How to Build Authentic Patient Relationships in an AI World
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the way we communicate and interact with each other. AI copywriting chatbots (like Chat GPT) and virtual assistants are becoming increasingly sophisticated, able to handle complex tasks and conversations with human-like fluency. As a result, dental marketing companies are turning to AI to streamline their customer service operations, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
But while AI may make many things faster and easier, it also makes one aspect of patient care now more critical than ever: the importance of “real” relationships. How are we defining “real relationships”? These are the human relationships that connect, engage, and inspire. With all this new technology, it seems we should have MORE time to connect. However, reality is often the opposite!
Listen in on this informative dental marketing webinar and learn strategies and techniques to improve your patient relationships.
Meet the Presenters:
Blake Hadley, President of My Social Practice
Blake has won a number of national and international awards in art direction, advertising, and creative marketing strategy. He’s passionate about helping dental practices use out-of-the-box thinking to create stories that spread online.
Over the past 13 years at My Social Practice, he has spoken to dental audiences all over the country and has helped thousands of practices succeed with digital marketing. His presentations are always entertaining and thought-provoking, while explaining the very latest trends and technologies in digital marketing. He refuses to let the dental industry fall-behind!
If you’re interested in booking Blake to speak at your event, you can do that here.
Penny Reed, Chief Growth Officer at eAssist Dental Solutions
Penny began her career in IT with the Walmart Corporation and was recruited by her own dentist to run his growing practice. She has over 30 years of experience in dentistry and has been designated a Leader in Dental Consulting by Dentistry Today from 2007 to present. She is a member of the Academy of Dental Management Consultants, Speaking Consulting Network, and a member of AADOM’s Speaker/Consultant alliance. In addition, she is the author of two books, Growing Your Dental Business and Persuade With A Case Acceptance Story.
Webinar Transcript
(00:00) okay hey there let’s go ahead and get started hey Penny hey Blake how you doing I’m doing well I’m excited about the webinar yeah me too um we want to welcome everybody we’re attending our um to our webinar tonight uh we see people are starting to join and so I’m sure over the next little bit we’ll have more attendees um we are excited about this topic of uh building or Beyond technology why building real patient relationships is key in an AI driven World a penny and I met um a couple months ago to you know
(00:44) discuss what we think we could offer what value we could offer to the dental industry and when we put our heads together you know we thought you know penny is amazing at you know helping practices with relationships with patients and helping case acceptance and you know and and we focus all of our attention on how to build relationships online through marketing and how to use all the latest tools and Technology to do that so we really try to stay on top of you know what’s what’s Leading Edge when it comes to marketing and and
(01:18) digital digital technology so I think this is going to be a good a good topic for both of us all right well um let me share my screen here I just had it uh just a couple things to go over um let’s see I lost my bar here it’s I lost mine earlier stand up no well while he’s while he’s looking for the bar get out your pen or open up whatever you take notes on because I know uh well I’m pretty excited about what I’ll share I know from hearing from Blake and his team at their uh digital marketing conference that they had and
(02:03) getting a sneak peek at some of what he’s going to share with you uh some of it is mind-blowing so uh there you go there’s the screen all right you can see it okay now yeah okay good yeah feel free to ask any questions use the chat function the Q a uh just ask any questions throughout the meeting and we’ll address the questions at the end uh we’ll leave about 10 minutes at the end to address any questions you have but feel free to chat those in whenever you want um the way that that tonight the webinar
(02:32) will go is I will start by presenting for 25 minutes about building relationships online through marketing and really talking about content creation and how AI is changing the way that we create content today or some of the things that are possible and then after I present Penny will present for the next 25 minutes and she’s going to talk about how to build relationships in your office so um you know we know that both of those are important you know people are looking at you online before they pick up the phone to call and then when they
(03:06) pick up the phone to call you need to know how to take it from there and how to build those relationships when they come in the office and and really help the experience of the patient so we’re going to talk about it all all right well let me just tell you really quickly about my social practice um we have been in the dental industry for about 13 years now helping practices with digital marketing we started primarily in social media marketing and you know this was back when everybody’s trying to figure out how to use Facebook
(03:37) and what content to create on Facebook and we’ve just we’ve helped practices over over that time and then we’ve expanded into other digital marketing uh tools we help with SEO we help with websites reputation management kind of Everything Under One Roof now but the name my social practice comes because we started primarily in social media we’ve worked with over 6 000 practices over the years we have over 475 five star reviews we really try to practice what we preach when it comes to online reputation
(04:11) and we have over 118 000 combined social media followers again we we try to use the things that we learn in our own marketing is really how we’ve built our business we’ve also had nine Dental digital marketing conferences these are conferences that are specific to dentists specific to dental marketing we actually just had ours a couple weeks ago and Penny was actually there she spoke at her conference so we had a chance to catch up there it was a great conference that we had in Vegas if this is something you’re
(04:45) interested in after watching this webinar you can visit dentalmarketingconference.com okay so we’re going to talk a little bit about the technology that is available today through artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is working with humans to create content online now this is a really deep subject and I’m not going to claim that I know everything about artificial intelligence it’s kind of Beyond me I’m not that smart but over the last couple months our company has really dived into this
