197: Revolutionizing Communication Systems for Enhanced Practice Efficiency

If you're not looking at your phone system, if you're not looking at your whole answer and scheduling process, I think you're missing out on a potential opportunity here. Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DEO Grow Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and today we're going to be talking about how to increase your patient flow utilizing technology on the phone system side. And I've got Kevin Talman, who's the CEO of Mango Voice here with us. Kevin's been an entrepreneur for a while. He spearheaded the growth of a company called Trade Star from a startup to its successful acquisition by a Fortune 100 company, and now is the CEO of Mango. He lives in Southern Utah. We found out we both graduated accounting at byu. So, like, you know, we're nerdy, but we enjoy it. So, Kevin, great to have you here. You know, one of the things that at DEO that we help our members with is we have what's called the ops assessment, where it's really based on constraint theory, because as leaders, it's all about prioritization. And what I'm excited about having you on is oftentimes we have members and those listeners who are asking about marketing strategy, how do I market? How do I market? Which is great, and we've got some great tools there. But if you think about it, if your phone answer rate is 50%, this is just kind of our accounting math. That means your marketing cost is twice as much as it needs to be. Right. So if I can get my phone answer rate, and if you've talked to one of our coaches, like Amber Nash, who's been a chief marketing officer for $150 million DSO, you know that one of the places she'll look at first in your patient flow piece is that phone answer rate. So I'm excited to get into some of those details with you. But, yeah, give me a little bit of background. You're. You're at Mango and what kind of inspired you and excited you to. To be in this company?

Yeah. First of all, Emmett, grateful to be here. It's incredible. You know, For Mango to be a part of the DEO organization. You know, looking at the evolution of Mango, I think being part of DO is. Is a big step forward for us, and we're grateful for that. You know, after we sold our last company as part of that company, we actually built a technology. And when you look at a traditional balance sheet business versus a technology company, there's, there's a lot of benefits to technology. Right. Scalability becomes much easier. You're not managing a true, you know, kind of traditional balance sheet and all the, the complexities that come with that. Right. You're not, you're not carrying, you know, kind of heavy assets. It's, it's all, it's all IP based. And the reality is in our last business, adding one new customer was a, was a big deal, and adding one new customer to a technology isn't a big deal. Right. So that, like I said, the scale is really easy. Well, I shouldn't say easy. Nothing's. Nothing's easy in scale, but.

Well, it's easier than dental. We can say that, yes. It's easier than running a dental practice. And I think you said before we started this show that when you invested in Mango and, you know, became CEO, you're at like 250 people on the platform now, more than 8,000 on the platform, but you're just stepping into the dental side or you've been in the dental side for a while.

We've been in the dental side for a while. While. So when we invested in 2017, they had just kind of delved into the dental side. And so that was interesting for us, coming, coming in and learning a new market and understanding the dental community. Some of the constraints that you talked about, which is, you know, what's holding people back from, you know, really being efficient operationally, you know, financially and those things that are really important. And so we've been in dental since really kind of early 2017, and 90% of our customer base is dentist.

When we think about how much technology is evolving, most of us don't really think about phone systems. But, you know, especially like post Covid, we know we're doing more of these zoom type calls, et cetera. How has phone system technology evolved and where could that be, you know, sexy and important for dental offices?

Yeah. If you think about where we've come on the voice side and, you know, I, I was telling my kids the other day, I was trying to explain a rotary phone to them and, you know, I, I remember using a rotary phone and they would look at you with this blank stare in their eye like they can't comprehend it. Right. So I pulled a picture up and explained it to them. But if you think about where we've come technology wise, and even with the advent of web based phones and how we use voice now, instead of using traditional copper lines, hard lines, we're using the Internet. That gives us, I think, a few advantages. One is you can now use it anywhere. Right. So mobility is becoming more important, unfortunately. I think with that accessibility, which can be a good thing and a bad thing, if you have a patient like me, it's probably a bad thing because whenever I'm thinking about, you know, I need to go to the dentist or something, I'm going to ping you, or if I need to go to a chiropractor or my accountant. But it does give us flexibility, especially also as we think about workforces and how they're structured today, that's been fundamentally shifted from traditional in office to maybe you have remote people now. So now all of a sudden with these technologies, you can have people working wherever and you're able to utilize those, those technologies and communications anywhere outside the office, which I think is really incredible.

