Over the years, maybe three years ago, when online booking sort of became popular, back then, sort of like a novelty. In today’s environment, it’s actually become a necessity. Because young patients, young people, they often go, “You know what? I don’t have time to call the practice.
To go forth and back with my calendar and their calendar to figure out a time that I want to make a booking.” They just want to go online to the website and just make a booking. Because they know their own calendar, they know their own schedule they just want to say, “What dates are you free? I’m free like this, I’m just gonna make a booking.”
All right? And online booking’s not the same as like a web form, where you just fill in your details and what your preferred time is. It’s actually to lock yourself into the calendar, so I know I got a spot, right? And this is especially important during a public holiday e.g. Christmas era. There are so many practices that might be closed. I just want to find out who’s open. I just want to book myself in. So online booking is now a necessity. No longer a novelty anymore, and our experience is that we actually help our clients implement online booking.
And after we implement the online booking, we notice a 350% or 3.5 times the engagement of the website. In the past, you come to the website they just click on the phone to call or fill in the webform. But after online booking suddenly you have all these extra clicks, all right, to allow the visitor to make a booking for themselves. And that’s why online booking is an absolute necessity.
And there are two types of online booking. There’s the online booking through a third party website, such as HealthEngine, which still requires some kind of manual intervention for the receptionist to enter that information into your practice management software, all right. At least the convenience is for the visitor, all right.
Now the other one is whether you’ve got Dental Window, Exact, Praktika, all these practice management software, often they have online booking features themselves. All we have to do is enable it, and create the link, then we’ll put it onto the website and that will allow your patients to make online bookings themselves.
So we’ve got plenty of other videos similar to this where it helps you with the marketing of your practice. Either subscribe to us on YouTube or like us on Facebook and be notified the next time the video comes out.