(05:22) and really try to understand as much as we can so that we can understand how it’s going to affect the dental industry and how it’s going to help you create content online and build relationships online so let me explain a little bit what we’ve figured out so before I start you need to understand the difference between search like a Google Search and artificial intelligence I know there’s probably people on this this webinar that know a lot about artificial intelligence and there’s some that probably don’t know
(05:53) very much so let me just start from the beginning so the difference between if you were to put something in a search bar basically what it does is it goes out to the world wide web and it searches for metadata now metadata is keywords different things that are built inside of websites to be able to um for Google to recognize that website so um so that’s how search works the way that artificial intelligence works is it takes all the information online and rather than giving you a result a specific result of what’s online it
(06:31) predicts the answer it predicts what you’re trying to figure out okay it’s kind of how the human brain works right we take all the knowledge that we have in our brain and we we put it all together and we try to solve problems well that’s what technology is doing now with artificial intelligence so search gives you metadata results it’ll give you a a web page as a result and artificial intelligence is predicted results it predicts what you are trying to figure out and it gives you the answer so to kind of explain this in a
(07:07) really simple way so if you were to put in the search bar of Google finish this sentence Jack and Jill went up the hill to and you click enter you would get a whole bunch of websites the American literature.com that has Jack and Jill went up the hill it has the whole uh poem in there uh interesting literature it has you know songs that have those words in it it gives you all the results of to give you the answer but artificial intelligence if you put this into something like chat GPT and you say finish the sentence Jack and Jill went
(07:40) up the hill too it gives you the answer fetch a pill of water because it takes all of the information that it finds everywhere on the web and it predicts what the answer will be rather than giving you a link to a website to find it out for yourself okay so hopefully that that makes sense so given that I’m going to explain how AI is changing the ways we communicate today and it’s changing um content with images audio or music video and copywriting okay so I want to go through each one of these so let’s start with images
(08:20) so one way that AI is changing things is it can take a blurred image or a very pixelated image and you can upload it on a site like remedy there’s a lot of sites that will do this and it will show you it will predict what that blurred or pixelated image is really trying to show you and it will will sharpen it and make it look real so if you were upload an image inside of a site like this it could take an image here on the left that’s really blurred like an old image and it can turn it to what it looks like
(08:54) here on the right so that’s one way it’s predicting what an image with the pixels of an image are supposed to look like and it’s making it look better on the right another thing that that with imagery if you’ve heard of the site mid-journey mid journey is kind of blowing our mind right now and what it’s able to do so mid-journey is actually creating images through artificial intelligence from scratch these are original images okay you can put in a prompt and you can tell mid journey to create an image
(09:28) whatever image you want and it will create it so I want to show you these three images and I want you to tell me in the chat chat bar which one you think is made by artificial intelligence all three of them are created by artificial intelligence there’s a trick question these are not photographs these are all created by AI it’s incredible with the realistic photos that it can create so basically what you can do this is how it works in a mid-journey you can just put in a prompt like this extreme close-up of a
(10:08) woman smiling Perfect Teeth dark skin tones cinematic lighting high resolution and this is the process that it does to create the image and this is about how fast it makes it too so you can see it slowly creating and it gives you four options okay that’s how fast a brand new from scratch image can be created so here’s some other images that we’ve created through mid-journey again these are not photographs these are just AI generated images you can tell it to get to create an image in a certain style so this one
(10:53) here on the left is a claymation Style this one here on the right you know a more um you know a different a painting type of style this one on the left we told to put a walrus and a dental chair this one on the right here is pretty incredible with a um uh dinosaur there in a dental chair the detail is just amazing we told it to create some dental chairs one in paradise and one that’s kind of space Space Age Dental chair on the right we had some fun by putting different celebrities as cartoons and dental chairs
(11:35) you can tell here on the left Jimi Hendrix on here it’s the Beach Boys on the right and if you look in detail you know there’s some weird things going on you know there’s whatever they’re folding the instruments it’s trying to create this predicting what a dental chair looks like and what’s inside so there’s some there’s some strange little details um that are a little off but it’s kind of neat if you want to see some more um just fun things we’re messing around with with AI art you can scan this QR
(12:08) code here and we created an Instagram account called Dental AI art and you can see all the different images that we’re making and feel free to use these images if you want to download any of them and put them on your social media accounts um you know there’s no copyright yeah we’re not going to go after you or anything because these are all just AI generated images there’s no problems with copyright at this point okay so that’s imagery second audio how is it changing audio content so this is a pretty cool example this is
(12:43) a clip I’m gonna I’m gonna share with you two sound Clips the first one is a current uh sound clip of John McCartney and then a second one is they took the clip and they made it sound like a young John McCartney back in uh when you know the Beatles days [Music] I don’t think okay here’s the second one [Music] I got crows at my window dogs at my door I don’t think all right so again pretty cool huh they just took the sound they dropped in the AI and made him sound younger again here’s another example I saw on Tick
