Highlights:
- Scalability: Using RingCentral Contact Center’s flexible and sophisticated tools, Heartland Dental supported offices plus their Patient Services Center can handle a million patient inquiries a month with ease.
- Sales: Integrating Contact Center with an artificial intelligence app, the Patient Services team is following up on missed opportunities—and converting 20% of them.
- Service: The company is using several Contact Center tools, from agent-performance scoresheets to automated phone menus and advanced routing, to improve the patient experience.
America’s Largest Dental Support Organization
Most dental practices do not have the in-house expertise, time, or resources to efficiently manage all the daily administrative tasks required to run a small business. That’s why more than 1,400 practices across the United States partner with the experts at Heartland Dental to support these non-clinical obligations, including IT, marketing, accounting, HR, regulatory compliance, and more..
Among the many services the company offers its dental practice partners, Heartland Dental provides a world-class overflow call center to handle inquiries when dental team members are focused on patients. Recently, Heartland Dental raised the bar on their call center by migrating the department’s 200 agents to RingCentral Contact Center.
Improving their supported doctors’ practices
Jeremy Stroud, Heartland Dental’s Vice President of Patient Services, explains that the company’s previous call center solution lacked the flexibility and features to help his team of agents efficiently handle the hundreds of thousands of inquiries flowing into their Patient Services department every month.
But with RingCentral Contact Center, he explains, Heartland Dental was able to easily create custom workflows to create just the right experience based on who was calling and why.
“We set up an automated menu in RingCentral Contact Center to let callers direct themselves to the right place, which is significantly improving outcomes,” Jeremy says. “If a caller identifies as a new patient, we let the call ring just a few times at the local practice before transferring it to our Patient Services team. We don’t want the practice to miss that chance to schedule an appointment.”
Jeremy’s Patient Services team also found another way to increase their conversion rate with new-patient calls. The company integrated an artificial intelligence app into the Contact Center environment, to identify and respond to viable opportunities.
As Jeremy explains, “The AI app reviews all calls that come into the Patient Services team, in real-time, and flags the ones from new patients where we might have missed an opportunity to schedule an appointment. Then the AI app sends those numbers into an outbound call queue for our agents, who typically respond within a few minutes. Here’s the incredible part: 20% of those callbacks result in a new patient.”
Improving agent performance
Heartland Dental is also leveraging several RingCentral Contact Center tools to monitor and improve agent performance. For example, the department uses the Quality Management Scoresheets, which automatically generate evaluations of agent performance based on recordings and analysis of actual calls.
“The scoresheets are great for two reasons,” Jeremy explains. “First, they give our Patient Services supervisors an easy way to review how the agents on their team are performing and where they might need coaching. They’re also a great way for us to show our supported dental practices that our team is performing at a high level on behalf of their practices.”
Improving the patient experience
Ultimately, Jeremy points out, the most significant benefits of rolling out RingCentral Contact Center have been the numerous ways the solution helps Heartland Dental create a better patient experience for the company’s supported dental practices.
“In the future, we plan to integrate with our practice management system, so that if a caller is an existing patient, the system automatically brings up a screen with that person’s profile and history before the agent picks up. That way, the agent can have a more personal, productive conversation with that patient right from the start.”
Additionally, because RingCentral Contact Center offers a user-friendly online chat interface, the Patient Services team has seen a 100% increase in inquiries via chat since migrating to Contact Center. As Jeremy explains, this represents a win-win for Heartland Dental, their supported practices and their patients.
“Because it’s a much more efficient way of communicating with patients than a phone call, an uptick in chat inquiries means our agents can be more productive throughout the day. And of course, that means they can help more patients.”
Jeremy concludes: “The thing that still amazes me every day about RingCentral Contact Center is that it’s enabling our Patient Services Representatives to handle inquiries for 1,400 different dental practices across the country—and increase our level of service more than ever.”
Originally published Oct 13, 2021, updated Aug 05, 2024
