227: How 30 Missed Calls a Month Could Cost Your Dental Practice Patients

If we have those calls that are coming in after hours, that are revenue generating calls, how do we make sure that those calls get answered in less than 30 seconds? Or, you know, I can answer it in seconds. Get that patient's information, get them on the schedule and have your staff come in the next morning, not just with a message, but actually with somebody on the books.

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 navig. 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.

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Hello everyone and welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I am Jake Boole, your host for today and with me I have Garrett Robin. So Garrett is with a company that is been around for a while, a lot of experience in dentist, but actually in a position that's getting a lot of attention lately, which is phones and answering phones with humans and AI. So, Garrett, with Nexa, why don't you give us a little bit of an introduction and kind of where you've been and how you got here?

Sure. So first off, thanks for having me, Jake. NEXA has been around since the 80s and we've evolved quite a bit, as you can imagine, since then. The with the rise of transcribed voicemails and automated text reminders. I mean, there's just a lot of really cool technology that has come from where we used to be, where you needed somebody to answer the phone, take a message and fax that to you. So that way you knew who you needed to follow up with. And so we've obviously learned a lot along the way in terms of how to best serve small to medium sized businesses in the healthcare space. And we've really found a lane and providing the humans to execute and whether that's live chat or live answering. Of course AI now being a nice supplemental technology that can help in the right circumstances. So we work with a lot of companies who have a variety of different practice management systems and technologies that are helping with recare and appointment reminders and just all of the things that are nice to kind of set and forget. And then we try to leverage those tools with our agents to help dental practices make lots of money and have nice and happy patients throughout their community.

Yeah, it's kind of cool because what we're talking about here is that critical point in the whole process of getting somebody dental care, which is that point where they first reach out to you as a dentist. Right. It's critical. It's a place where a lot of offices maybe don't always get it 100% right and a lot of patients kind of fall through the cracks because they don't get the proper, the proper kind of experience at that level. So you guys had that really, really critical point within the DEO we find that to be one of the hu biggest areas of opportunity for an office. They always, they kind of don't really know how much is there to be to be scooped up and, and the patients that are there to be had. But before we get into that, because I want to hear exactly how you guys do it. I'm really interested in how you're working with AI and how you're blending humans and a together for the optimal experience. Before you came here, you were selling contact contact center solutions. You're on other side of the fans with GoDaddy. So it's kind of cool coming from a tech company into dental, leading the efforts to outsource some phone calls to third parties in Philippines. So you know, what's that experience given you where you were before outsourcing to those folks and now you're the one receiving the calls?

Yeah, it's been a great journey and the, the one common thing theme is that I've been helping support small and medium sized businesses as they grow and try to scale. The time at GoDaddy was on the marketing side of the fence and you know that was when social media was, was, you know, just people were trying to really figure out how to use that to get new business and keep their current patients engaged building websites. I ran an operations team there that was responsible for our lower end Website builds and we needed to outsource the website design and the call answering more about like an intake call for those people who are purchasing that service. And that was my first experience really getting into the BPO space and you know, finding the right solution for us at that time. And what I learned was a lot, but the things that really stood, stood out to me were that there's specific tasks that make a heck of a lot of sense to give to somebody else. Relatively low complexity, there's, there's a great number of volume and then there's other tasks that are better to keep in house. And there's also a lot of choice in terms of what these agent profiles look like, where they're located. So being in a post sale type of interaction, we were not meeting the great, the highest level of quality agent there because these people had already purchased. It was more of a support type role. So I think tying it back to all of our dental friends out there, there's certain calls that are just different than others and I think not a one size all fits approach is really the right way to look at it. So really trying to figure out who's calling, why are they calling and then get those high value calls to the right place and those other calls that maybe automation's good for AI or maybe a lower skilled agent would be so totally fine as well. And that's how you build a scalable and cost effective model.

Amazing. So it's just cool to see the talent like yourself coming into dental every time I do, you know, get out in the, into the, the events and see who's kind of new folks like folks like yourself with incredible backgrounds in tech in Silicon Valley. And so it's really cool to see the leveling up that's happening in dentistry. So let's get into the nitty gritty about what Nexa does specifically. So walk me through. Let's say I give you a call and say, hey, all I know is I'm not capturing everyone I can at the phones. My office is busy, my front staff is busy, sometimes they're not there. I don't know what's going on before after hours. Give me the kind of rundown as a potential customer of yours of what Nexa does.