Labor inflation has been such a big deal that technologies that allow us to be creative on that side. Right. Like there is no requirement now in today's world, with today's technology that the person answering the phone needs to be sitting at a very specific spot in the front desk. Like that is absolutely not necessary. They can be at another location, they could be at home, they could be in another country. There's all these options that are now available. And if you're not utilizing that, it might be okay, but you might also be having a higher labor cost or have less efficiency than someone who is getting more creative there.

Right?

Right.

Yeah. I think you have to think about, I mean, in every situation has its own nuances, but I think you have to think operationally, what are you trying to accomplish? And you know, what I see quite often is I'll ask people, the question is, what are you trying to accomplish? What's your goal? Where do you want to get to? And most people say, I don't know. And it's really hard to build operational excellence if you don't really know what you're working towards. And so whether it's phones or different systems, I think you have to think about what am I trying to accomplish? How can I maximize efficiency? And then you've got to build the processes around that. Right. And have accountability around that. And so I think Just like what you said. Right. If remote works for you. Right. Really understanding what that means and then building the systems and the accountability around that can be an incredible opportunity to maybe reduce some of the burden on the P and L and other things like that.

Yeah. And the deo, we use the profitability cycle. Right. So start with some financial clarity, which would align with kind of like, what are you trying to operationally do? I'm trying to drive down costs here, whatever it might be, increase revenue there, move to revenue maximization and then eventually to expense reduction as well. And as you do that with team alignment, this is where these technologies can be highly leverageable to meet what you're trying to do with both patients as well as staffing costs. So tell us a little bit about Mango and what you think is the differentiator versus, I don't know, some other phone system. Why would I choose Mango?

I think there's a couple components to that answer. So the first one is when you're looking at technology, at least in, in the phone world, there's two different ways that you can go. One is someone could go to, you know, a license platform and buy a license platform. What that means is really kind of the core technology is built for them and, and they build a UI on top of it, and so they don't really own the back end technology. Anybody can do this. Emmett. If you wanted to go start a phone company today, you could go buy license platform and, and be up and running. Mango's taken a different approach, which is we own our technology, so we own our back end. We're not on a licensed platform. And what that allows us to do is really build features that we feel like benefit, you know, our core audience, which is the dental community. And so what we've done is tried to make phones which are traditionally, like, nasty to work with, really hard to understand. We've really tried to simplify them and also create this visualization, which is you now can visualize how your call flow is going. And that's really important because you want to make sure that the patient has the right experience when they come into you, you know, when they come into your office. And the way most, well, almost all new patients come into your office is through voice. And what experience are you trying to create that first time as that new patient comes into your office and existing patients. Right. And the way they do that is largely through voice still. And having this canvas or visualization of what that looks like and analyzing that becomes really, really, really important. Just like you, I know you guys talk a lot about, you know, analyzing your financials and making sure they're dialed in. Your. Your voice and how you're answering the phone and converting should be no different than that. You should be analyzing it like you're analyzing your financials and dialing that in, because that right there will impact your practice as much as anything.

It's funny, if I asked any marketing company what's one thing you don't provide service around, but you would love to have fixed within a dental office, they would say something around the phone system, right? Something around answering the phone, the scripting around the phone, all of those things. So walk me through what the best customers are doing. Like, what are the best dental offices doing to maximize the features and functions of this new technology within phone systems?

