Hi Product team,
I need to flag a potential flaw/drawback of the online booking portal that we have found. We’ve found that the messaging/design of the Portal is most likely losing us new patient bookings. The good news is, I believe it can be fixed fairly simply.
This wouldn’t be only us experiencing this issue, it would apply to other practice also, especially smaller practices with less potential capacity for total patients to be seen.
Context/Problem statement
We've had a significant growth in organic search traffic and Google ads traffic. Whilst looking into why that isn't converting to more New Patients, we found the booking portal starts off by asking if you are a new/existing customer --> What type of appointment are you after—> Choose your practitioner and see availability. Screen shot is attached of the next step "Choose a date and time".
Problem/Issue
At this point, if you don't have much (or any) availability for several weeks (as we do at the moment), most people lose interest and move to the next provider.
You can see in our example, it is showing no availability till 6th Jan (which is too long for most new patients to wait).
Usually, if people phone us, we will do our best to fit them in somehow - but we are finding as most people search online, they aren't calling and the increase in search traffic we've worked so hard for just isn't converting to bookings.
Possible solution
Could we make a visible banner just under the text in the attached screenshot "showing availability for....", to say something like "Don't see the time that suits you? Please call us on XXX and we'll do our best to help!". Its a really simple type of fix that could have a significant benefit to many practices.
Making it highly visible that we can provide another time, might not get 100% of those potential clients converted, but it could definitely make a difference.
Whilst I know the goal is to automate bookings as much as possible (not divert them to the phone), I think some practices with less availability are losing potential patients (which costs more in marketing costs and opportunity cost of lost income, than time spent answering the phone call to help...)
Marketing is getting increasingly costly and more difficult (in Australia, at least) as the demand for discretionary spending keeps reducing - it would be great to do what we can to not lose potential new patients where possible.
We have similar messaging on our website, but unfortunately Dentally portal is not customisable so I’m reaching out about this one in the hope you can address it.
