Website Chat

In today’s digital landscape, managed website chat is essential for dental offices to remain competitive. Live chat – powered by a human rather than a chatbot – enhances the overall user experience of visitors to your website – a critical factor when it comes to lead generation and increasing revenue.

Managed web chat now plays a crucial role in converting dental website visitors into paying patients, doubling the number of site visitors who make appointments. It’s also an effective tool in patient retention, providing a channel of fast support that helps to consolidate patient trust and loyalty.

With managed live chat, human agents can have real conversations with potential patients and existing patients. This helps to build relationships, providing a considerably more personalized service than chatbots with generic, automated responses.

However, simply tacking live chat software onto your website and hoping for the best won’t impress your site visitors and may even be counterproductive. Live chat has to be utilized and managed properly to ensure it has a positive effect as a streamlined, inviting part of the patient journey.

Multiple considerations come into play when trying to figure out managed website chat best practices, and we’ll be looking at the most important ones here, with top tips to help you provide a superior online chat service.

Dos and Don’ts of Managed Website Chat

Managed live web chat is a powerful tool when done properly. Here are some things you need to do to get it right.

Send Out an Invitation

Your office wouldn’t ignore a patient who’s just walked through the door, so don’t ignore someone who enters your website. Dynamic chat invites should be used to say hi and ask how you can help.

Gather Pre-Chat Data

A short, simple pre-chat questionnaire with chat options to click on helps to ensure a faster, more relevant service for the patient. Acquiring preliminary details gives you key data in order to offer a personalized service right from the start.

Route Chats to the Right Person

Patients expect immediate expertise with managed web chat. Live chat software with automatic skill-based routing will direct patients to the agents best equipped to respond to their needs.

Introduce Yourself

The personal touch is a key advantage of live chat, so emphasize the human interaction by making sure your chat agents introduce themselves by name. This immediately indicates to patients that they’re dealing with a real person, not a talking robot.

Maintain Contact

While an agent is writing a response, the patient doesn’t want to be left wondering whether the agent is still there. A simple typing indicator message – “Daniel is typing”, for instance – tells the patient they’re getting a response in real time.

Use Emojis

Instant messaging can be prone to miscommunication issues, and emojis have been designed to provide social cues for better understanding. People understand emojis, and, besides adding clarity, they also show the human, friendly side of your chat agent.

Use Automated Responses

Pre-set responses to some questions will ensure both speed and accuracy when dealing with queries. Automated replies to commonly used phrases or questions not only shorten response time of busy agents but also avoid the frustration of continual retyping.

Facilitate File Transfer

The ability to send and receive documents in real time inside the live chat window enables a streamlined patient experience. File transfer software avoids the need to launch a separate email program to share documents.

Integrate with Your CRM

Valuable exchanges with patients happen during managed website chat. So, integrate your chat software with your customer relationship management (CRM) system to store that data where it belongs.

Conduct a Post-Chat Survey

Evaluating patient satisfaction after their live chat will help you to continually improve your online support.

What to Avoid with Managed Web Chat

Now we’ve looked at what you should be doing to achieve managed website chat best practices, here are a few things to avoid.

  • Don’t be intrusive. Making chat buttons huge or having them hover around all over the place can be annoying for patients who don’t need your live chat service.
  • Don’t be sloppy with grammar and spelling. It’s important to keep live chat as sociable as possible, but don’t be amateurish. Typos and bad grammar will reflect badly on your professionalism.
  • Don’t make patients repeat themselves. Patients returning to chat don’t want to reintroduce and repeat themselves over and over. Check their chat history to make sure you have their details to hand.
  • Don’t capitalize phrases. No one likes being yelled at. Using caps in live chat is the equivalent of SHOUTING AT YOUR PATIENTS.

Live Web Chat vs. Chatbots

Following live website chat best practices will enable your office to optimize the advantages managed web chat holds over chatbots.

So, why is managed chat better for your practice than chatbots?

Live chat and chatbots can in some cases work together to provide quality patient support. But while chatbots offer automated responses to queries, agent-operated live chat provides human-to-human communication and incorporates empathy to support conversations.

Here are some stats that underpin the importance of managed website chat:

  • 73 per cent of consumers are satisfied after using live chat.
  • 42 per cent prefer live chat over other communication channels.
  • 77 per cent of online consumers want contact with a real person before parting with their money.
  • 41 per cent are more likely to trust a brand when live chat is available.

Finding the Right Dental Live Chat Service

The easiest way to ensure online chat best practices is to have managed live chat provided by specialists in dental productivity and marketing.

DentalROI offers user-friendly live chat systems for practices looking to maximize return on investment. We’re well placed to do this because we understand what dentists need and what patients expect.

Our managed web chat service is delivered in partnership with ApexChat, with agents who specialize in dental chat services. And your live chat will ensure compliance with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations.

Contact DentalROI if you need to know more about managed website chat best practices.