While working with many dentists and Dental offices to build their Chatbot strategy, one recurrent confusion and dilemma is the role of live chat vs. chatbots. A chatbot is an AI program that automatically responds to the user (patient), whereas in live chat, there is a human agent (for example, a receptionist at a dentist’s office) that chats with the user.

We have found that about 80% of small healthcare businesses (for example, dentist or podiatrist offices) prefer a pure chatbot solution for the relatively small number of patients that will request live chat each day. Then the percentage decreases to about 50% for medium-sized companies.

Most of SmartBot360’s dental customers are small dental offices with 5-10 employees, and at first, most appreciated the idea of having a chatbot to engage website visitors 24/7, however, most were reluctant because of worries of needing to hire an extra person to handle extra chats and customer service requests. This prevented many from deploying a chatbot on their website, but once we gave them a demo and customized a chatbot for their website, they realized it was a lot less work to maintain since the chatbot handled most chats by itself while increasing overall conversions.

Benefits for Dental Office

According to the data we compiled from our customers that use our chatbot for their dentist office, the chatbot acquires 20% more leads and 24% new appointments for their dental practice than before they used SmartBot360.

Having a chatbot on your dentist office’s website allows you to get more out of your marketing spend by giving visitors a way to instantly receive help and answers by chatting with the chatbot. SmartBot360 takes advantage of AI and natural language understanding to learn common questions and provide tailored responses based on previous interactions. The bot can then route the conversation to the appropriate person after collecting relevant information or if there is a unique, complex dental request.

There are many ways to customize a chatbot for your dental practice. Common uses for our dentist office chatbots are to engage all website visitors 24/7, act as a quick way to search and get answers, screen patients, or schedule appointments. SmartBot360 comes with pre-built dental office templates to make it as simple as possible to deploy a working chatbot on a website without any code. Have the chatbot do a mix of all common uses or customize it specifically for how you want to interact with website visitors.

When having a chatbot engage all website visitors 24/7, it naturally captures people that are looking for info and more open to trying out a new dentist, whereas if there was no chatbot and not enough information on the website, visitors are more likely to move on to another dentist website for more information. 

A chatbot for your dentist office not only improves cold website visitors to new patient conversion rates, but also retargeting conversion rates. When a website visitor interacts with the chatbot, SmartBot360 works with other tracking software and enables you to retarget visitors that interacted with the chatbot. Being able to segment and retarget people that interacted with the chatbot has also led to an increase in retargeting revenue for most dental offices as well.

HIPAA Compliant Chatbot

SmartBot360 was developed solely for healthcare practices by making HIPAA Compliance our number 1 priority (See more HIPAA-Compliance info here). Other popular chatbots were made more for simple businesses like SaaS or e-commerce and do not usually uphold the strict HIPAA regulations. With SmartBot360, you can take advantage of an AI powered chatbot and know your patient’s info will be kept secure and private without having to do anything extra.

Our platform also makes it so that you can use other SMS/messaging services like Facebook messenger, SMS, or Whatsapp, but when protected health information (PHI) must be exchanged, a secure link is sent to switch to a secure chat. 

Try a chatbot on your dentist office’s website for 2 weeks to see how a chatbot can convert more of your website visitors. SmartBot360 also has pre-built templates for your dental office that you can use during a free 2 week trial. Deploy a bot on your dental website in less than 1 hour with no coding required.

It is easy to customize the template for your exact needs with our flow chart chatbot builder. Our chatbot is simple to set up and easy to deploy on your website, but can also integrate with your CRM, appointment scheduler, and tracking. Do it yourself or have our team customize it for your dental office’s needs. 

Our HIPAA compliant chatbot has ready to use dentist office templates and many more chatbot templates available for free with every SmartBot360 account.