(13:42) Tock where this guy he took his voice and he dropped it into AI programming that made it sound like Kanye West so he basically created a song by Kanye West with his voice and his lyrics by just changing the voice with AI I lost it I said this but I’m still Yeezy back in the kitchen man I’m a genius boys in the hood just like I’m easy Kanye Wheezy south side of Chicago life ain’t easy I lost Adidas but I’m so easy back in the kitchen man I’m a genius boys in the hood just like I’m easy Kanye Wheezy
(14:17) south side of Chicago life ain’t easy so if you know uh Kanye’s music and you’re familiar with his voice it’s it’s pretty incredible how exact that is and so this is really changing the music industry um songs are starting to be created by just normal people by famous artists and people can’t tell the difference so I don’t know what this is going to do for the music industry I don’t think this is going anywhere probably the music industry is just going to have to adapt um but for now there’s probably a lot of
(14:51) copyright problems infringement that could potentially happen so we’ll see what happens with this video how is it changing the way we create video there’s a site called deform and they are allowing well what you can do in the Forum again it’s a complicated process but you can take a series of images and it will predict from image to image what’s supposed to happen in between so and it starts creating some motion with the images and creates some video so here’s just a couple examples of um images that are created a series of
(15:31) images that created and put together to make a video and here’s one more [Music] so again none of this is photograph none of this is drawn this is all artificial intelligence that’s creating this for people this was kind of cool as someone figured out how to do a tour of their home using just imagery and it looks like a drone is actually going through this house but it’s not a drone it’s um it’s just taking images and and adding motion to it so it feels like you’re going through the house and when I saw
(16:34) this I was thinking you know how could this change the way we give office tours virtual tours of our dental office and this might be the future just being able to you know you don’t have to hire someone to bring their drone or hire someone to make this video of your office you could just take some photos and it will create this for you so that was pretty cool so it’s video now let’s talk about uh copy copywriting how is it changing how we communicate through a copy and I’m sure by now most of you have heard of
(17:12) chat GPT you know it’s all over the news um probably your kids are using it to write their reports for school it’s it’s been kind of crazy to watch how chap GPT has changed um the way we think about written content um if you don’t know what chat GPT is basically it’s a sophisticated chat bot that’s trained by artificial intelligence that can generate human-like text based on given prompts so just like I explained about prompts you know creating images and creating videos this creates copy you can
(17:48) basically tell it to write you pretty much anything so I’m gonna show this video by uh Ryan Reynolds that explains how he used chap GPT hey it’s Ryan Reynolds owner of mint mobile uh you know we’re always looking for ways to save you money so this year we’re kicking things off with an ad that I created using chat GPT the AI technology this is what I asked it to write I I said I said write a commercial for mint Mobile in the voice of Ryan Reynolds use a joke a curse word and let people know that men’s holiday promo is still going
(18:20) even after the big wireless companies have ended theirs this is what it wrote hey it’s Ryan Reynolds here Erie first of all let me just say mint mobile is but here’s the thing all the big wireless companies out there are ending their holiday promos but not mint mobile we’re keeping the party going because we’re just that damn good give mint mobile a try and hey as an added bonus if you sign up now you’ll get to hear my voice every time you call customer service just kidding that’s that’s not really a
(18:50) thing Stay classy everyone that is mildly terrifying but compelling okay so really you can tell a chat gbt write you anything if it’s the script for a commercial whatever it might be so I we’ve been testing it out with dental practices here’s a prompt that I give it gave it write me a blog post written by Dr Linda Borna DDS from born of Family Dental about the benefits of dental implants include that her practice is located in Claremont California that they offer comprehensive Dentistry for patients of
(19:23) all ages and degrees of oral health and within seconds it wrote this complete blog post um are you missing are you missing teeth and feeling self-conscious about your smile do you have trouble eating certain foods or speaking clearly if so down implants might be the solution you’ve been looking for as a dentist with years of experience in Claremont California I’ve seen firsthand and you know just continues to go on about as speaking from her perspective it talks about some benefits of dental implants it ends with
(19:51) at born of Family Dental we offer comprehensive Dentistry for patients of all ages and degrees of oral health our teams of experienced professionals can committed to helping you achieve a healthy and beautiful smile if you’re interested in learning more about dental implants please don’t don’t hesitate to contact us then I said give me five different titles for this blog post that gave me five different creative titles for the post I said make these titles a little more fun and it made them a little more fun kind
(20:18) of got they got kind of punny and and put some fun little things in there and then I said write this post as a social media caption and I wrote a short social media caption with hashtags and um and it was you know easy to copy and paste to put on Instagram or Facebook so that was done within seconds by just giving the right arms this is one thing that we’ve actually um at my social practice we for all of our social media clients we give them what’s called a social media publisher so they can publish content onto their
(20:50) sites onto Instagram and any social media account and so we’ve actually built this chat GPT into the captions section because we know how difficult it is for so many people to create captions that think of what to write and so um it’s called caption AI it can click on that they can say write a caption about the benefits of dental implants they can say where um you know what tone they want it in what accounts they wanted to post to Facebook Instagram and it will use chat GPT technology to create captions for
(21:23) you and then you can just go in and edit it how you how you’d like so this was an example I actually created an image using mid-journey of dental implants and I created a caption using chat GPT and posted to Instagram and Facebook so it’s it’s helping in that content creation um also we are offering a page of copy if you want us to create you a page of copy for your website using this technology we can do that and we’ll also optimize it for some keywords to help you and then give it to you then you can
