Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Dental Marketing Drill is a podcast for dentists and practice owners who want clear, practical guidance on how to grow and market their practice in today’s digital world.
Hosted by experts from Web Marketing for Dentists, the show dives into the strategies, tools, and trends shaping modern dentistry — from patient acquisition and branding to technology, automation, and practice operations.
Each episode features honest conversations, real-world examples, and actionable insights designed to help dental practices attract the right patients, improve efficiency, and build long-term success. No hype, no guesswork — just straightforward advice from people who work with dental practices every day.
Whether you’re looking to refine your marketing strategy, understand new technology, or make smarter business decisions, The Dental Marketing Drill gives you the clarity you need to grow with confidence.
David Herman (00:15)
Okay, great. is a discussion between David Herman and Isaac Gorin. Together we have 37
years of advertising for dentists. Maybe 35. Let's be conservative here. It's not that much. It's not like we're old. We're definitely not old. We're very young.
Isaac (00:37)
Nope.
David Herman (00:40)
⁓ while also having, yeah, we did that for effect purely. I've also got a little bit going on there. This is actually.
Isaac (00:41)
I painted my beard gray. Yeah. It's like
a look experience, really,
David Herman (00:50)
Yeah, I've actually been in the sun.
It's going blonde again. I'm back to my childhood. ⁓ Okay, so we're going to have some ⁓ honest conversation about AI ⁓ and in particular, AI in terms of new patients and in terms specifically of answering calls, being on top of new leads in a way that's basically impossible for humans. It's right. It's only AI can do that.
Isaac (00:54)
You
David Herman (01:20)
And I wanted to start it off with this very, maybe I'm pushing it a little bit too much. New patients are choosing dentists based on speed to lead, right? And then why and what to do about it and the what to do about it is how are you gonna use AI? That's why I teed it up, but what do you feel about, am I being too aggressive in saying that that's how new patients are making their choices?
Isaac (01:48)
So, I my feeling about this discussion is really about my default is always to move away from product centricity, to not look at it from product. ⁓ You're definitely approaching it from a problem perspective, but I'd like to go further and kind of push the question of patient experience. Like, in my experience, and every one of us, think, can resonate with this experience, you're calling the doctor's office and you can't get through, and you can't get information, you can't get resolution, you can't get what you want.
Especially, mean, you're stuck when it's the person that you're having to work with that you've chosen to work with. How does that make you feel if you're trying to select who to work with? So that sense of lack of access, lack of experience, it almost gives you that feeling like they're not interested in talking to me. I call, I call, nobody answers. So now transpose that into the marketing experience. You have a patient on a journey who has a need. That need has gotten itself to enough of a boiling point that the patient is actually looking to resolve it in that moment. They're reaching out to that office.
What's their experience like now when again, it's just, it's a voicemail. What is this person going to call me back? I really want to get this taken care of now. Like what, what should I do? So what does a patient to do in that moment? Right. And that's where I think we need to kind of build the background, the context, because we're using a term of speed to lead as kind of like an industry insider term, but I want to kind of apply that to the context of patient experience. Right. So I I'm reaching out to a, to an office. How different is that experience when
Number one, I call and sometimes I call one, two, three times. We see on our side, right David? You can tell me, can speak to this. We see sometimes three, four, five missed calls from the same number. Do you wanna tell me that's not like an expression of frustration? Like a person just not being like, my God, can you please just answer the phone? Like I almost hear them screaming on the other side of the missed call. Please answer my phone, I just wanna, I wanna give you money to fix my teeth. Is that what, don't you want that too? You know, it's kinda like that's what's going on.
David Herman (03:40)
And sometimes we spin that as, how much we sold you on the landing page, they really want you. But it's probably more frustration than, wow, this guy is the one that I need. I mean, it's definitely an interesting problem. mean, the other thing instead of speed to lead is what I could have said here is, patients are very impatient. They're badly
Isaac (04:03)
Right,
I just wanted to explain what speed to lead means to us. means fixing that patient experience, right? I think, is that what you meant by it? It means appreciating that if I can give a patient a nice warm welcome when they're first reaching out to me, that's already maybe 80 % of the work of beginning to build trust and beginning to build relationship. mean, you see that one of the places where I see this expressed so pronouncibly.
David Herman (04:11)
Yeah, fixing the beginning, like...
Yeah.