Well, so we are a custom solution. So it's, it's a little bit more about how we're going to best fit your operation specifically. But I'll just take some, some liberties here and kind of generalize this to what I hear most. And it's what you said It's, I'm tired of this endless rotation of talent that comes in. They stick around for a little bit, I train them up and then just when they start to figure it out, they're off to something else or, you know, the struggle to recruit. There's just a lot of pain that these practices go through as they start to try and scale, you know, so I try to figure out what's going on and then I'm listening for where we could snap in and I'm honest about where we won't snap in. Well, we work with all the major practice management systems that are out there. We kind of depends on the level and the volume of your practice. So the lower volumes, the, the more I'm probably going to say, hey, you know, that's a little bit more complex, let's keep that in house. But these things over here, let's outsource these because I think we can have a very high quality, whether it's through AI, through a human agent and get the good outcomes. So it's really assessing that at the beginning. And then for example, if we have those calls that are coming in after hours, that are revenue generating calls, how do we make sure that those calls get answered in less than 30 seconds? Or you know, AI can answer it in seconds, get that patient's information, get them on the schedule and then have your staff come in the next morning. Not just with a message, but actually with somebody on the books who has already received their paperwork and all the things that they need to do leveraging a lot of times whatever technology they're already using. So that's really what I'm looking for. And then if they're calling for medical records, maybe that's something that we can have AI handle 100%. And in some cases maybe AI is leading the call and then transferring to a live agent. There's just a lot of different ways we can build it. So that's really what the cool thing about my job is, is I get to kind of play consultant for a little bit and give them advice on how I think we can build a better mousetrap.

So maybe we can kind of list the full menu. Right? You can, NEXA can answer calls after hours. They can potentially, those can potentially go to a human or to AI. Are they all AI after hours?

Yeah. So if we're looking at the menu of options, we're looking, you know, inbound calls, what about outbound calls? Let's assess that. Are we needing to make follow up calls for treatment plans? Are we needing to just work a list of referrals that maybe you have that haven't yet scheduled. So I'll look to inbound and outbound, and then we're looking at live agents, we're looking at shared, meaning you just basically are paying us for the time that our agents are spending on your account. Or if you have a little bit more volume, maybe we're doing kind of a dedicated route where we give you a couple of agents or maybe, you know, 10 agents if you're a pretty big DSO where centralizing call center is important to you. And then what happens if you get 15 calls while all 10 of them are on the phone? We have our shared support. That could kind of layer underneath that. So we can guarantee you never miss a call. We have AI, of course, like we've discussed. And then we have live chat. So great. For website, late night. I've got four kids. My wife and I both work. Usually it's 9:30 before we can get to a point where we're sitting down looking at personal things. And if I'm needing to schedule an appointment or I'm new to town, that's when I'm doing my research. So if you can have a live chat, pop in at 11pm and say, hey, just so you know, I'm here, I'm a real person, I can answer questions. That's a really nice way to start to get some interaction and win more business. Convert more of those marketing dollars into actual dollars.

Yeah, the amount of dentists, I know we're talking about kind of patients here, but the amount of dentists who reach out to us in the middle of the night is wild. And so it's so many, you know, we're busy. Right? Yeah, it's like when it's when people get stuff done or you're sleepless and you're like, I'm gonna see if I can knock a few things out. So. Okay, so that makes sense to me. So you got outbound, you got inbound, and then with inbound you have chat and phones, and then within that you kind of split up between live, like in person or a person. And then you have AI. Right. So I mean, maybe just real quick, we'll do. So outbound will be call reminders. Anything else, like appointment reminders. Anything else on the outbound that you guys would cover?

You know, those are the big ones, I think, you know, the use, the use of outbound. There's so many appointment reminder solutions out there that are automated. But for maybe the 30% who have completely Been unresponsive. Maybe that's an outbound campaign. We want to call them a few different times and just make sure that we've exhausted all of our options to get them back in the door.

Yeah, so you got replacement reminders. You have reactivations for somebody who's fallen off. I mean, I don't know if you've gotten into, like, payment kind of calls and all, you know, getting people to kind of pay and all that.