(21:54) edit it however you would like to make it more personalized but if this is something you want to try out you can scan this and it will do that for you so in in my last little bit I want to show you um I’m gonna actually skip past this here um so I’ve talked to you about all of the what’s possible when it comes to uh Ai and I love this comic created by Tom Fishburn he said consumers want communication that is human empathetic and real so hopefully our AI can learn to generate content like that for them
(22:28) so I think you know given all this technology that there is we gotta figure out how to use it as a support for what we’re doing but of course we have to have that human side and um and edit it so that it fits our audience and fits our talk so that we can build relationships because that’s what’s most important Andrew Davis said content builds relationships relationships are built on trust and Trust drives Revenue so if we have good content um on a on our accounts and on our website on social media it can build
(23:05) relationships and that’s where the trust comes in so how do we make real content that builds trust well you have to understand there’s two different types of content there’s sympathy based content and there’s empathy based content sympathy based content is uh connect content that connects with people based on how they think so if someone has a toothache they want to find the most practical Solution that’s going to solve that issue that they have they want to find something that’s convenient and maybe something
(23:32) that’s a practice that’s price you know price sensitive it’s a very practical approach to creating content but empathy based content is content that connects with people based on how they feel it’s more emotional it’s more relatable and it’s more comfortable so um the way that I see these two working together both types of content are good to have I think sympathy based content can really be solved by artificial intelligence it can help us to create more content that just people need we
(24:03) can create more um blog posts we can create more content on our on our um on our social media accounts and but it’s not super personal it’s not really empathetic so the human touch is needed to create that empathy uh based content and and use empathy-based marketing so an example of maybe content creative from sympathy based content would be graphics and ads something that talks about a promotion that you’re running I used an image here from mid-journey on this um graphic here where I didn’t have to
(24:38) buy this image or I didn’t have to have someone go out and shoot a photo for this I could just create it very quickly and easily I just I quickly just took the Beach Boys image that I created from mid journey and dropped it in here and just wrote a corny little headline whiten your smile like the bleach boys right kind of dumb but like right it helped me create this this graphic that I needed to just so I could put it out there and tell people about a promotion that I was doing also keyword optimized blog content is a
(25:09) lot easier to make with this and a lot quicker you can write a whole blog post you can tell chat GPT to include certain keywords so you can rank better in Google um so just being able to produce more of this quickly is a great way to use AI but when it comes to empathy based content this is stuff that you need to create on your own thinking about your audience thinking about the patients that you’re trying to reach this is that emotional relatable and um trying to make people feel comfortable when they come in your
(25:39) office so here’s a few great examples of content that people are making on on that side uh showing your your own great work that you do hi I’m Dr Janet Stefan from Park Avenue Orthodontics in New York I just wanted to share with you a case that I traded who had a very very severe open bite you can see how his teeth are not touching at all except in the very very back we finished his treatment with a very nice closed bite and facially it made a huge difference for this patient we treated him using Invisalign
(26:15) and we had a remarkable result maybe showing the culture of your practice [Music] you can tell that’s a fun practice that people want to go to the patient loves it there and they like to have a little bit of fun which maybe makes people feel comfortable focusing on the patient experience you know you really do change people’s lives through the Dentistry that you do and to show that and to show the relationship that you have with the patient can really go a long way and then of course showing how you do
(27:19) good in your community the Charities that you support whether it’s breast something for breast cancer awareness or oral cancer awareness or whatever your charity is to support your local community you know people like to do business with people they can relate with and um and companies that are doing good and helping others so you know this is something that you have to understand on an emotional level to be able to make that human connection um just to end uh this is the vice president of the senior vice president
(27:52) of Google said this when it came to to AI he’s talking about um he’s talking about how what AI can never achieve what humans can achieve and it says we’re sentient beings we have feelings emotion ideas thoughts perspectives we’ve reflected all that in books and novels and fiction so when they learn from that they build patterns from that so it’s no surprise to me that the exhibitive behavior sometimes looks like maybe there’s somebody behind it there’s nobody there these are not sentient beings so artificial
(28:25) intelligence will never achieve is it will never be a sentient being in order to build relationships well we need to understand our patients and we need to create content that will touch them in ways that artificial intelligence won’t but we can still use artificial intelligence to support what we’re trying to do I think it’s a really great tool especially creatively to help us come up with ideas help us come up with content giving us a starting point of the content we should be making but then we should always customize it to fit
(29:00) um to to create empathy based content customize it to who we are and the patients that we’re trying to reach so with that said um we’ll kind of take it now into Penny’s presentation of how we can then take those relationships in the office and um and enhance them from the technology to actually the experience in their office awesome thank you so much I’m hoping that when I share my screen that it uh that it shares it to the uh the right screen here so we’ll see uh absolutely you know it’s always great to practice