Isaac (04:29)
is 50 % acceptance rate on treatment plan presentation. Really most practices are presenting treatment and only getting it accepted about 50 % of time. Part of that, yeah, it might be a presentation problem. It might be an affordability problem, but it might also be a trust problem. And maybe that trust could have been built better if you were able to just give them a better experience from the get-go, show them a sense of professionalism. Like I reach out, there's someone there. I can get in, it's available to me. It's a smooth experience and process.
David Herman (04:55)
Right.
Isaac (04:55)
I get
a sense this is a professional operation. I'm willing to allow myself to be put in this person's hands. But yeah, guess guide us through what you want to.
David Herman (04:59)
Yeah, 100%.
And sometimes if
we can answer the phone fast, usually because of AI, if we're answering the phone fast and we're answering the phone fast 24 seven, we'll promote that on the page and say, we answer the phone 24 seven. And people will go like, I bet they don't. And no, we do. And that makes people go, that's what I want from my dentist. I want them to interact with me very quickly.
Isaac (05:17)
Right. Right.
We should almost
get tongue in cheek in the ads, David, and just say, test us. You know, like, I dare you. I dare you to call me now at 12 o'clock at night. ⁓
David Herman (05:32)
Right, yeah, it's a good... Right.
But then you speak to AI, so everybody goes like, but it was AI, you know. I don't know, maybe it flips back at you. ⁓ But anyway, the idea here is, you know, people are very impatient. We know that people are impatient anyway. I mean, when was the last time, you know, you bought something on Amazon and you were like, no, no, no, send it to me in a week, right? It's like, no, yeah, tomorrow, unless you have to pay for it, right?
Isaac (05:42)
Right, exactly.
David Herman (06:00)
but most people are on Prime, you can get it tomorrow. Sometimes they say, I can have it there later today and they're not charging me. like, ooh, exciting. Everybody wants it quickly.
Isaac (06:09)
My kids
want to know how many stops away are they.
David Herman (06:14)
Right. So, so there's so much focus on speed and, ⁓ you know, they want to call, somebody answers, they book an appointment. Everybody, by the way, has this story. We hear it anecdotally from front desks. This person called. Yeah, two minutes later, I called them back and they answered the phone and they're like, I'm all set. Like I called somebody right after you and I'm all set now, which means do not try and pitch me.
Isaac (06:20)
Yeah.
David Herman (06:42)
on doing an additional appointment. I did the thing I was going to do. I got up my mojo, I called a bunch of dentists, and I got an appointment with a dentist. That's all they're trying to do. They're differentiating between dentists. Some people are at that level. A lot of people aren't. I mean, especially if they're in pain, or they have to do something, or they just want to get it done.
Isaac (07:03)
Yeah, mean, if
I've decided I need help, right, and I call an office, and we see what we were talking just now about the multiple missed calls, what am gonna do? I'm gonna just sit and hope that this person calls back, of course I'm gonna call another office, of course I'm gonna try to keep figuring out who's gonna give me attention, and I'm probably gonna be grateful, just automatically grateful to whoever is able to give me that attention first. There's a natural gratitude that's gonna be engendered there.
David Herman (07:26)
Yeah. Okay. Look, look at some of this data though. Some of these, some of these stats are pretty amazing. I think you dug up
this first one is from inside sales, which is now known as Xant, X-A-N-T. People are a hundred times more likely to convert when responding within five minutes versus 30 minutes. Now, now that at that level, by the way, I
some of our very good front desks could do that. And I think they do do that. They get back to them in five minutes, but
certainly not outside of normal office hours, and certainly not 100 % of the time. And I would say that even within those minutes, if you give somebody five minutes and they're doing a dial, they could dial another three, four, five. I mean, if people don't answer the phone, they're just dialing a lot. And what we hear as well, we have to remember this is 98 % of people that get through, they're a new patient, which is all we deal with, we just generate new patients, if they...
Isaac (08:02)
But.
David Herman (08:25)
If they hit a voicemail, they are not waiting. First of all, your voicemails dentists are gigantic, right? And take forever. So I can imagine people pressing one and it's just not jumping forward. don't know if you have that jump forward capability with pressing the one, but they wait for a little bit, but then they could be booked in somewhere else within the next 30 seconds. So they hang up and they just dial somebody else, right? That's what they do. So you can understand that that...
100 times more likely is totally correct. And I would say probably the quicker you could answer, the higher the chances that you're gonna be able to book them.
