How To Practice Owners Can Implement Missed Call Texts To Help Improve Their New Patient Generation

Introduction:

I wanted to write a quick article to show practice owners something we use without clients that own a physical therapy or chiropractic practice.

This is something called a missed call text. And basically what this is, is that when somebody calls you guys up, say, I'm a potential patient and I'm calling you guys up and I want to schedule an appointment, or I have a question on your services or anything else that would be calling you for. And you guys, obviously you're not available every second of the day or every second of the working day.

And maybe your front desk is already on the phone with somebody or they're helping somebody in person. Maybe you're a solo practitioner and you're handling everything and you're treating a patient right now. 

So this is a text that gets sent out when that call doesn't get picked up. Because, look, these people, they have an urgent question or need. Maybe they want to schedule an appointment, and that amount of time that they call you is the only amount of time they're interested in you. 

So you need something if you can't pick up that call to keep their focus on you guys. And so that's the missed call text. And again, you don't want to miss out on their business because you weren't available in that second. Most of us are not available the precise second everybody calls us, right?

We can't just drop everything and answer the phone and tend to whoever's needs or questions. So we need something to kind of help us out. And this will also automate some of your front desk work.

How It Works ⚙️

Basically how this works is that when somebody calls you and you guys do not pick up, a text gets sent to their phone.

A text gets sent to that phone number saying anything like: hey, we're so sorry we missed your call. What can we do to help? How can we help you? Are you looking to schedule an appointment? Are you looking to have a question answered? Do you want us to call you back as soon as possible? What is it that you're looking to have done? And also feel free to text number back because this is a real person texting you, or there is somebody real going to respond to you.

Implementation 📝

All right, so let's jump into setting this up. You guys can use whatever software that allows you guys to send a text.

I recommend texting over emailing for this just because they will see it faster. When someone is calling you guys they aren’t going to hang up and immediately check their email. But if they were to get sent a text right afterward their phone would buzz, right? And then they would look at that and stay thinking about your practice. So I recommend texting over this one over email. All right, so let's jump into setting up.

We're going to use something called Follow Up Helper (www.followuphelper.com) to build this in. You guys can use whatever you have that lets you send texts and make a text campaign because that’s what we're going to do. 

The first thing I am going to do is create a campaign from scratch. Then the main focus becomes the trigger. 

A trigger is what tells the software to perform an action. For example, if you want to send a text to someone when a certain tag is added your trigger would be when the tag is added. 

For this specific situation we want to trigger to fire when someone calls your practice and no one picks up. So we are going to select the trigger to be “Call Status” and then filter it to be incoming calls that have no answer.

This is probably the hardest part of the entire sequence so if you guys get stuck anywhere or have any questions shoot me an email at thomas@followuphelper.com and I can help you out. 

The next thing to do is to add your action. For this sequence that action is to send a text out. So select the text option and then open up the text editor. 

In the text you want to say something along the lines of: 

“Hey [First Name], this is ____ with ______ and I just saw we missed your call. How can we help you?”

You can also change it so ask if they wanted to schedule an appointment, speak to a therapist, have you guys call them back, etc (see the pattern here?). 

You could also choose to keep the conversation happening over text by asking them to reply back to the text you sent and letting them know that they will be chatting with the front desk staff or one of the therapists.

You guys can go a bunch of different routes.

Again, that main route starts off saying, hey, whatever their first name is. So sorry we missed your call. What can we do to help?” And then you can go to “do you want to schedule an appointment. You have a question, you want to speak to somebody on the phone”, aka us, give you a call back, and then those can all route through your front desk.

What you can do is have your texting software pulled up on a computer for your front desk and have them reply to texts when they come in. It should only take a few seconds to respond to a text. 

Recap

Just to recap, in case you guys just skip to the end of the article just to figure out what it is. This is something that when a potential patient calls your practice and you guys do not pick up, this sends them a text. 

Let's say they just Googled Physical Therapy or Chiropractor in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they saw your number, they just clicked on you on Google. And we're like, all right, let's see if they pick up. You guys happened to be busy and couldn’t pick up the phone, but that’s a potential patient right there so something needs to happen. 

As soon as they hang up the phone or leave a voicemail or whatever it is, they get shot a text that comes straight to their phone. And when they click the hang up button, it goes back to whatever screen they were on with a new notification for a text from the practice they just called. This way you guys keep their attention and work them towards scheduling an appointment even if you can’t pick up the phone. 

Because if not, they'll just go and click the next physical Therapy practice or Chiropractic practice on that Google list. Maybe that other practice picks up and then you lose a potential patient, right? And so that's no good. That's no fun.

We don't want that. We want as many patients to come through your front doors as possible for free. 

So give this a try. It takes maybe five minutes to build out. If you have any questions or need any help, let me know.

If you need help implementing any of this or automating this sequence let me know. I am happy to help, just shoot me an email at thomas@followuphelper.com! 

Create A Missed Call Text Checklist:

Here is a quick checklist to get you started with you missed appointment text.

• Launch the texting software you are going to use (we use www.followuphelper.com)

• Create a new campaign from scratch

• Set your trigger (the action that the software looks for to start the sequence)

• Create your missed call text

• Publish the campaign

• Start using your new missed call text campaign!