(29:37) uh thank you so much Blake I made it some additional limits today that I didn’t make uh when I was actually at the uh digital marketing conference so thank you for having me um I’m with the assist I’ll pepper in a little bit about what we do along the way uh prior to joining ESS does the chief growth officer I was a practice Management Consultant and coach for about 30 years and I still have the privilege of speaking at conferences around the country and uh I think I’ve even seen one or two clients that I
(30:08) worked with on the meeting today so um we do and you may say what in the world does this have to do with marketing and and marketing is communication right and the the real relationships one of the reasons that I’m so passionate about what we do the outsourced revenue cycle Services is is it frees us up we only have so much bandwidth to focus on more of the patients in the office being creative with our marketing that we’re able to do in the office and uh and actually I should have updated the slide we posted
(30:42) more than a than 12 billion dollars from insurance companies to patient accounts um we’re the leading Dental billing platform we’re super proud and have worked really hard for many of the endorsements that we have so um I’ll actually be touching on the human relations component uh former Dale Carnegie trainer so I’m a huge fan of really focusing on not only how we need to show up uh as far as being friendlier but also what we can do to make our patients really feel that uh that that’s evident and and I really believe that it
(31:20) will transform your practice internally because most patients don’t know great Dentistry they know how we make them feel and so unless they look in the mirror and they don’t like how something looks or something’s really uncomfortable they’re going to evaluate us or should I say judge us based on our interactions with them and so it really begins with the decision as far as those relationships of you know in our practice culture how do we answer the phone what sort of conversations do we have with the patients what’s the focus
(31:56) on those and and are they more on the social side or are we really segwaying and learning how to ask those questions in the right way to find out and uncover what it is that patients really want so um I love the work that my social practice does then and the tools that they’re giving you and hopefully you’re utilizing some of their services to help you attract those patients get the phone to ring get those patients to use your online scheduling systems and then once they begin their human interaction
(32:31) that’s really a decision about how how do we answer the phone when do we talk about insurance when do we begin to ask those questions and finding out what’s most important to them and I don’t know who who uh said this quote probably many people have you know a lot of people will strive to be the most interesting person in the room and yet what’s really most important is that we become the most interested in our patients the most interested Dental team as far as what’s most important to them
(33:05) and I’ve seen this happen in practice over practice where things will play out and you will even see you know it’s like the patient that was a patient in a practice for years and for some reason they go to another office maybe they had a toothache and and the doctor was out of town and they wind up doing treatment in that other office that they never accepted in our practice and there could be a variety of reasons for that I believe that a lot of the power is in in the questions that we’re asking them and
(33:37) so um I wanted wanted to go ahead and offer a tool uh earlier on and that can really help you guys in your office this is not necessarily something that I would have the patient still out you could it’s more of a conversation and and I call it the new patient profile I know you can’t see what a lot of the questions are on here it’s a guide you could definitely adapt those questions for your practice it’s very different from Blake what brought you in to see us today it’s more along the lines of what’s most important
(34:08) to you you know is hey it’s prevention’s important or right now cost is most important or I want to be out of pain or maybe what’s most important to me is I really want to build my self-confidence and so how I look and then there’s a few other questions peppered in there as well so feel free to go ahead and download that that could be a great team meeting topic for you to figure out if that’s something that you want to integrate into your practice conversations and then the other is in creating a
(34:39) culture where the focus is on real relationships and your patients feel it uh and and this sort of thing and you may think wow this is coming from the person that works for the insurance Outsourcing uh company maybe your practice is one that has decided not to take insurance uh and that’s a decision that every practice has to make on their own based on the market that they’re in and the marketing that they’ve done so if you’re going to do that then how do you deepen those relationships or maybe
(35:09) you are in Network and and your greatest concern is there’s a lot of other dental offices around here you know maybe they have uh more hours than we have maybe they’re open on the weekends how do we differentiate ourselves and create the type of practice where patients will refer their friends uh and not and keep returning for their visits as well so not only stay with you but go out and leave those reviews and become ambassadors for your practice so as I mentioned huge Dell Carnegie fan and one of his principals that he
(35:42) created many many years ago about a hundred years ago now make the other person feel important and do it sincerely uh super the sincerity uh is is really what matters so we can go through the motions uh we can teach a bot right to go through the motions and at times that’s appropriate we want to learn how to do that sincerely and so even on the telephone and I know that’s a cute puppy it’s just to kind of disrupt the uh sitting at your more than likely you’re sitting at a computer or standing at a computer
(36:13) um on the phone and in person do we sound friendly do we sound enthusiastic do we sound like we believe in the practice and then the doctors and it comes across in our body language and in our tone of voice and and so much about this especially if we are on the phone uh wear a headset right there’s that when you’re like this all day you know holding that phone up under your chin uh we may not come across like this is the place where we want to be so that is definitely one way that we can make the patient sincerely feel appreciated is
(36:47) that we showed up ready you know we showed up for game day we showed up ready to play and we’re really happy to be at the office and that enthusiasm is key and one of the most important things I’ve done a lot of speaker training I’ve done speaker boot camps for our team and I will tell them when you’re getting ready to deliver a presentation the most important part of that is being enthusiastic about your subject so be enthusiastic that doesn’t mean you’re bouncing off the walls right that that’s