Isaac (09:04)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to note that we have, we've always talked about a difference in the patient experience based on where, what the need is, cosmetic versus, versus, ⁓ you know, some kind of emergency situation if they're in pain and they need to get out of pain.
They're motivated, they're calling and right now during office hours, normal times, if they're just deciding they want to spend money on their mouth, which is what most of us want, is those implant veneer cosmetic cases, they're going to wait for when it's convenient to look at stuff up and it's on the nights and the weekends, so you're not on the phone. You're not there at those times. Number one, number two, how often have you not had these offices that are just cruising, they're coasting, they have a rock solid, awesome front desk, then all of sudden it just falls off?
falls off a cliff, what happened? Someone on the front desk had a life event. They got sick, they got apparent issues. Life event that just took them off the game and then all of sudden they're off and now all of a sudden you're retooling and then all of a sudden everything drops off and you're wondering, hey, the marketing is not working anymore and things like that. ⁓ So the human factor is just, it's also, it's the 24-7 availability but it's also like AI doesn't have, you life drama like all of us do.
David Herman (10:17)
Right?
Isaac (10:17)
So those are things that are maybe more long-term, but they definitely impact the offices.
David Herman (10:20)
And
yeah, and I just want to mention that we will come onto later in another slide where this human element can slot back in because we're not saying take away front desk people, AI can do everything. We're saying let the AI do what it's good at answering within 20 seconds, 24, seven, 365 and booking ⁓ and let the human be the person that does the warm stuff, the fuzzy stuff.
Isaac (10:30)
Right. No.
And booking them.
David Herman (10:48)
calls, hey, how you doing, where do you live, my brother-in-law lives there, watch out for the road works on I-95, like whatever it is, like just to try to make that connection. Because in the end, we always say to the front desk, you guys are not salespeople, but you are neighbors. Like be neighborly, be warm, be nice, you know, you're just people who live, you're friends who haven't met yet, basically. So,
Isaac (11:14)
Yeah. Yeah, I think this
information seems accurate. You know what saying? In terms of the experience that we have
72 % of consumers expect immediate service responses. I mean, like you said, we're an Amazon generation. We need everything right now.
David Herman (11:23)
Right.
that's a HubSpot study, but I'm pretty sure that we saw a Google study with exactly that number in as well. So they've been doing a lot of studies on how immediacy is the most important thing, maybe self-interested for them.
Isaac (11:34)
Yeah. Yeah. Well.
Well, that's also why Google...
Well, remember that Google had that stat they told us. 70 % of traffic is mobile. And on the mobile traffic, your first paintful of content, if your first section on your mobile site doesn't load, within 2.9 seconds, remember, you lose something like 79 % of your traffic, or 59 % of your traffic, won't wait more than 2.9 seconds. It won't wait 2.9 seconds.
David Herman (12:06)
Yeah.
They won't wait. Yeah, they won't wait to three seconds.
Isaac (12:14)
for
your website to load before they've bounced. They've left. said, forget it. I don't want to wait for this to load. So it's clear they see it in user behavior.
David Herman (12:20)
Yeah.
And that number we heard, I don't know, five years ago, six years ago, it's probably descending rapidly, right? It could be below two
Isaac (12:27)
Yeah, a long time ago. Yeah. Right.
David Herman (12:32)
All right, and then patients call multiple practices at once. Whoever answers first wins. I mean, obviously I'm not saying
time, but a lot of the time. we hit, it's anecdotal.
Isaac (12:42)
Yeah, and wins is relative, but I think wins
their attention, wins their attention, wins their commitment, wins a chance at that patient, you know, that someone else might not get because they didn't get the call.
David Herman (12:52)
Okay, next one. ⁓ So the AI gold standard, I mean, for us is ⁓ within 20 seconds, you've answered the phone. When I say you, mean, your AI receptionist who we call Shelly. She's answered. And then for ⁓ form responses, we basically wait 30 seconds. We could do it.
in one second after you hit submit, you could have a response in your text, in your SMS folder. But we don't do that. And one of the reasons we don't do that is we want to make it seem like it's a real person. And honestly, on the SMS stuff, it is impossible to know that it's not a real person. I mean, it's just, it's very, very difficult. So ⁓ on the phone, I think some people are completely fooled.
I think some people know it's AI and continue. And then I think there are some people who know it's AI and asked to be forwarded to a human for whatever reason. And all of those things can happen. It's not that this is a, yeah.
