Figuring out how to make your waiting room a little more exciting for patients shouldn’t feel like pulling teeth. The right dental patient communication software can be an added convenience to your practice and be highly effective with your patients.
Here are three key features to look for in dental patient engagement software for your practice and one service that can provide all three of them: UPshow!
What is patient communication software in a dental practice?
Cultivating relationships with your patients is about much more than just office visits and monthly mailers to remind them to get their teeth cleaned. It’s a process of relationship building that depends on your patients trusting you, enjoying your service and feeling that you are committed to their well-being.
However, doing this is easier said than done.
Luckily, dental patient engagement software can help. A patient engagement system is a set of tools that helps you communicate and interact with your patients in a hands-off but meaningful way. These systems can take many shapes; they include anything from online scheduling tools and reminders to on-premise trivia displays.
If you're looking for a way to keep your patients excited about dental visits, then you may benefit from leveraging the power of a patient communication software for dental offices.
What to look for in a dental patient engagement software suite
Interactive modes of dental patient communications
There are very few times to communicate with patients in meaningful ways. Speaking to them during their visit is reserved to sidebars over the reception desk and small talk in the examination room. Plus, because 36% of adults fear the dentist, many patients are anxious or distracted during your brief conversations.
If you’re looking to keep your patients in the loop about your practice, this proposes several challenges for you to overcome. Luckily, digital signage takes some of the pressure off.
Patient communication software—and digital displays in particular—allow your team to share information your patients need to know without pulling them aside before an appointment, sending them home with an overwhelming stack of brochures or turning your hygienists into salesmen.
You can remind your clients about updated billing practices, expanded services and more with a beautifully designed and captivating screen.
An independent patient outreach and marketing module or software
While we’ve all come to know and love our dentist’s postcard reminder on our birthdays to schedule a cleaning, you should consider bolstering your marketing strategy.
While direct mailers are wildly popular marketing strategies for those in the industry, it’s a technique that is most effective when it’s consistent. The problem is that an approach like this can cost practices time and money in a strategy that’s ultimately most effective for patients of only a certain demographic (namely, baby boomers).
Diversifying your approach to marketing solutions keeps existing patients in your waiting room and gets new ones through the door. The strategies you may have once relied on are quickly changing, especially as more millennials start to come in with their new families.
Mailers remain a great approach, but new research suggests that 80% of patients prefer digital communication. The most ideal strategy can maintain the strengths of tested methods and bolster them with new techniques.
Incorporating digital tools in your marketing and outreach approach is the perfect way to do this. And, best of all, it’s far easier than it seems!
Here are some ways you can use your digital display to step up your outreach and marketing game:
- Share live reviews and patient testimonials on your screens, and invite your patients to share their own reviews, too!
- Get your patients excited about new services and share a QR code to a consultation form.
- Create a social media or online referral program that offers existing patients incentives to share and promote your practice on their social media accounts.
A dental communication software that is accessible and easy to use
Dental communication software is meant to add convenience to your practice's operation, so it shouldn’t be another hurdle to overcome.
The solution you select should be easy enough that anyone can use it with no coding required. These tools should feature comprehensive dashboards, intuitive editors and content management systems that are simple to navigate.
This should be true for all aspects of the software you select, all the way from content creation to campaign analytics.
A few key features to look for when determining whether the software you’re interested in will be easy to use include:
- Integration with content creation platforms you are familiar with, like Canva
- Analytics tools that automatically compile your patient engagement data into meaningful numbers
- Fully trackable campaign features
- A wide range of streamable entertainment, including channels for news and sports
- Options for fully licensed, ad-free music streaming
Why UPshow is the perfect dental patient communications software
Display dental patient communications with the right digital signage
A big part of patient engagement is providing pertinent and interesting information. Why not use your on-premise screens to display it?
UPshow makes creating digital signage displays easier than ever. With full in-app Canva integration, your practice will have access to images, videos and premade templates that your team can use to create captivating displays.
It’s so easy, you’ll never have to pay someone to create content for you ever again! But, if you ever wanted to, UPshow has an in-house managed services team that can take care of all that for you.
Managing your displays is just as easy, too. You can create a schedule for displaying your campaigns with the Playlists feature, allowing you to plan display campaigns on a short or long-term basis so you can sort things out as far ahead as you want to. And, if things change, your schedule is easy to update.
Whether your practice is run by one administrator or a whole team, UPshow makes it easy for everyone to manage display content with role-based account profiles. You’ll never skip a beat even when you’re out of the office because you can easily monitor your screens from anywhere and at any time.
UPshow Connect provides trackable QR codes
Here at UPshow, we believe that you should be able to see a return on the investments you’re making at your practice. That’s why UPshow Connect makes all campaigns fully trackable, converting data into dollars and cents. How do they do this? With the power of QR codes!
Why do we use QR codes? Because they link anywhere and are fully trackable!
Tacking on a QR code somewhere allows your patients to access whatever content you want right from their smart devices. You can easily link them to pages for appointment scheduling, your billing portal or even to social media or review platforms to increase your testimonials.
UPshow Connect lets you create full QR code campaigns. And, with Smart Paper, you can infuse QR code technology into print campaigns, too! The codes on your screens will connect with the codes on your mailers, and you can absorb all that data with our analytics tools. You’ll be able to see how many people saw your campaign, whether they interacted with it and how long they interacted.
Access everything all in one platform
With so many features to explore and try, you might forget that you can do this all—that’s right, everything—from one, easy-to-use platform.
Through a single dental patient communications software, you can:
- Create and manage display content
- Implement QR code technology
- Track your campaign success
- Stream 500+ channels of entertainment in your office
- Play music in your practice
There’s no need to toggle with inputs, switch around cords, or spend hours trying to set up complicated display systems. UPshow allows you to make the most of a plug-and-play setup with new screens, or take advantage of the existing computers in your exam rooms to run the UPshow software.
From there, you can start streaming entertainment in your practice or educating your patients on dental hygiene tips. You can even do both with multi-panel displays!
There’s a little bit of everything for everyone with UPshow, so you never have to sacrifice one of your patient's preferences over another. All entertainment and music options are ad-free, licensed, and fully accessible at your fingertips.
Try UPshow as your dental office communication system today
A dental communication system that incorporates a dedicated patient communication software is the way to keep your patients and gather new ones. With so many new families sprouting up that are used to digital tools, you’ll need to keep up with digital solutions. That includes your signage!Looking for a way to make your waiting room a little more exciting? Try a risk-free demo of UPshow and our long list of engagement features today! We’re willing to bet you’ll be impressed.