(37:17) more of like a hyperactive the enthusiasm comes from here uh that you love what you do that you’re passionate about helping and so again it comes across in your tone of voice it comes across in your body language making eye contact with your patients when you can knowing when is an appropriate time especially if you’re in the clinical area where you could you know take down a mask to have a conversation and let the patients feel uh your enthusiasm for helping them so I’m going to introduce you and maybe
(37:51) some of you have heard me share this before to the smile ossophy and what I’ve found and maybe this goes back to Sesame Street my days of growing up watching Sesame Street we remember things that are funny or really unique or sort of cheesy and so this probably borders on the third thing the cheating Park uh and and it’s a fcmily so I’ll walk you through uh some steps to be sure and work on in your practice or maybe you’re already doing them and you could work to take it to the next level so uh s we’ll talk about the importance
(38:24) of using the patient’s name and making them feel important is the m i I am in charge of my attitude if we’ve ever had reasons now uh in today’s day and age to feel a little bit frustrated uh perhaps even with how we’re treated by some of our own patients that can happen yet we get to decide how we respond really listening to them I think I think we are are bordering on a listening crisis um AI in some ways May listen better than some human beings do like these little devices which if I called the one
(39:01) behind me whose name starts with an A or the one in my phone whose name starts with an S they’re always listening uh we we could do as well and then the E exceed their expectations and I’ll have some tips on that um using a person’s name makes them feel special unique and cared for and it only takes another moment even in the busiest of days to be sure that we know who it is that we’re looking for when we go out in the reception area take the extra time to take the photographs of your patient so that they’re in your practice
(39:34) management software and you know if I know that I’m going out and I’m looking for Blake uh I know who Blake is uh and so that that can right off the bat make them feel uh cared for and some of the best influencers are great with names I love to refer to television shows that that most of you may be too young to even know where I’m coming from and if you think about the show Cheers the bar that uh the scene took place I believe it was in Boston and when different ones would walk in you know they would call
(40:06) out their name but most popular would be nor you know so it’s this is the place where everybody knows your name and you can tell that they’re excited to see you that’s some of the best internal marketing that you can have so be sure and utilize the patient’s name when appropriate I’m not talking about violating HIPAA right I’m I’m just thinking once or twice while they’re in the office make sure that they know that you know them and they’re not simply in the next person in line so that’s the s
(40:34) and then the other is make them feel important and focus on their experience acknowledging patient life events I think is one of the best ways that we can do this and Old School uh as advanced as technology is sometimes old school uh still rules the day and I think we’ll be looking for more ways to utilize technology to help us figure this out so if we have a patient that was going to Hawaii let’s say they’re in our Dental chair today and they’re going to Hawaii next month will we remember the next time we see them to ask about
(41:09) the trip in the paper record at least in the office I worked in and what I would coach my offices to do we had a purple sheet you know where we could write little things like that so put that in your dental software make a point to go and look at it so that you know uh to follow up with them maybe they were expecting a baby or maybe you’ve heard that someone passed away so the human component is super important and then also of showing them sincere appreciation sending a personalized thank you note or maybe it’s using
(41:42) something in your practice uh software your your patient relationship software to send a fun little card even if you don’t can’t say hey thank you for referring Blake you could say thank you for referring your friend or thank you for for the referral they at least know that you’re acknowledging them so uh you could send a handwritten thank you note you could send a little flower arrangement and a coffee cup that has your logo on it uh operationalize some things that make it simple to do and then the other is and I learned this
(42:13) from one of my mentors my first business partner was and still is a practicing dentist and he made a habit more than any other dentist that I had ever been around to thank the patients every time that they came in you know hey thank you so much for coming in to see us today we know that you have choices about where you can come to have your done help taken care of and we appreciate you coming here and and do that with sincerity so that’s the M of the smilosophy this one this one might be one of the toughest ones maybe it’s only
(42:47) one of the toughest ones for me um is to realize that I’m in charge of my attitude uh every day we make a conscious decision about that maybe it’s on the drive to work and someone cuts us off well I was in a great mood right until I got cut off in traffic so uh realizing that this can make a huge difference when you’re engaging with your patient if you’re not in the best um if you’re not showing up at your best they may think it’s them and that happens I think more often than not you know people if they say well you
(43:19) know are you having a bad day or are you upset with me or are you mad at me and some of that tension does come across so you know whether we need to take that deep breath or take a lap around the office that can be super helpful as well and then really listening to your patients making that eye contact it can be difficult when we’re entering things in the practice management software or perhaps and I love my Apple watch um I try to turn it on do not disturb if I’m presenting or doing something like this because when it buzzes I want to
(43:51) look at it so being sure that when it’s appropriate we are maintaining that eye contact we’re deeply listening we’re rephrasing what the patients are telling us when appropriate and then we’re responding you know in a way that shows that we understand them what they’re feeling not only what they need yet what they want and the best communicators are the ones you know the best communicators online or in marketing materials are the ones that are attracting most of the patients the best communicators in the