Isaac (13:52)
Yeah.
A human. Yeah.
I've literally heard
someone on a call be like, hey Joe, listen to this, I think it's AI, look how cool this is. And just feel like it's really neat that they're talking to AI and getting booked by AI kind of thing. And it becomes fun for them. And other people are like, I think they're a little bit annoyed by it.
David Herman (14:14)
Right.
start to scream. I'm not sure that those are the...
Isaac (14:22)
and start to scream Is this a computer?
Am I talking to a computer?
David Herman (14:27)
I'm not
sure that these are the prime candidates as new patients for your practice. If they're screaming and swearing at some poor AI, you know, chip. yeah, lots of different responses to these things, but I think mostly curiosity and sometimes just no ability to discern that this isn't a real person. And certainly a lot of people...
Isaac (14:34)
Right.
David Herman (14:52)
Like you, heard somebody who at the end of the call, you heard them as they're going to hang up. They're like, you'll never believe this. I just made an appointment at a dentist using AI, right? And then they hang up. So you heard, you you heard that little bit at the end of the call. It's really nice. So, you know, achieving a hundred percent coverage, you're answering 24 seven to three 65 within 20 seconds with no failure. There's no
Isaac (15:18)
Let me ask
you another question too, which I think is a pretty deep question, but I think it's pretty relevant to what we're talking about. Everyone's using AI more
more in their life, in the applications that they use typically, in their search patterns, in their searching for answers to questions, information, advice. mean, AI is becoming so much more ubiquitous and adoption is so fast and great and profound.
I think people really feel helped by AI. So don't you think that it's going to become part of this expectation of, why aren't you using AI? You could just make this work for me. I need something from you. And if you just use the AI, I can get it. And we could just be done and we can move on. You know what saying? I almost feel like we're going to get to that place where people are going to have almost an expectation of, you're not using these tools to try to make things easier. Then really, are you qualified?
advanced, are you like, there's a certain sense of technological advancement also building a sense of trust with patients, you when they see the use of technology.
David Herman (16:25)
And dentists are purveyors of technology, They have a back room and we try to sell that as part of the marketing. What technology do you have? What great tools do you have? ⁓ They're using all sorts of advanced technology themselves. So it's almost like you need to have this because you are a medical technologist, ⁓ Very good point.
Isaac (16:50)
Yeah,
you're printing teeth in a day, you're doing all kinds of stuff. Digital simulations, 100%. The digital scans, the comb beam looks, just the visualization of the mouth and trying to show what's going on through technology. It's such a ubiquitous part of the dental experience. It just seems silly that you shouldn't.
David Herman (16:56)
digital simulations of what your smile will look like. Yeah.
Isaac (17:18)
you shouldn't apply that to the patient experience as they're trying to acquaint the practice.
David Herman (17:20)
Yeah.
Right, that's
true. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the front desk person. This many armed, yeah, many armed person with lots and lots of things going on. We actually made, we made this chart, which is to illustrate that there are bigger priorities that the front desk has than answering the calls that come from the marketing agency. I think the marketing agency is great, right? We're a marketing agency. We realize where we sit. The dentist calls you.
Isaac (17:29)
The human challenges. Yeah.
David Herman (17:52)
and needs help, you go to the dentist, right? He's your employer. There's probably somebody in the chair. He's got some kind of a problem that he needs you for. That's where you're going. Existing patients want to run their card right now. I have to run out to my car. You got to run it right now. Yeah, $20,000. Fine, right? You're going to run that car and leave the phone ringing. There are situations where even we will say, yeah, leave the phone. It's potential money, right? New patients have potential money.
Something goes wrong with the AC, the AC is down. Who's doing that? Front desk is doing it. The dentist is busy. And if you don't fix it, nobody's gonna wanna stay for their appointments this afternoon. So, you know, we just did three examples, but there's probably, you know, we think we're like 16th in line. There's just a lack of focus because nobody can do everything at the same time. So even when people say to me, you know what we should do? And we do this sometimes. Nine to five, we're open.
send it to the front desk first, and then we kind of do a rollover. So if they don't answer it within a certain amount of time, we send it to AI. We can do that. But sometimes I feel we should just send to AI and then let AI figure out if this needs to go to the front desk. Some people just want to forward. Or if it's something that AI can't handle, it's going to forward anyway. It's going to suggest, well, I can't handle it. I don't have the information for that. Let me forward.
I don't know what you think about that.
