Jan
16
One year ago, Archer Dental in Toronto adopted Dental Attendant chatbot and it was our first big test. What we learned while helping this busy dental practice in Canada’s largest city helped us improve our AI software for dentists across North America.
Working together with Dr Natalie Archer, we customized the system and developed branded responses to frequently asked questions and other queries. We put a lot of work into getting it set up and then made changes incrementally as we went along. Readers can see, in the table provided below, how we steadily built-on our successes slowly month over month. We added more robust analytics and improved the dashboard in the spring of 2019, and we started totaling the number of unique users to the site in May. That metric is critical as it allowed us to calculate the Adoption Rate. In December 2019 for example, the last month of the year-long trial, Archer Dental had approximately 5% adoption rate, and 42% conversion rate.
In July 2019 we got serious and connected the appointment-booking mechanism which allows us to track customer relationships from start to finish. We have found that more than 30% of our new visitor traffic cycles through multiple pages on our website before actually committing to an introductory appointment.
Canadians in general, and the people of Toronto specifically are very technologically savvy and eager to use and explore new innovations. We hear from young people in particular how they appreciate the speed of the chat software and how they actually find chatting with software to be less invasive. Toronto may be more tolerant of new tech trends today, but we believe artificial intelligence software is coming to every service sector in our society in the next decade. Chatbots will soon be raising customer service standards in dental offices across the continent.
Search Engine Optimization and Usability: We believe that dentists who adopt Dental Attendant today will benefit greatly as chatbots become more common over time. These little conversation starters and information dispensaries dramatically increase website usability. That satisfaction can be tabulated and becomes a Google Search Ranking Factor when the algorithm considers how to rank the dentists’ websites for search queries. The search giant wants to show the most usable sites first. Increasing usability is the number one objective for most search engine optimization strategies in 2020 and some dentists spend thousands of dollars making web videos and info-graphics as they try and create reasons to keep people on page longer than their competitors. Chatbots fit the bill perfectly and come brand-ready with more affordable pricing.
What did Archer Dental expect versus What did they get?
Office administrators, Archer Dental
A major takeaway for this deployment is how it’s possible to reduce customer-service costs by replacing human front desk workers with conversation bots that dispense answers to frequently asked questions and book appointments. How can we prove this? The table above and the screen grabs below shows hundreds of conversations with web users that Archer Dental didn’t have. That’s hundreds of telephone conversations that were shorter and more targeted because their web users were more educated and more likely to purchase their dental services. And furthermore, consider how this gave their front desk staff a real break from the repetition of answering the same frequently- asked questions every day.
Tracking Dental Attendant AI Chatbot Users on Archer Dental
The real-life glimpse at Archer Dental’s Google Analytics for December 2019 shows how consumers behaved on their site, and what percentage of would-be patients require multiple touch points before actually committing to appointments.
Dental Attendant streamlines these interactions as it educates people about Archer Dental services. We believe the software greatly enhances and improves customer experience by virtue of instant gratification to information requests and immediate appointment bookings.
We check long and short conversations to measure and validate the contextual algorithm’s performance. Long conversations could mean everything went well and lots of good data was issued to information-hungry consumers, or it could be someone frustrated they keep getting the same non-answers. Short conversation are almost always problematic. When there is just one or two exchanges it’s usually negative. So we read and try to gauge and improve satisfaction, and effectiveness of Dental Attendant grows more popular each month.
With a click of a button we can see and read the contextual conversations. In theory, every interaction helps to improve chatbot response with the help of deep learning and sentiment analysis. But should we see instances where the users’ queries were not satisfied, then we’ll drill down on that response. In addition to the system’s own AI learning subroutines, we have competent dental personnel who consistently work to improve and customize the information we dispense.
Archer Dental also reports an increase in positive Google Reviews.
Chat bots are the future of customer experience and have the power to replace search windows in the not-so-distant future. The key to making them helpful is to program many different answers for all imaginable requests and keep an eye on the conversations to see what you’ve missed. We have noticed there’s a lot of consumer queries for prices and for specific staff members and treatment option and office hours and so we have added those details that accordingly. The chatbot conversations allow us to see and learn what people need, want answers to and how to convert the conversation into an appointment into our office chair.