(44:21) office are the ones that are having the best results and the greatest case acceptance and then exceeding your patients expectations and as I mentioned before they’re they’re going to judge us by uh our customer service level and also our clinical expertise they will unless they’re seeing before and after pictures or Blake as you mentioned reviews are super important um that’s what they’re looking at they’re looking at the customer service they’re looking at the reviews and I don’t know about you guys I really don’t
(44:54) enjoy leaving a review that’s not positive I will if I need to I actually left one yesterday uh for a nail salon that I went to and it wasn’t ugly it was just giving them some uh you know a little bit of feedback that I think maybe could help them but we we not only want to satisfy uh what it is that uh that the patients are coming in for we want to exceed that and I’ll give you because again there’s a difference in my mind between and I’m sure Blakey would agree uh in a moment when you come back
(45:24) on and we take some q a that there there’s a distinction between marketing and advertising advertising is a paid or maybe it’s something that you Bartered or effort of promotion marketing uh is encompasses more than advertising so advertising is a component of that the marketing is all of your patient communication everything from what’s written in your appointment reminders uh what is on your forms what and how and when you follow up with your patients so here’s here’s a tip and if you guys are
(45:59) in a practice that uh does crown and Bridge this would be something great uh that you could do and I’ll give another example for a specialty practice to a patient getting a crown is a big deal it’s a big deal financially uh it’s a big deal you know like emotionally curiosity my my 23 3 year old daughter got her first crowned a couple of weeks ago and she was like okay Mom what is this like what what am I having done so it’s again it’s an investment for them even though we may look at the overall
(46:32) scope of what a treatment plan could be if someone is paying a full fee let’s just say the full fee is two thousand dollars and there will make the math easy they’re out of pockets a thousand what are their expectations will they expect to be comfortable while they’re having it done right they expect it to function well they expect it to look nice what what are their expectations from us beyond that and many years back I went to one of these minor minor med uh places I had a cold and it was the weekend and I thought well I’ll go in I
(47:06) think it was a Walgreens Pharmacy saw the nurse practitioner got my antibiotics you know what I was back on my way what I wasn’t expecting even though I was you know my needs were met and I was satisfied I had a pleasant experience as far as that goes what I wasn’t expecting was a phone call from Walgreens uh it was either three or four days after I went and it was another nurse practitioner but they asked for me and you know and I was like did I forget something I think I picked up all of my prescriptions and
(47:38) they asked me they said we saw that you were in on Saturday and we wanted to check on you and be sure that you got your medication and to see how you were feeling and that’s why I’m actually feeling better and they’re like oh that’s great I said well that changes let us know and you know be sure to finish your medication and and it will take a few more days after you finish the prescription for you to fill the full effects of the medication and then they asked if there was anything that they could do for me and
(48:06) um and I was like no this is great and I said well take care and be well and at the time with my medical insurance I had to pay them and then get reimbursed so I happen to have the receipt and I went pulled it out of the drawer and looked at it and I think it was maybe an 80 encounter and I thought wow for an 80 encounter with something that I’m sure was automated or I’m sure between patients this nurse practitioner got a list of people with a little script about what they needed to do the impact that that made on me was
(48:36) significant and you know and I thought okay well if I do need to go back it wasn’t like I was going to run around and tell everybody about how great Walgreens Take Care Clinic was what hit me was how much more of an investment that our patients make in the practice uh than that visit and so whether it’s a new patient call uh prior to them coming in or calling a new patient at the end of the day or not only calling a patient that got a crown prep uh and what maybe it was seated that day not only calling
(49:08) them same day putting a note somewhere in the system and being intentional where hopefully it’s the assistant that assisted on the procedure makes a phone call one or two weeks later after they’ve the patient’s had a chance to see wow this is rough on my tongue or my bite doesn’t feel quite right and they may not call you yet they wait and you know when they wait until their next recare visit and now they’re not happy with you at all right and it may even influence whether or not they accept
(49:37) that next treatment plan for Orthodontics I know if adult friend of mine got braces a couple of years ago and I don’t think well she even told me she said I had no idea how bad my teeth were going to hurt and maybe because she was an adult they didn’t think to call and check on her that night or the next day within three business days she was so done with those she went back in and had them taken off now if she’d gotten a phone call I don’t know that that would have changed things yet look at some
(50:06) simple way that that is above and beyond what other offices are doing so that you guys can be the special group that does this and uh make that extra little effort that extra push to do the unexpected things your patients will not only appreciate it they will refer and they’ll gladly do it because they’ll know that that you provide an experience that others don’t necessarily provide so um we’re going to segue here into some q a and before I do that and I’ll we can leave this up for part of the Q a for
(50:42) this next one um if you’re interested in and Blake I’ll have you uh chimed in on this as well and learning more and uh have a peace of mind consultation I I love uh how you’ve framed this that if you’re looking uh to improve your patient relationships through uh utilizing my social practice to help you grow your top line revenue help you with the patient attraction uh this is definitely something that you I would want to take advantage of I think uh Blake you may be dropping that in the chat or maybe from
