Ep. 48: Building the Perfect Dental Receptionist
Reception is one of the most important positions in a dental practice. They are the first voice patients hear and the first face they see. And the skill of your receptionist has a major impact on the productivity and patient flow of your practice. So in this episode, Jeff describes the perfect receptionist and how you can hire and train them for your office.
Topics:
:11 - Why the receptionist position is even more important than you realize
7:44 - Organizing the front desk intelligently
13:35 - Finding the right person and training them effectively
22:36 - Using a New Patient Intake Form
Links:
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
Team training video courses - https://ddssuccess.com
New Patient Intake Form - https://www.mgeonline.com/np-intake-form
Phone Scripts - https://www.mgeonline.com/the-mge-new-patient-phone-scripts-ebook
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Questions From This Episode
What's the real cost of a poorly handled reception desk?
It's largely invisible waste. A study of 10,000 recorded new patient calls found an average conversion rate under 23 percent. If you spend 5,000 dollars on marketing and get 100 calls but only convert 23, you're not just missing new patients, you're paying full price for leads that a properly trained receptionist could turn into 70 or 80 new patients from the exact same spend, no additional marketing required.
How do I know if I need to split reception, scheduling, and new patient intake into separate roles?
It comes down to volume. A single person can reasonably answer phones, schedule patients, and greet arrivals in a smaller practice. Once new patient call volume climbs to several calls a day, a proper new patient call typically takes six to nine minutes of focused attention, and that same person is also checking patients out or juggling other calls, conversion quality suffers, not because the person is bad at their job, but because they're structurally unable to give each call the attention it needs.
What should a brand new receptionist's very first job actually be?
Not answering the phones. Start them on something lower stakes, like helping the office manager, making reactivation calls, or supporting the scheduler, so you can evaluate their fit and ability before handing them your most valuable phone call. Putting a brand new, untrained hire straight onto new patient calls right after a marketing spend is a common and costly mistake.
What's the single most important thing to train a new receptionist on first, before scripts or scenarios?
Why their job exists in the first place. Without a clearly stated purpose, receptionists tend to invent their own, often settling into a gatekeeper mentality that filters out solicitors but also unintentionally filters out potential new patients. Making it explicit that their purpose is to convert calls into scheduled, retained patients prevents that drift before it starts.
Should every new patient get a longer appointment, or just some patients?
Just the patients who show early signs of needing more extensive treatment, mentioning missing teeth, longstanding discomfort, or interest in implants or orthodontics during the intake call, for example. Booking everyone for an hour and a half wastes time on straightforward cases, while a patient with real treatment needs can eat into the exam time and leave no room to actually present a treatment plan. The receptionist has to know this distinction is being made or the scheduling won't reflect it accurately.
Episode Transcript
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This episode of Dental Business Rx was inspired by you, our listeners. Back in episode three, A New Take on the Dental Receptionist Position, we introduced how important this role actually is and gave a few tips for improving it, with guests Jeff Santone and Sabri Blumberg. Since that episode, I've gotten a steady stream of follow up questions: what does the ideal candidate look like, how do you train them, what should they actually be trained on. So I knew we'd need a full episode on this, it was just a matter of timing, and here we are.
This week, I want to cover most if not all of the questions that came in. We're calling it Building the Perfect Receptionist. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host. My plan for this episode is to cover five or six points: revisit why this is such a significant issue, look at the organizational side of how reception actually works and where it tends to break down, then get into who the ideal candidate is, what attitude they should have, and exactly what and how to train them.
Let's start with why this is such a problem, in case you missed the earlier episode. There's the obvious piece: your receptionist is often the first human interaction a prospective patient has with your practice, after seeing your website or hearing about you some other way. As tough as it can be with your own business, you have to try to think like a consumer who knows nothing about your office. If I call and the person answering doesn't have to be unfriendly or rude, just a little scattered or unable to answer basic questions, that impression still shapes whether I schedule. You can always recover from a bad first impression, but why start there at all.
The bigger issue is new patient waste. A marketing company called Viva Concepts ran a study years ago on new patient call conversion, listening to 10,000 recorded new patient phone calls across mostly US offices. The average conversion rate, meaning how many callers actually scheduled, was under 23 percent, I believe it was 22.8 percent specifically. Out of 10,000 calls, fewer than one in four converted.
