Dental Appointment scheduling setup mistakes every dentist should avoid : Effective appointment scheduling techniques increase productivity. The ability to increase productivity in your day-to-day dental practice is the result of a well-designed appointment scheduling system.
The goal of any dentist is to be more productive and help as many patients as possible. This can’t be possible by making mistakes in your appointment scheduling setup.
When setting up your appointment scheduling system, you need to be very careful and meticulous so that you don’t make mistakes that will negatively affect your productivity.
As a dentist, there are certain appointment scheduling setup mistakes that you should avoid to ensure your productivity. These include:
1. Double booking
Double booking is an appointment scheduling mistake that you must try as much as possible to avoid. Double booking is a situation whereby a patient books an appointment twice instead of once. This can cause irregularities in your calendar and also make you lose clients because the slot that would’ve been booked by two persons is booked by one person.
You need to ensure that one person makes only one booking. You can do this by integrating other third-party calendars into your appointment booking system. When you integrate third-party calendars such as Google, Outlook, or Office 365 calendar into your appointment booking system, you can then synchronize these calendars with your primary calendar in your appointment booking system. Synchronizing third-party calendars with your primary calendar helps to prevent double-booking.
You can also avoid double bookings by providing booking request in your appointment booking system. This allows clients to send booking requests that need to be approved first by you before the booking is complete. If a booking request is not approved, the booking can’t be complete.
When you do this, you will be able to view all pending requests and see if there are any double bookings before approving them.
2. Lack of reminder
An appointment scheduling system that doesn’t have a reminder feature is not an efficient appointment scheduling system. The reminder feature is a primary function of an appointment scheduling system. It helps to enhance your productivity by making sure that clients show up for their appointments.
If the system doesn’t have the reminder function, it will be unable to send reminder messages to clients. This will lead to increase in your no-show rates. You will begin to lose clients and money.
Lack of the reminder function in your appointment scheduling system can make you very unproductive.
Ensure that your appointment scheduling system has a reminder function. Do not use an appointment scheduling system that doesn’t have a reminder function.
3. No follow-up for rescheduling
Not following-up is a mistake that can reduce your productivity. You need to always follow-up to ensure that your clients show-up for appointments.
When a client reschedules an appointment, the system should automatically update you on the changes that have been made. An appointment scheduling system that doesn’t have this function is not complete. If an appointment is rescheduled and you’re not duly updated, you may not know about it. You may be waiting for the client on the day of the meeting not knowing that the meeting has been rescheduled by the client.
Ensure that you don’t make the mistake of using an appointment scheduling system that doesn’t have a follow-up function after an appointment has been rescheduled.
4. No online payment
No online payment is another big mistake that you can make when setting up your appointment scheduling system. An efficient appointment booking system should have a payment channel where clients can directly make payments when booking appointments. A booking should be completed only after payment has been made.
Using an appointment booking system that doesn’t have an online payment channel will make you unproductive. There are many drawbacks of using an appointment booking system that doesn’t have a payment channel. Avoid using an appointment booking system that doesn’t have a payment channel.
5. After appointment review request
You should always review appointment booking requests before approving them. You will be making a big mistake to just approve all booking requests without reviewing them.
If you don’t review booking requests before approving them, you may end up approving double booking requests from the same person.
Reviewing booking requests before approving them also allows you to check for clients that haven’t made payments. Reviewing booking requests allows you to approve only clients that have made payments.