Anything. Great, great, great point. Because some of those calls, I'm not going to lie, they're best handled by the people that are actually in the practice. So if we're talking about a treatment plan, for example, and they're. They need to get some of the. Some questions answered that are a little bit beyond what I think we're probably in the sweet spot to answer. Half the battle is getting these people on the phone. So if we can say, hey, I was calling about that treatment plan, do you have a few minutes right now to talk to someone about that? Let's get this. Let's get this figured out. Hold on one second. Let me get some on the line. Now we call the practice and we say, hey, you know, Mr. So and so is on the line. He's ready to get. Move forward with this. Can you talk to him? And now we've made that connection. So they're not spending all their time picking up the phone and leaving voicemails. We do that part, and then they can just be connected. As soon as we get that customer on the line, we can strategically figure out when the right time to call is. And we've had, I think, some really good success stories with just a live transfer.

So that's amazing. I mean, you know, if anyone is listening and they're in the office and they have somebody manually dialing at all in any kind of way, manually dialing. There's a huge opportunity there to save a lot of time. Okay, so that makes tons of sense. Outbound, Outbound, they answer. AI maybe says one or two things, transfers over to somebody live. That's an incredible use case. Then you've got inbound. You've got after hours. Anything during hours that you guys would handle?

Okay, yeah, we're 247 operations, so a lot of times we leverage the overflow during normal hours. Maybe they're closed for lunch. Right. Maybe they're half days on Fridays. You just basically would tell us what the game plan is, and then it's all on us to staff, to recruit, to train, to coach. You know, we have Incentives for these agents that are trying to grow their careers. And all of that headache, and I hate to say the word headache because some people really enjoy it. Most of the dental owners that I've talked to, the performance management and the, you know, employee performance reviews, all that stuff is like on the very bottom of their list of things that they're excited to do. Right. Or their office manager. So the more we can let them focus on what they do want to do and what they're good at, we take all those burdens off of their plate and can help with. If a call rings three or four times and they don't answer it in the practice, it can just roll to our agents and we're there to help that caller with whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish after hours. It can just come straight to us. It's really up to the practice on how they want to configure those rules to have our support team there to help their operation.

Yeah, I think this is a great use case of, I mean you got, it's human and AI, but both of those together. It's, it's augmenting what folks are already doing. It's, it's really just, you know, they're taking what you're already doing as far as answering the phones and getting patients in the door and just making it much better. You know, there's, there's all kinds of value that's being left on the floor. I mean, you know, you run ads, you hire a marketing company and they get your website all sorted out and they get you on Google running, you know, running paid ads. Somebody calls, it's really a spot where you want to be capturing every single thing you can. You already spent all the money to get them to call. I just love this use case. I think it's growing. What, like, how does this work? Like, how well does it work? Because there's a lot of skepticism, I think, about anywhere where AI is, you know, kind of being a human, where they're talking to people, things like that. Walk us through what your experience is so far and how it, how well it works.

It is, it's all very new. It's, it's funny for me to, you know, have my father in law, Kahlo, our AI test and see how he interacts with it. We obviously have product managers that, that's their full time job. But I think it's important to have an AI that is not just pointing to some large language model and then, you know, you kind of are up. It's up to the practice owners to build those guardrails because they don't have time or the expertise or the, the knowledge to know how to create those rules so you don't end up with some really wonky interactions. So all of our AI and live calls are available for our practices to listen to through their portal. We have reporting that they can look at. So we're keeping an eye on conversion rates, we're keeping an eye on sentiment from what the AI transcript is showing. We are on the product side building these guardrails for our key industries kind of at a, at a high level. And then we can really train that AI to say or handle calls a specific way at each specific practices operation. So I'll give you just one or two quick examples here. Some cases, some different calls, they might have a call tree on their side. Press 4 for you know, press 1, press 2, press 3, press 4. Those options might dictate who answers the call. Maybe certain options are going to go straight to the practice. Maybe certain options are going to come to our live agents. Other options could go straight to AI. But the cool thing is, especially now with it being so new, I always recommend to our new accounts that they start with our hybrid solution so we have AI and humans working on that account. Because if, if a caller is skeptical of AI, even if it's the best AI in the world and they don't have an escalation point, like if it's just AI and AI only, it can cause some frustration and it could have an impact on that patient's decision to use you or not. So as long as whatever time of day it is, if they want to speak to a human, whether we're transferring it back to the office or transferring it to one of our live agents, I think it's always a good idea to have that, especially when you first build it. And then once we see how it's working in practice, we can always strip out that live agent if we need to. So there's so many different ways, depending on the call type, that we can build this. And the last thing I'll say on this, Jake, is the AI is so efficient, it's taking notes as it goes. So we're seeing our typical AI interactions be 30 to 40% shorter handle time than it is with a human agent. And we know they're going to answer on the first ring every single time. Our human agent answering is good, but it's never going to be as good as AI because it could literally be on a thousand calls. At once.