(51:16) some of the things that I’ve talked about you’re thinking you know what our bottom line revenue is not really where it could be you know maybe we don’t have the ideal uh situation as far as having a qualified Dental biller and we’re looking to Outsource our accounts receivable or maybe it’s Insurance verification which if it’s not done well can also be marketing if the patient doesn’t have great uh success with their expectation is being met there so we’d be more than happy to uh to connect with
(51:48) you on that and I appreciate the opportunity and happy to feel any questions from you guys so uh Blake would you like for me to stop sharing my screen yeah they leave it up for just me well actually I put I put a link in the chat you put a link in the chat yeah okay awesome yeah so go ahead and you can stop sharing if you didn’t get the QR code scanned just go into the chat and click on that link but yeah we’d love for you to um request a consultation we’ll reach out to you someone from ESS will reach
(52:18) out to you and we want to give you peace of mind so anything that we can help with your marketing or what you’re doing in your office and all the things that you assist provides we love to help you where we can awesome uh so one of the things that I was thinking about um Blake earlier when when you were sharing your presentation and uh and talking about the utilization of AI and and talking about blogging in general uh because I think well if most offices know that they should blog uh and how much that helps with SEO uh time it
(52:55) seems to be one of the assets that a lot of practices don’t have enough of um how often do you recommend that an office should blog uh and you know maybe you can touch a little bit more on and I know that you made an offer to them that you would you know help them do one with with AI how often should they do it and then maybe just recap a little bit on how they can use AI to help them with that yeah that’s a great question I actually get that quite a bit like how often should I be posting to my blog how
(53:26) often should I be posting to social media what’s a good amount um you know I’ve seen over the years it takes a lot of work and and all the data that I’ve worked with I probably over the years probably seen five dentists that actually great blog content like original blog content where they sit down and they think of the needs of Their audience and they write out a well thought through post it’s hard to do it’s hard to write and it takes a lot of time and I totally get it and um so there’s two options of what you can do
(54:02) you can hire an agency to create content for you and usually an agency will post maybe once a week you know you’ll get three or four blog posts a month and that’s just good to show Google that you’re active that you’re creating content that you know we can usually optimize these posts for certain keywords so just help your site rank better in your local area so in the blog post we’ll include you know Geographic keywords that people might search for if someone’s searching dental implants in
(54:34) Claremont California right then your blog post might show up first and so if you are not actively posting to your site Google just thinks that Google will stop recognizing your site and it just makes you go stale so if you can three or four times a month would be ideal so that’s why using tools like chat GPT to help you at least get a starting point on some of this and then taking that content and customizing it so that it’s you know there’s there’s certain sites that you can copy and paste you know you can use
(55:13) chat gbt but then you can edit it and then you can copy and paste into like a plagiarism site that checks how much of that content is already somewhere else and it’ll give you a percentage score and if you can stay low on the plagiarism and and create more original content I would recommend to try to do maybe three or four a month same with social media we recommend that you post maybe three times a week is what we recommend to practices and again an agency like ours can help you be consistent so you’re at least staying active and
(55:50) then you’re kind of throwing in some more custom stuff on top of what we’re already doing it’s usually what most practices like to do so that makes a lot of sense and hey I noticed we had a couple of um pinks here in the Q a uh someone was asking and I believe we are sending out the recording of the webinar correct yep we’ll send it out to all the registrants after this awesome and hey Dr Jackie McLean I saw your name on there I was happy to have you great and one thing I wanted to bring up that
(56:27) I really liked in your what you presented Penny was just I think it was the m stand for in smile again what was that uh make them feel important make them feel important so and I love how you talked about going above and beyond and doing the unexpected for patients because that’s what’s going to make patients really talk about you and one thing we talk about in my social practice is turning patients into promoters and raving fans of your practice and not only will it help them accept more K you know more more case
(56:59) Acceptance in the future of your practice but doing these small things will help them to talk about you to their friends talk about you online and tell everybody to go to your practice and so um I think that’s where social media has changed the game quite a bit isn’t that you can even do some of these small things by following them on social media you know seeing their posts about Hawaii and commenting and saying you know that looks like a great ship there’s so there’s so many things that we can do in
(57:32) between those six month appointments now to stay in touch to build relationships in a non-obtrusive way by leaving a comment liking a post responding to a direct message answering a web chat you know it’s it’s not just about turning strangers into patients that’s not what marketing is about it’s turning patients into promoters and that’s really what’s going to grow your practice and and everything online all these online tools really assist in helping you do the unexpected and the little things that
(58:05) will that will build that relationship that’s awesome well I thank you so much for having me Blake this was a lot of fun and I hope that we have opportunities to do more things like this together to help dentists and their teams yeah I agree we’ll uh we’ll definitely schedule something again in the future so well thank you everybody for coming and yeah like we mentioned this is being recorded and we’ll send this out we’ll send a link out to you and um the links in the chat if you want to come uh
(58:37) consultation with us and we’ll reach out to you and schedule that so thanks everyone and hopefully you have a good night and we’ll talk to you later penny all right thanks so much take care okay we’ll see
About the Author: Blake Hadley is a dental marketing expert and a key member of the dental marketing team at My Social Practice. My Social Practice is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Blake is passionate about helping dental practices grow through transparent and effective dental marketing services.
