a contact form. Click-to-text is a persuasive little tool for website visitors to quickly contact you via text. Once a visitor clicks the “click to text” button, they are asked to enter their cell phone number and maybe even more information like name and email address.
Predefined automatic messages will be sent to their cell phones in real time, engaging them in conversations that will create opportunities to make appointments.
I have seen success using this tool, where patients browse medical websites after hours and make appointments with the practices without talking to anyone. I recommend placing these buttons on the homepage of your website where it’s easy to see and interact with. Although click-to-text may not have as much of a bold impact on medical practice as other features we have covered so far, it is still a very useful feature that I always recommend my customers take advantage of, especially since there is no additional cost to deploy it.
Facebook Messenger: An important contact channel
Many medical offices promote their practices on Facebook. It’s important to take advantage of Facebook Messenger to communicate with those Facebook users who are interested in your services.
People should not be treated differently if they contact you via Facebook instead of another contact channel. The idea is to merge, integrate, and unify various engagement channels to achieve a consistent customer experience. Your messaging solutions must be integrated with Facebook Messenger to fetch those messages and display them in the same portal as your other communication channels. The idea here is that no matter what channel customers decide to message you from, they will all pop in the same portal, where staff can answer them promptly without having to constantly check different sites and services.
One-way texting service with random IDs is not effective
Old generation texting services using third party applications with random numbers to communicate one-way texts is certainly a thing of the past. It’s best to work with a partner who provides a holistic messaging solution that supports the advanced features discussed in this webinar (like chatbots). You have the opportunity to start small and get your feet wet with new technologies and then, when you’re ready, open the flood gates and take full advantage of the more advanced features to achieve great results over time.
The next generation of messaging for medical practices should be a major part of the overall communication system of any practice. The integration of telephone service and texting, for instance, creates interesting opportunities, such as transforming voicemails into engaging conversations via text or gathering texting opt-in consent via the telephone greeting system, and so on.
Take a patient’s phone call that lands in a staff mailbox, for instance. If the staff member does not check their voicemail for days, the patient inquiry remains unanswered. Integration between a telephone system and texting, however, converts static voicemail messages into real-time, engaging text conversations to avoid inadvertently ignoring patients.
Cloud-based technologies make it super affordable for small businesses and practices to utilize cutting edge tools with a monthly subscription model. I always tell my small business clients that there’s never been a better time to add conversational technologies to their toolset. They have the potential to transform their businesses as a new wave of advanced tech gives us the gift of accessibility and affordability, no matter the size of your IT budget.
Being a small business owner, I love to help my peers, and I have a passion for helping medical practices deploy advanced tools to take their practices to the next level. I want to help you achieve your goals. If you have any questions, or if you need help figuring out how to start, please contact me and let’s talk.
Author: Pejman Rajabian
Chief Technology Adviser
Zebyl Inc.