Yeah, I love having the backup as well. At least to start, because we can all remember, like 10 years ago, when you call your bank, I don't know about you, but I would call my bank, I'd go to an automated service, and I'd just be hammering the zero button, trying to find a real person. Well, but if it worked, it'd be different, right? It just didn't work back then. The cool thing now is it works. And my theory with these kind of AI use cases is people just want service. They don't care. Actually, at the end of the day, if it's AI or humans, if you give somebody a choice and there's an AI experience that's better and faster and they get what they need faster, they will learn to use it. They just want. They want the phone answer, they want their answers, and they want answers quickly. And so as the technology gets better, which it's there now, people are going to get used to it. I think it's going to be. Going to be fine.

It's as worse today as it's ever going to be, right?

Yeah, exactly.

It should be just a little better. Yeah, we've all been burned, though. Like. Like your bank example.

Exactly. But. But it's getting. I think it's getting better. So, okay, what kind of results can somebody expect? So let's say I'm doing. I mean, if you have some numbers, let's say I've got 30 new patients coming in. I'm, you know, producing a million and a half. I'm the only doctor, maybe I have an associate coming in one day. I don't know if I'm bringing in 30 patients. How many calls is that? A few hundred calls a month. Couple hundred calls a month. That. I mean, I probably am only answering 70 to 100 of those. I don't know. So what. What, you know, what kind of lift will I see on calls on patients? Like, what have you guys seen?

Yeah. So, you know, general. If we're just talking kind of a general practice, single location, you know, there's a lot of different variables, but I think it's certainly fair to say that we're able to give you the data on the call types that we're getting. So first off, you know, what's the denominator of bookable calls? And we have that in your portal, so you can see, like, oh, okay, I missed 50 calls, but only 20 of them were possible bookings and 10 of them were new patients. So we can really break that down and help them understand their business and then tie that back to those marketing efforts to see what's actually working well.

And actually if I can join in there, because the old, the old school way is you just would see number of missed calls. Right. Like you just, you wouldn't know what type of call that was. With AI, they can at least get a little bit of information. Right. So just that data, you're missing a hundred calls a month, but 30 of those are actual opportunities. That's, that's a little more data than most other people have currently.

Yeah. And these, these business owners, especially in dental, are so like hard working and they burn it at both ends and it's rare that they get or allow them to step back and analyze the numbers. So I think, you know, whatever our booking rate is, it's, it's almost always going to pay for itself because you know, if we're booking the general cleanings or especially like helping an emergency cosmetic or other type of higher margin job, it's such a no brainer to have this as a backup. But, but a lot of people don't even have access to those numbers and so it's hard for them to run the business and step back and assess how is my marketing doing? Am I spending my money wisely? Do I need to spend more money? Because I have an operation that's ready to capture all these additional leads Just depends on their space and their plans for growth. But I think, you know, a booking percentage rate is kind of hard for me to say because they're so different. But I think it's more than fair to say at least a third of those are getting booked on that first call and several others are having a very tangible lead to follow up with for those practices. And those are 30% of zero. They wouldn't have had those otherwise. Or very small percentage because they may have gone somewhere else or they've stopped caring about the way that their smile looked. Maybe they moved on to other things.

Right. So who is your perfect kind of client? Let's say, you know, you're shaking hands with somebody and like what, what would they be saying where after the conversation you're like, okay, if they signed up with us, we would absolutely crush this. You know, is it somebody who's just like completely overwhelmed with multiple locations and has tons going on? Is it, is it that that's like, who's just a guaranteed knocking out of the park for you?

