OrthoChats: Connecting Orthodontists to Patients

OrthoChats is an online chat designed specifically for orthodontic practices. We talked to Scott Hansen, CEO and founder of OrthoChats, to learn more about their service and why orthodontists should have this feature on their website.

What Are the Benefits of Having Online Chat and Outsourcing It?

An ever-increasing number of patients (30%+) say they prefer live chat and messaging over phone and email because it provides instant gratification through immediate customer service and offers a personal, empathetic and friendly human interaction, versus filling out a form or an email that may or may not be read and responded to quickly. Live chat helps you to engage with new patients when they want to engage, both during and outside of normal practice hours.

Outsourcing chat frees up your team to interact with patients in the office. This reduces stress for everyone involved and enhances the patient experience. It also lets you interact with patients 24/7 so patients no longer have to wait for office hours or leave a message when your staff is at lunch or when the office is closed.

Outsourcing also ensures a consistent quality of service, and you are able to see reports and records of chat conversations. This keeps everyone accountable and providing the best experience for your potential patient.

Unfortunately, most chat services outsource their agents overseas. When that happens, not only does the quality suffer, but requests for changes and improvements are difficult to apply and sometimes get ignored. In contrast, our clients know our OrthoChats specialists by name. We are the people answering patient questions and representing your practice.

What Prompted You to Found OrthoChats?

Like most successful startups, it was prompted by a big problem. At Hansen Orthodontics, where I was the practice director, we were only converting about 5% of our website visitors into new patients. The fact is, those visitors weren’t visiting our site because they were bored, they were interested in straight teeth.

I knew I needed to give them a simple, risk-free way to way to ask questions and to schedule an appointment. So, we added online chat software to our site, staffed by our own in-house team of chat agents. It was an eye-opening experience.

We learned that online chat was a very effective way to capture leads. Not only that, it clearly enhanced our patient experience which gave us a distinct advantage over other orthodontic practices. However, it took up a lot of our staff’s time.

After exploring outsource chats for Hansen Orthodontics, I realized our only options were cookie-cutter solutions using agents mostly from overseas. Quality was too important to me, so I called up a group of leading orthodontists and floated the idea of in-house chat exclusively for them. Naturally, other doctors liked it, and I took the opportunity to provide our service to other orthodontic practices.

The result…OrthoChats.

What Is Your Process When Someone Initiates a Chat?

1. Engage: Patients are greeted by a smile specialist who engages in a conversation with the patient to learn about them and gather information.
2. Serve: The smile specialist answers your patients’ questions and collects their information using the industry’s best scripting and sales techniques.
3. Connect: We connect new patients immediately to your practice by way of a warm call transfer and text/email notification.

How Many Smile Specialists Do You Employ?

At the time of this publication, we are staffed with 70 smile specialists who are fully trained and enthusiastic about supporting over 1,300 clients with 99% client retention.

All of our smile specialists are in-house, so they’re in a positive, energetic and supportive environment. They are sales certified professionals who are knowledgeable about the orthodontic industry and trained to answer patients’ questions with accuracy. In addition to being trained by industry leaders such as Peniche & Associates, our smile specialists provide a top-notch patient experience and are grammar certified.

How Does the OrthoChats Fee Structure Work?

Our structure doesn’t include a contract, which is an extra level of comfort for our practices. We have a start-up fee and a monthly fee based on the amount of website traffic. We monitor activity for a period of time, then determine the monthly pricing based on the amount of visitors to the site.

OrthoChats is now part of Ruby. To learn more, call (844) 311-7829 or visit their website: www.ruby.com.