Your on-hold messaging might be the first thing some of your callers hear when they reach out to your dental practice. It’s important that any information they get while on hold is valuable and useful to them. But sometimes, just having an on-hold message playing for someone isn’t in itself going to be beneficial, especially if that message is out-of-date!
3 Reasons to Update Your On-Hold Messages
It’s not unusual for dental practices to create content for their message on-hold programs that’s intended to be evergreen, but much like life, your practice is inevitably going to change. If you need any reasons to update your message on-hold program, don’t click away.
Here are our 3 top reasons for keeping your on-hold messaging up-to-date:
1. It Keeps Your Patients in the Loop
If you’re making any changes at your practice that are going to affect your patients, then you’ll want to include information about those changes in your on-hold messages. Adding hour changes, new policies, new team members, or any other important practice update to your message on-hold gives your callers the heads-up they need
2. It Can Help Prevent Costly Misunderstandings
Imagine a caller hears a message about your office hours, and assumes that they can stop by at a certain day and time to pick up a special sensitivity toothpaste they can’t find anywhere else. But when they arrive at your office, they find that you’re closed. It’s the week of a major holiday, but your message on-hold program wasn’t updated to reflect your special holiday hours!
While this might seem like just a minor misunderstanding, the patient in question could be quite frustrated and disappointed. Maybe they had to alter their schedule so they could make the trip to your office. Regardless, issues like this one can cost you patients, because to the patient, this oversight demonstrates carelessness.
Had you updated your program, this caller could have planned accordingly and avoided the frustration of finding you closed when they thought you’d be open.
3. It Makes You More Trustworthy
Keeping patients up to speed on changes at your dental practice means they can trust you to do so all the time. Being a source for reliable information is a good way to build loyalty with your patients and demonstrate your consistency, capability, and trustworthiness. If you’re a dental patient and your practice is dropping the ball on several occasions, you’re probably not going to stick with them for very long (and you’ll be sure to let your friends and family know, too). If patients can’t trust you to relay critical information, then why should they trust you with something as important as their oral health?
The Best Time to Update Your On-Hold Messaging…
…is when you need to make updates. There’s no right or wrong timeframe for updating your messages, as long as you stay on the ball and make changes in advance to avoid blindsiding and misinforming your patients.
The most important thing is having content that accurately reflects what your practice is doing and offering, and is always relevant to your patients’ interests. If you’re uncertain about everything in your messages being up-to-date, you should review them for inaccuracies. Taking the time to do this will save your practice the trouble and stress that might otherwise occur if you’re giving patients inaccurate information.
Need Someone to Help You Make On-Hold Messaging Updates?
That’s what InTouch is here for. Our scriptwriters and voice talent work together in-house to create custom on-hold messaging for dental practices and other businesses. We also offer a Flex Plus Membership to clients who want to make unlimited changes to their programs for one annual fee. To learn more about our on-hold services and Flex Plus program, get in touch by calling (877) 493-9003.