Isaac (19:18)
I think that's
an... I mean, I think that it kind of teases at an important point. think that everyone's knee-jerk is that AI is going to take my job. And I don't think that anyone can imagine that it can take their job. I think it's really meant to be another team member that releases some of the pressure from some of the parts of the job that shouldn't be as time-pressured.
You know, some of these things you can do a lot of things. You just can't do them all at the same time, all right now. The problem with the marketing leads with new patients coming into the practice is that it's extremely time pressured. There's a lot of other time pressured stuff you have to do. So you can build that relationship with a patient. You need your front desk and your team to build a relationship with a patient. You just don't want them to have that time pressure of having to drop everything and do that right now because it's going to create some havoc inside of the rest of the practice and other things that they need to do. If they're checking out a patient like you said here.
taking payments or they're like trying to, you know, taking a follow-up appointment or the dentist is asking to pull something for them immediately or, you know, help with someone that's in the chair or, you know, there's so many demands that are, you know, unpredictable and you can't really account for. So I think that's an important, you know, thing is to really think about the workflow, the process of how you're working with patients and how this fits into a larger workflow. It's not meant to replace it all. It's meant to be embedded inside of a workflow to relieve some of that pressure.
I think people don't think about it that way. They don't realize that it's meant to make your life that much easier. Even the front desk, the front desk is the first one to get excited about this and be like, ⁓ my gosh, is this gonna take my job now? No, it's gonna make you successful. It's gonna make you enjoy your job now.
David Herman (20:56)
Yeah. And the interesting thing is like AI is very, it's very focused on the task that you give it. And the task that we give to Shelly when she answers is your goal is really to book people in, get people to book and to commit to that time slot. ⁓ And she's very good at coming back to that. She never forgets it. Humans forget what the point is all the time. And you and I have had many conversations where it's like squirrel.
Isaac (21:22)
You know, one of the...
David Herman (21:25)
Right? We're just like off in the woods somewhere.
Isaac (21:27)
But you know, one of the biggest
surprises that I had listening to front desks, the biggest surprise is that it was often the best front desks, the most experienced front desks that were the worst on the phone. You know why? Not because they weren't nice, not because they weren't expert in what they were doing and they weren't totally knowledgeable and informative, because they played dentist. Too much knowledge. They played dentist.
David Herman (21:40)
Mm.
Too much knowledge. Yeah.
Isaac (21:52)
You know, the goal of that call is get this patient in front of a dentist, not try to help this person diagnose what it is and then quickly refer them to a specialist because it's probably going to need a root canal. It's probably how many times do we hear these guys, these girls diagnosing over the phone? And it's just, it's amazing that like the level of experience they have, the knowledge, the way that they're actually able to try to begin to diagnose the situations. You could tell that they're, they're, they're brilliant and they're expert and they have a lot of experience, but it's like, you've just derailed the whole call. Like that wasn't the point. Wasn't that.
The point was to get some x-rays, know? The point was to actually see what's going on. So you can stay on course with the AI a little bit more with the humans. It's so counterintuitive, but it's such a challenge for so many of our practices, right? They're like, no, I have the best front desk in the world, 25 years with us, and all of a sudden you're like, yeah, you need a neural surgeon, you need a root canal, you need a, you know?
David Herman (22:33)
Yeah, totally.
Right. Or also trying to work out based on somebody's accent or some of the questions that they ask if this is the right kind of patient, right? You know, I don't think this is our kind of patient. It's like, let's just get them in and like not commit to very much time, but let's see them and then make a decision. So that's what we like to do. This whole point is to try to get them in front of you where all of the power of the office that you've paid so much money for, to redecorate, ⁓
Isaac (22:50)
Can they afford it? Can they afford it? Right, yeah.
David Herman (23:13)
make it look beautiful, all of your staff, all of that effect gets to
have some effect on the new patients. So that's the point. Just going to some results that we've seen. we, yeah, we answered the phone 100 % of the time. And I think we did actually go down, remember there was an outage, there wasn't an AWS outage. And we went down and we missed like three calls or something on, you know,
Isaac (23:28)
This was awesome. ⁓
David Herman (23:41)
over all the clients that we've got. We missed like three calls because it was down for like 30 minutes. So we missed three calls. So it's true. It's not completely infallible. But we answered, you know, out of 100 calls, we booked 30 appointments on average. By the way, and you know, because you know the person that I'm talking about, but we had a 61 % booking rate for one particular dentist over a particular period of time with a very special offer that he had. People just wanted it, right?
