Heartland Dental
RingCentral Contact Center Helps America’s Largest Dental Support Organization Increase Revenue and Improve the Patient Experience
1 million
INQUIRIES HANDLED PER MONTH WITH RINGCENTRAL CONTACT CENTER
2x
INCREASE IN CHAT INQUIRIES, A MORE EFFICIENT CHANNEL FOR THE PATIENT SERVICES TEAM
20%
OF AI-INITIATED CALLBACKS TO NEW PATIENTS RESULT IN APPOINTMENTS
The thing that still amazes me every day about the RingCentral Contact Center is that it’s enabling our Patient Services Representatives to handle inquiries for more than 1,400 dental offices across the country—and provide a better level of service than we ever have.
Jeremy Stroud
Vice President of Patient Services
The largest dental support organization in the United States
By partnering with Heartland Dental, dental practices can transition many of their non-clinical responsibilities—IT, HR, marketing, accounting, etc.—to an expert firm that has built the economies of scale to manage these tasks more effectively than a small practice can itself. The unique, custom solutions Heartland Dental offers have proven so successful that the company is now the largest dental support organization (DSO) in the US.
Each year, Heartland Dental adds roughly 150 dental practices to its partner roster—either by helping local dentists form and operate new businesses or working with existing practices eager for help managing their administrative responsibilities. A few years ago, the company decided to add a new value-added solution to its customer offering: a single, more reliable phone system.
That decision, which led to the cloud communications solution RingEX, helped Heartland Dental improve communications for its supported dental practice partners. But the truly transformational benefit came later—when Heartland Dental migrated from its on-prem customer support system to the RingCentral Contact Center.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Effingham, IL
YEAR FOUNDED
1997
EMPLOYEES
13,000
A customer support solution that needed to be pulled
Roughly 40% of all calls to average dental offices go unanswered. Jeremy Stroud, Heartland Dental’s Vice President of Patient Services, explains that his department serves as an overflow call center for the company’s 1,400 supported dental practices across the country. And because many of those missed calls could represent new business, Jeremy explains, the company’s call center is a valuable service for its partners.
“Our research indicates that when a potential new patient calls a dentist’s office, and nobody answers, there’s a 75% likelihood that the person will just call another practice in the area,” says Jeremy. He adds that having a backup call center to grab those calls when an office’s staff is busy can mean the difference between the practice signing up a new long-term patient or losing that patient to another practice.
“The problem was, our on-prem call center solution didn’t have the advanced features we needed to create the right workflows for our Patient Services Representatives, our dental practice partners, or their patients.”
RingCentral Contact Center immediately adds value
When they rolled out RingCentral Contact Center, the Heartland Dental Patient Services team suddenly had the sophisticated tools to build the custom workflows that almost immediately began improving operations for their dental practices and creating a better patient experience.
“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.”
“We also understand that existing patients are the lifeblood of our supported doctors’ practices. So, when callers identify as existing patients, we let those calls ring a few more times at the practice before we grab them, because we want to give the local staff a chance to have those conversations and build those relationships.”
With all the call data RingCentral Contact Center gives us, we’re able to help our supported doctors grow their businesses. We can review a practice’s call volume, find their new patient inquiries are lower than those of similar practices, and start increasing our marketing efforts on behalf of that practice. We never had this visibility before.
Jeremy Stroud
Vice President of Patient Services
Helping agents become even more efficient
Another benefit of implementing the automated menu with RingCentral Contact Center, Jeremy explains, is that it prevents an enormous number of telemarketing calls from wasting the agents’ time and adding to patients’ wait times.
“Our dental practices collectively receive hundreds of thousands of calls each month through RingCentral Contact Center. Many of those are telemarketers or robocalls. Because we’ve set up this automated menu, we’re filtering out most of these calls, which means office teams and Patient Services Representatives have more time each day to handle real calls that benefit our supported practices and their patients.”
Helping to increase revenue for its supported practices
Heartland Dental has also taken advantage of RingCentral’s scripting and routing options to integrate an artificial intelligence solution into RingCentral Contact Center. As Jeremy explains, connecting these tools helps the Patient Services team identify and quickly act on potential new business opportunities.
The AI app reviews all calls that come into the supported practices, in real-time, and flags the ones from new patients where we might have missed an opportunity to set an appointment. Then the AI sends those numbers into an outbound call queue for our agents, who typically respond back to the patient within 10 minutes. Here’s the incredible part: 20+% of those callbacks result in a new patient.
Jeremy Stroud
Vice President of Patient Services
Jeremy adds: “Because we’re able to see what’s happening with patient inquiries—both across the company and at the individual practice level—we’re learning more than ever about how to improve our supported doctors’ operations and the service they’re able to provide. RingCentral Contact Center is helping us help our supported doctors deliver a better patient experience, which is the most important metric of all.”