So the highest performing offices on Mango have a different mindset. What I mean by that is going back to what we talked about, operational efficiency, they're actually building their call flow based on their operations. What I mean by that is, let's say, for example, if you think about a billing question that comes into the practice. So if someone just happens to pick up the phone and call an office and say, I have a billing question, on average, that billing call, when they call in, is roughly about 22 minutes long. And the reason why is it catches you off guard. You've got to go look the patient up. You have to figure out, okay, what's going on with this? You know, it just takes a minute. Maybe you put them on hold for five minutes while you figure it out. Where. Let's. Let's say.

Which by the way, can we also say in most offices, this is also the person at the front desk who's also managing. Who's also managing. Right. So we don't think about retooling. We think about it in manufacturing. That. That would be ridiculous to be like, we're building red cars. Oh, let's do quickly, a blue truck. Right. But we do this to our team all the time. We put them in positions where they're doing red cars, blue trucks, motorcycle, yellow motorcycles. Right. And so part of that 22 minutes is the retooling, the looking up, the tech, all of that stuff. Okay, cool.

Checking people in and out, everything else that's just bombarding them. Where if you could say all billing questions go to voicemail and you designate, let's say Friday afternoon or whatever time that, you know, is kind of a lull in the practice, and you just call those billing questions back. If you call someone back, if you send a voicemail and then call them back. On average, that calls only five minutes. And the reason, the reason why is because you're now going to that call prepared. You have the information, you've looked into it, you can have a concise conversation with, with that patient. So think about all the time that you'll save your team if you would just say, okay, all billing questions go to voicemail. Here's the time that we get back to them. You've just freed, you know, that, that team member or team members up to, to work on things of highest use, which is new patient calls and converting those. Right. Getting new people into the practice, getting, you know, maybe overdue care, different things like that. So thinking about how do I structure things to maximize the profitability and the efficiency of the practice versus really bucket all calls out here. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So if I can bucketize and batch based on the type of call, even if I didn't send them to voicemail, I could send them to someone who's dedicated to only answering billing questions. Right. Maybe I have someone on the RCM team that that's all they do is take those phone calls because I've got multiple locations or whatnot. Hey, anything that's new patient, boom, it goes here. I've got the scripting down. Anyone who's a current patient, we know they're going to ask these series of questions that goes to this person. So that kind of piece, parceling that out, I can create these efficiencies which, by the way, as you're saying that I'm thinking about human nature, how often would we hear like, sorry, I haven't gotten to any of the conforms, or I haven't called any of these new patients because I was dealing with those billing questions. Because human nature is to deal with the reactive, lose all our energy and then not have any energy for the proactive. Right. So the only way to truly work on the proactive is make sure that the reactive stuff doesn't go to that person. Something like that.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you said something in the beginning which I thought was really insightful, which is competing time. Right. Basically competing interest. And we all deal with this, which is, where do I allocate my time for maximum return? Right? What are the highest and best uses of my time? And you have to think about your calls that way, which is my team, what's the highest and best use of their time? And I want them to have the maximum amount of time to work on those things. And so what's kind of the the beta or the noise that I can. I can reduce for them to be able to maximize those things. And I. So our highest performing offices really understand this concept, Emmett, and they build their call flow or operational flow around this concept. And it's incredible, you know, what we see from them. You know, the average in dentist, the average inbound answer rate is around. It's around 65. I mean, 65 to 70% on average around there. Our highest performing offices are in the 90% answer rate because of things like we just talked about about. Right. They've really cleared it up so that they have the maximum time to answer those calls for new patients and existing patients.

Well. So not only do I have a higher answer rate, but I also probably have a better phone call happening because it's batched that way, because the human on the other side knows what kind of call they're taking or within some kind of range, and they're not as distracted. So that's super powerful. You know, I was talking to someone about their RCM team recently and I said, how are you determining your budget for that? And it wasn't a concept they had thought of. They had scaled a lot, but it was just kind of like, oh, I just add people as necessary, et cetera. And then the next question was, how do you know if people are effective or not? So we kind of went down the whole RCM route and what could be there? When I think about this, on the phone answer side, on the calls, etc. What I'm missing there typically is some set of data. I'm curious, what are some of the data elements that Mango could give me to make sure that one, you know, is Suzy as effective as Frank, as effective, you know, as Sally kind of things. And. And, you know, where could there be some cross training, et cetera, how long these phone calls are taking, you know, how many of them getting scheduled, whatever it might be, what's some of the data that I can get out of Mango that I can make operational fairly quickly?