Isaac (24:09)
Yeah.
David Herman (24:10)
Once they want
Isaac (24:10)
Yeah.
David Herman (24:11)
it, you're gonna get higher numbers than that. Do I have some lower? I think I definitely have some lower, especially when it's a tough area. If we're told to not book people that have Medicaid, for instance, it's hard sometimes to keep the Medicaid people out, depending on the area, depending on the offer, depending on the procedure that you're talking about. So sometimes it can be lower, sometimes it can be higher, but we at least have the numbers. So when we have a 60 % close rate, we can push that a little bit more. Let's do more of that.
Isaac (24:15)
Yeah, you're-
Yeah, no, it's-
The important thing is that this 30 % is an average and there's much higher numbers in there as well, I've seen, like you've shown me. What's most kind of impressive to me about this whole thing is that in every one of those numbers, they outperform the front desk on that first call on the booking rate. So regardless of what the rate is, if it's 50 % booking rate, if it's 60, 61%, in every one of those situations, the AI outperform the front desk, number one. And number two, I want to say,
David Herman (24:55)
Yeah, yes.
Can I tell it? Yeah.
Isaac (25:09)
Can we make a huge exclamation mark on the 70 qualified leads? If you don't speak to someone, they're not a lead for you. You don't know their name, you don't know their phone number, you don't know anything about them. You have no way of actually doing anything more with that person except for just calling the same number they called you on or texting. Here in this situation, you might actually, like you wrote, you get the reason for the calling, email, phone number, and you've also started them off on a positive experience. They might not be ready to book on that first call because they want to think about things or
David Herman (25:20)
Mm-hmm.
Isaac (25:39)
figure out the best time or talk to a partner or whatever it is, or work out their work schedule and figure out when the real openings are based on the information you gave them. But they're a lead and they've had a good experience because they called and they were answered. And that there's a higher probability of those 70 leads that didn't book, booking later on than there is if they were a missed call that you call back like, you know, 12 or 18 or 26 hours later.
David Herman (26:00)
Yeah.
Yeah, 100%. And you just see as well, a hundred calls come in and now the front desk job, right, to be human is call 30 people that already agreed to come in for an appointment and greet them, right? Welcome them. ⁓ You know, give a little bit of it. Just go and find out a little bit about them. Where do they live? They live near you. They live somewhere far. Tell them how, you know, how much time you think it'll take them at the time they're coming. Like whatever it is, you can be warm.
with 30 people, you don't have to chase them. They won't say, who is this on the front? Like they'll know because they've already been booked. They've already received a notification by text saying, you you're coming in at this point to this office. You'll get a call from somebody. So they're prepared for it. So this is a much nicer call than just calling randomly and hoping that you get hold of somebody who's maybe a, you know, a missed call. And then with the 70 qualified leads, you're right. You've just got so much ammunition in there.
You know their name, right? So hard for people to call back when there's just a missed call and your line is, ⁓ Hi, I'm calling from Dr. Phillips office and ⁓ we got a missed call from there. And they're like, well, this is a house with like seven people who live here. So I'm sorry. I don't know. ⁓ they forgotten already. Right. Happens so often. So everybody hates that. So if you get somebody who calls,
Isaac (27:09)
You called?
Or who are you? I called you when? You know what saying? Like who?
David Herman (27:27)
And you're gonna get some people in here, let's be fair, some people that you're never gonna call back again because they're gonna unqualify themselves. So I say 70 qualified leads, they could qualify themselves as the wrong kind of person. They could say, I'm on a fixed income, I have Medicaid. So you're like, you know what, if you're gonna call those people maybe to be nice and give them advice as to where they should go, which would be a nice thing to do, you get brownie points for that, but they're at the bottom of the list for callbacks, let's just say.
so yeah, so I think that's, that's right. Zero missed opportunities. It's just a no brainer, but it actually, what we find as well is the greatest success here is when the humans, right, get involved with the AI here and go, ⁓ now I'm called for, I need to seal the deal on that person showing up. Cause people don't show up for AI. They show up for, you know, Sandra on the front desk.
because Sandra was lovely. They're showing up to say hi to Sandra. I'm looking forward to seeing you on Friday at 10 a.m. Okay, I'm coming in. And then when they come in, you're like, continue on that conversation that you already were having ⁓ with Sandra. And then Sandra passes the baton to the dentist, and now you're gonna come back for the dentist. But it has to go from human to human. I really feel it's like a baton that gets passed, and you can't drop the baton, right?