Yeah, usually it's somebody who's tried a few different things and they've realized it didn't work. Maybe they, they used someone overseas. Right. Like we are. We believe heavily in our, our U.S. team. It is more expensive, I'm not going to lie, than getting someone who's overseas to do it. And I think overseas people do great on certain call types. But if we're talking about revenue generating calls and needing to convert, I think the agent skill level matters a lot. We have an amazing team nearshore as well who are able to do our bilingual calls. So usually it's someone who's tried a few different things. They've hired a few people, they've seen, they've tried to scale, and they've realized how they may have overlooked the difficulty of scaling this very key role in their front office. So I think those are some of the things that I love to hear because sometimes if this is their first opportunity, they're just kind of looking at this as a cost center and they're saying, well, I can get someone to do this for less expensive. Not really understanding the value that a team like NEXT is going to bring with workforce management, with operations, with, you know, the, the training and the recruiting and just all the things that go into hiring and keeping an employee productive and happy and growing and covering their benefits and time off. Like whoever you hire, I hope you're giving them some vacation days, some sick days. What are you going to do in those instances? And if the practice is small enough, maybe they can get by with having somebody be out for a day. But it's still a pretty painful day for everybody else who's having to run back and forth. It just makes, it makes so much sense to even have a very small plan, whether it's AI Only or hybrid, just to help your staff and retain that great talent that you have and allow them to be a little bit more creative and more impactful so they're not on the phone talking to a customer or patient right in front of them in person and not delivering the best experience, letting them spread their wings a little bit. I mean, these are all things that I love to hear because they understand the value of, of adding a support service like ours because they've tried other things and it hasn't worked.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, if you haven't tried it, then I'm sure you guys, it'd be. It's like skipping the line and just going to Nexo right away because it's, you know, it sounds like you guys are able to outperform a lot of the other methods of doing this. But I mean, the way I look at it is it's so clearly the future. It's so clearly the way that the business is going to be done in the next three to five years. So if you're not like experimenting with this, I mean, I'm always looking at competition. I'm like, okay, you're the office next door probably is. They might not be nailing it every 100% of time, but if you're nailing it 70% of the time, you're starting to learn, you're getting ahead. And so just think in two to three years, I mean really, if you're listening to this, your competitors are probably going to be using this. And if they, you know, if they're learning about it now and practicing and cutting their teeth now in two to three years is be really good. It's gonna be 100% ready to go. And it kind of just is in your best interest to start getting into this world. You know, I don't, I don't know how you can be a dental office in two or three years and not start having this figured out. I mean, Gary, is that, is that,

I'm sure you agree do and you know, who knows what it's gonna look like in five or ten years from now. But what is certain is that patients are gonna need a way to interact with your office and you're gonna need somebody there to manage that relationship. Even if it's 100% a high, at a certain point you need people monitoring the AI, you need people there to handle those. You know, maybe AI is great for 80% of that call type, but there's 20% that's just kind of not a great fit. So where is that customer going to go, that patient going to end up if you don't have some support systems that are scalable and you know, I think it'll just be on us as a company to try and look around the corner and see where it's heading next. As we done for the last 40 plus years.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So welcome to the future. Appreciate Garrett. All the work you guys are doing and it's a pretty exciting place, I can tell you. Within our do members we have about 400 do members and these are the top of the top dental offices and multi location groups. And they're all trying to figure this out right now. I mean, most of them are trying to figure this out. So, you know, working with you guys, you're just stepping into the future. I mean, this is, this is absolutely part of doing business. It's Just the current setup, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, bringing in somebody's hourly employee, training them and trying to manage that, it's. It's like. It feels very overwhelming. I think most of our listeners are. They feel that. They're like, this is unsustainable. And I think what you guys do is the answer. So any final words for anyone listening, Garrett?

Sure, Yeah, I do. I totally agree with you. And the final point I'll say on that is we've seen how people think about work, and it's certainly changed a lot over the last decade and certainly over even the last five years since COVID Those days of having somebody be there in the office and working for you for 30 years and being really good at their job, it's just really hard to find. I'm not saying they're not out there, but the way people think about work has changed. And so I think you have to make sure that you're thinking about your employee experience and are you creating an environment that's going to allow them to thrive and stay with you as long as possible. And so having giving them some help is not only going to help your bottom line, but it's going to help you and your employees enjoy life. So with that, I'll say check us out@nexa.com we'd love to talk to you about your specific situation and just see if this makes sense. A big part of our job is is figuring out what does and doesn't make sense. So we'd love to chat with you and just explore your current operation to see if you're ready to scale.

I love that customized kind of menu approach as well. So. All right, Garrett, thank you so much. Check out Nexa and we'll be in touch. And keep us informed on the future here.

Thank you for listening to deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group. 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.