Yeah, I think this is a great question. So when you talk about the power of new technologies and where they're going, this is where they're going, which is looking at voice and these interactions differently. What I mean by that is, um, and. And what we're working on, Mango is, is starting to build the foundational pieces for what you. You're talking about, which is how do I know how I'm actually. How the team is actually performing on the phones and going back to our language. A P and L is a Great scorecard. Right. It's very defined and it tells you, am I winning or am I losing? Yep. And so taking that concept and saying, are we winning on the phones or are we losing on the phones? And where are we winning and where are we losing? And the way we do that is through data. And the foundational pieces are this concept of, well, first of all, how do I know what type of call is coming into the practice? Is it a new patient, is it existing patient, is it billing?

Can I ask even a more basic question? Can I see something like where is call volume the highest? So I know how to staff that correctly?

Yeah. So yeah, getting, getting a report where it says, what's my call volume by hour?

Yeah, exactly.

What you may be looking at is, well, you know, during lunch time, when people are taking lunch, that's when they're saying, okay, I need to call my dentist, I need to get, you know, get this procedure. But if your team's taking lunch during that time, you're missing those calls. And so understanding proper staffing. So call volume by hour, how many

after hour calls are really happening and if so, at what time so that I can again, we think of labor too often because of how it is on the P and L is like this sunk cost expense. But if we think about it as an investment and then we're trying to maximize the return on that investment, I think that gets more surgical to what you're talking about is, okay, when, when should I have this person not doing scanning of paperwork and say, you're going to help support on the phones because these hours are always higher than these other ones. Right. Like if I can follow the wave and the curve of some of this stuff, it could be super powerful.

That's right. So basically, is the team available when we need the team available? Right. That's one. Two is what's interesting to me, Emmett, is as we talk to these multi location groups, usually the first question we lead out with is, what's your inbound answer rate? And you would be surprised how many people just say, we don't know, we have no idea. And so the next thing is, how well are we doing at answering phone calls? Right. And understanding why we're not answering those calls goes back to what we talked about. You know, maybe we need to talk about looking at your call flow. And this is where we kind of step in and say, hey, let us tell you what we're seeing from our highest performing offices and how they think about things, which I think has been really impactful because Most people haven't thought about that. And. And then where the technology is going. So looking forward, really where this technology is going is saying, okay, I now want to look at, well, how does Emmett actually perform on the phone? So let's look at Emmett's phone calls, right? And there's a few things we can look at there, right? So we can look at sentiment analysis on how you're doing on phone calls. So what we're working on right now is actually building out a whole sentiment analysis. We're thinking, we're listening to. So we're listening to tonality, we're listening for keywords, right? And we can actually infer those and in a graph, actually graph this out and say, okay, this is a problematic area. Let's go to this and see what something negative happened right here. Let's understand that. And if that is. If you think about a call, and let's say 50% of that call is a negative interaction, that's a call we should be looking at. There's something very problematic, you know, looking at the opportunity for, you know, taking transcripts and understanding, you know, what's going on in these. And using some of this machine learning and new technology, we have to be able to better analyze these things quicker and give you data at your fingertips that traditionally you had to sit there and say, okay, I gotta listen to this call recording for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and I'm taking notes and it's just really hard. And so the technology is now taking that with some of the new technologies and creating these experiences that is going to give you insights fairly quickly.