So, and dropping the baton is missing the
Isaac (28:54)
Yep.
I think the foundational question that was kind of lingering in the back of my mind is like, you're a business owner, you need to figure out, is this really... It's solving a problem, right? For sure. In terms of missed calls, in terms of booking more appointments and things like that. I think that the foundational question is, is it providing a better patient experience?
David Herman (29:17)
Hmm.
Isaac (29:18)
Do
the patients feel better about the fact that AI answered their phone call and tried to book them in, or do they feel worse about it? What does it do in that respect? And I think that question, and I'm curious about your opinion, ⁓ that question really is...
function of how you build the team around it and you think about your process. It's up to you to kind of architect the experience intentionally, you know, and to know what are the different stages of that experience and how do I build that in a way, the cadence, the timing, the messaging, the things that I need to do to really create the right patient experience. think that the ultimate goal of a practice is obviously to treat patients, but also to turn those patients into
real advocates of the practice, that they should go out and want to tell the world that this is the best practice in the world. That really takes a holistic, unified team approach that's thoughtful and that's intentional, that all those stages. I think AI, in my opinion, is a massive win in that respect, even though people might have the knee-jerk of, gosh, I'm talking to AI. Yeah, but you're actually talking to someone when you called the medical office. When did that ever happen to you previously, if it wasn't for AI? You're always talking to machines and then,
David Herman (30:30)
Right.
Isaac (30:31)
You've seen that funny meme of the person screaming into the phone, know, receptionist! know? God, I'm talking to a computer receptionist! You know, when you're stuck in that circular, like, press one, tell us what your problem is, press two, tell us what your problem is. Here, I think you've really solved that, you know?
David Herman (30:47)
⁓ yeah.
That's a very good point to bring up, by the way, about the press one type stuff. There are two other systems out there that I come across a lot. There's still a lot of press one for this, press two for that, press three if you want to go back to the previous menu. Everybody hates that, right? That's the worst. We would rather have somebody from a call center in the Philippines answering the phone than that.
Right. We want to speak to a human rather than press buttons. There's another version of like low level AI, I guess, which is it's like voice registration software somehow. Banks have it a lot. I think I had it with Chase once I called Chase. I'm like, yeah, I'd like to speak to somebody in the mortgage department. And it's like, I'm sorry. I could not tell what you said. Please repeat it. It's like,
Whoa, if you don't understand when I'm speaking English at a normal volume, what I'm saying, that is so annoying. It's like bad AI. There's a lot of that still out there. There are a lot of companies that installed that company wide and chase is not, you know, it cannot move that quickly with so many lies, lines, and so many different, you know, possibilities for how the call goes. They're probably working on it and it's going to get better probably within the next 12 months, but they are stuck.
Isaac (31:44)
Exactly.
Yeah.
David Herman (32:13)
But this is the latest and greatest. ⁓ What we're using now, one of our engineers actually, who works on the AI voice piece, actually put together AI voice systems for Reddit. So Reddit has a call line that he's actually been involved in. And the Reddit engineers who are known slow pokes, they're impressed by what he's doing because it's so good compared to what they had in the past.
So it's like, is really top level technology. It's not just yesterday's recycled voice recognition software.
Isaac (32:53)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. That's true.
David Herman (32:56)
⁓ you know what,
one other thing that we should talk about as well is that answering the phone is not the only function of the AI system. So there are other moving parts. So answering incoming calls in a way is the easiest thing to do, right? Because these are, calls are always our best leads, right? We always want, if they're calling, probably you've got a chance to book them. You're to have a face-to-face interaction.
Isaac (33:06)
Right.
David Herman (33:23)
When somebody fills in a form or they have a chat online when they're a little bit at a distance from you, those are harder to follow up on. There's certainly also a little mind numbing for the front desk if there's a high volume of them. I think this is where results on Facebook are often like this, where you're like, yes, you have 300 leads in one day. It's like $4 per lead. It's like, wow, that's amazing, I have 300 leads.
but now you have 300 leads, right? So it's kind of scary. like, well, who's going to go through all the leads? How can we prioritize these? So the way that AI works is it can very quickly send SMSs. It can very quickly make outbound calls as well to see if those, you know, is the phone number valid? Does it ring? Does it go to a voicemail with a, ⁓ kind of a standard response like, you know, please leave a message after the tone or is it a human?
that's actually recorded their own voice message. So you know it's maybe somebody's personal line. So we can find out all of this information and that's kind of the other side of this is working those tougher leads as well. And that's kind of all built in. And honestly is really in development, I think. So, do you have any thoughts on that side of things, the non-incoming leads?