Yeah, it's awesome. You know, I'll come back to two points just to drive this home. If you're not looking at your phone system, if you're not looking at your whole answer and scheduling process, I think you're missing out on a potential opportunity here. And, you know, one thing I would say is just kind of as a story, Sorry, I had two thoughts and I'm going to put second over first. But my wife, when we first moved to Texas, was looking for a doctor and she came to me and said, oh, man, I found this great doc. And she's describing her and I'm like, wow, did you like go in and interview her or what? She's like, no. I called around to these different offices and, you know, I talked to their front desk person and just asked them a few questions and I thought to myself, okay, here's a doctor who did all of this schooling, who's done all this, you know, has all this care and capability and clinical capability, et cetera. And she's 100% getting rated based on this phone piece and how well that individual is explaining their services. And I thought every dental office right now is getting rated on that person. So you might have an excellent back office, your clinical might be amazing, but if they never get past that first part or have a good experience there. The second piece that I wanted to mention is just again, this data, so often if you're saying, man, I just need to do more pay per click, I need to do a better website, I need to remember that all of that investment is going to flow through them making a phone call. So if that's at 60%, you know, 40% more for everything that you're doing, getting this fixed first might be your highest leverage opportunity. So whether you do that with Mango or any other service, like, look at how this process works, right?

And the great thing about that is that's pretty basic math. You could back into the numbers and say, if I could get my inbound answer rate from 65 to 90, you can do the back of the napkin math and it's going to be substantial income to that practice. And if you look at that over say a 10 year period, you know, our data tells us if we can get your answer rate from 70 to closer to 90 over a 10 year period, you're going to generate about $1.2 million more in production. I mean, that's significant, right? In some ways that's, I don't want to dismiss this, but that's life changing. Like that's a lot of money and a lot of revenue that could be coming into the practice just by that one thing, just by one thing that's

on a single location, then you just multiply that by how many you have. Awesome. Thank you so much. Is there any other thoughts, Kevin, as we kind of close this out that you think would be helpful for our listeners as they're thinking about what the opportunity is here and how they should assess that?

Yeah, I think one thing is getting really comfortable with these numbers we talked about, which is, you know, calls, calls per hour, Are we answering our calls? How well are we converting our calls, you know, these types of things? And, and we're more than happy to, to walk through those with you and take a look at those. But you're absolutely right. You can spend all the money on marketing, you can spend all your money doing these things. But when they come into the practice, and I, I tell this, I like what you said Emmett and I say this at Mango all the time, which is when people call you and have an interaction with you at Mango, you're creating an experience for them, and they're going to remember you by that. Right. And so what we always try to do is really think about how do we make our customers as happy as possible. And you're right. I mean, that first phone call into the practice, that person at the front is the person that's going to set the experience for that patient. And, and what kind of experience are you trying to create? And it may seem corny, it may seem kind of like fluffy, but it's so true. And we as humans want to know that where we go, we're going to have a great experience. People are kind, they listen, they're helpful. And so, you know, spending time understanding what's actually happening on these calls can have such a major impact on the practice. And I think it's one that we overlook because of the simplification of it.

Sure. And the other fires that we think are more important to solve for. If somebody wants to reach out and just have a conversation, maybe get an analysis of their practice, what's the best way to get a hold of you, Kevin?

Yeah, so the, the best way you can go to our website, mangovoice.com you can also reach out to me. My, my email is kevinngovoice.com. something I love to do is, is talk to people. I'm very accessible. That's really important to me. So.

Well, and because you, you see across so many different practices, I tell people, talk to our sponsors here because they see best practices. Right. They see what's working, what's not. And so you get a little quasi coaching out of these conversations on, you know, what to do, whether you invest in the product or not. So thank you so much, Kevin, for, for being on. I, I really appreciate it. You'll also be at our event. Mango will be at the deo Summit for 2024. Multiply your dental practice margins out in Orlando, Florida. So that's June 13th and 15th. So if you want to talk face to face, feel free to come out to there. So thank you again, Kevin. For anybody else who wants to have more conversation, come over to our Facebook page at DEO GrowSecrets. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group and meet other dental leaders. Get questions answered and the strategies you need to succeed. Plus, we have some free resources for you right there on the Facebook page. Remember, you're not alone. Let's do this together. Join DEO's Growth Secrets Group on Facebook. And until next time, keep smiling.