Isaac (34:51)
Yeah. Again, you know, it's so much easier to have a tool that allows you to identify the successes, right? Like we know that you're going to be more successful calling people between 5 and 7 p.m., right? If you want to call them back, if you want to do the outbound calling. Well, good luck finding a human that's entire job is to only make calls during 5 to 7 p.m.
David Herman (35:11)
Right.
Isaac (35:12)
You
know I'm saying? And like just during those two hours. So just the flexibility you have with AI, it just allows you to really architect whatever you want it to do. The app on side, on the multiple touch side, the messaging side and the tonality side, know, text messaging together with calling and having it be working unison. Like you really think about it. It's really, that automation is really designed for this, for right now. Cause people also sometimes just need a reminders. just...
We're also bombarded by so many things distracting us at every moment. It's a benefit to me when someone reminds me about stuff that I want to do anyway. They called the office, right? Let's not forget that. People get stuck on, I have to keep texting them, I have to keep calling them. Well, the reason why you're texting and calling them is because they called you first. The reason they called you first is because they needed something from you. Why are you assuming? Because this is annoying for you. It's not helpful for them.
David Herman (35:41)
Yeah.
Yeah, they started it. ⁓
Isaac (36:08)
They started it. That's great.
Yeah, totally. That's my thought.
David Herman (36:13)
Yeah,
yeah. think we're just, realize as well, we're so at the beginning of finding out how the soft skills here can really help. Somebody asked me the other day if we could do, a Canadian dentist actually said to me, can we do a British voice? Because we feel like a British voice is really like ups the level of our company. And I formerly had a British accent ⁓ when I was from there. ⁓
Isaac (36:25)
Yeah.
You must have loved that
request.
David Herman (36:44)
And now I've adapted. But it was really interesting as well because they're Canada and they're part of the Commonwealth as well. I was like, really? Like you guys want the British accent? That's kind of an upmarket thing now. ⁓ Really interesting, but I would be interested to know what happens when you add an accent. We actually have some amazing success with humans that have accents at some of our dental offices.
Sometimes accents that we find, we're like, ⁓ not sure if that's gonna, you know, work so well. The English is not absolutely the best, but some of these people are amazing closers, amazing. And the accent is, I sometimes think is it almost a benefit that they have an accent that somehow, I don't know, there's...
Isaac (37:12)
Yeah.
Maybe it's a nice breaker.
Maybe it just creates a sense of interest, a personal human interest, you know, in the conversation.
David Herman (37:38)
Right.
Yeah, so I don't know, we have options to do that. We're actually using a female voice right now. There's a question about should we use a male voice? Should we try a male voice? Would it make a difference? I sense that there are...
Isaac (37:50)
There's a question of whether or not
when you feel that a person knows it's AI, you can actually gamify it too. And say, you can have a lot of fun with me too. If you'd like, I could sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know what I'm saying? And have them choose an accent. You know I'm saying? I've heard people beginning to do stuff like that too. Finding a way of just making it fun and agitating too.
David Herman (38:01)
Right? Yeah! So there's a...
Yeah, there's also that whole idea of like ⁓ reciprocating the way somebody else is talking to you. So if you fold your arms, right, I'll fold my arms as well. if you, you know, if you're sitting with your legs, I'll cross my legs. And the same thing I think applies to voices as well. Certainly I know that quite often when you get, when you have call centers, they've got quite sophisticated technology to try to get you to somebody who may sound like you, right? If you're calling from Georgia,
Isaac (38:39)
Interesting.
David Herman (38:40)
they'll try to get you with somebody who has more of a Southern accent. You may be from New York, they're just taking a wild guess, right? But they're hoping that that will work out better. This could actually work with AI on the fly. So as AI talks to you, slowly their accent shifts. So it becomes much more Southern as they're talking to you and they establish, no, this person definitely has a Southern accent. You just like replay back the same accent that you're hearing. So there's immediately a connection, even...
you know, subconsciously, that would be totally fascinating. We've got to do some experimenting with that.