If you're the average US practice bringing in 23 new patients a month, you're likely generating around 100 new patient calls to get there. The wrong-headed response to wanting more new patients is to immediately spend more on marketing, more mailers, more digital ads, without fixing the reception bottleneck first. That's filling a bucket with a hole in it, the water just runs back out. You want reception adequately handled at the same time you're investing in any marketing push, not after.
There's a direct financial cost too. Say I spend 5,000 dollars on a postcard campaign and get 100 calls. At the average 23 percent conversion, that's 23 new patients. If I instead converted at a strong 80 percent, that same spend would yield 80 new patients, a difference of 57 patients a month lost purely to reception, not to a bad receptionist necessarily, but often simply someone who doesn't fully understand the purpose of their role, which I'll get into shortly.
So if you're spending more on marketing to chase 40 or 50 new patients a month while converting at 23 percent, fixing reception first might get you there with the marketing you're already running. One thing worth tracking alongside your new patient count: new reaches, meaning first time contacts into your practice, whether that's a phone call or a form fill, regardless of whether they convert. If you spend 5,000 dollars and get 100 new reaches but only 23 new patients, you know exactly where the problem sits. New patient count tells you if your receptionist is working. New reaches tells you if your marketing is working.
One thing to watch for: if a receptionist converts only 23 of 100 calls, you'll often hear explanations for the other 77, they were just shoppers, they wanted insurance we don't take, and so on. Eventually you'll want to actually listen to these calls yourself rather than take that at face value, more on that later.
So that's the overview. Your receptionist functions as a genuine partner in your marketing, whoever answers your phone needs to be genuinely sharp at it. Which brings us to the organizational side of this position.
In the average office, everyone at the front gets lumped into front desk, essentially named after the furniture, without clearly delineated responsibilities. That's a mistake we've covered in other episodes and go over extensively in the MGE program. Ideally, each front desk role has a defined area of ownership, a financial coordinator, a schedule coordinator, and so on. But let's look specifically at reception, since you may have an organizational issue here you're not even aware of, depending on your call volume.
In a typical office, a receptionist answers the phone, schedules patients including new patients, greets arrivals, makes copies, sends letters, handles a wide range of tasks. As an office grows, these functions naturally need to split. The reason this matters: if one person is absorbing all of this traffic, it will affect new patient conversion, not because that person is incapable, but because they genuinely don't have adequate time to give new patient intake the attention it requires.
So what are the actual functions here? A receptionist answers the phone, routes communication, greets patients as they arrive, makes sure they're seated and attended to during any wait, and keeps the reception area presentable, essentially keeping practice communication flowing smoothly. A scheduler builds a productive schedule and books patients. In a larger office, you might have a dedicated new patient coordinator, whose job is specifically handling new patient calls.
In a very small practice, the office manager might be the receptionist, scheduler, financial coordinator, treatment coordinator, and occasionally even the assistant, all at once. As the practice grows, you'll typically first have someone functioning as receptionist and scheduler combined, handling both existing and new patients. Once new patient call volume increases, say 8 to 10 calls a day, that combined role becomes difficult to sustain alongside walkout statements and other front desk duties, so the functions split: a dedicated receptionist and a separate scheduler, with the scheduler handling both new and existing patients.
If new patient volume climbs even further, to the point where someone could reasonably spend hours a day just on new patient calls, especially if you're running online lead funnels generating contact form fills that require outbound calls in addition to inbound ones, that's when a dedicated new patient coordinator role makes sense, focused entirely on answering new patient calls and making outbound follow up calls.
This is entirely about matching structure to volume. Imagine you're the receptionist handling a genuine new patient call properly, which typically takes at least six to nine minutes of focused conversation, while also needing to check out a patient at the counter and answer a ringing phone. You're going to put that new patient on hold repeatedly and feel scattered yourself, which directly hurts conversion. This is exactly why some larger and corporate offices set up dedicated call centers, sometimes in a completely separate room, staffed specifically to handle new patient calls without distraction. We've had non-corporate clients do this too once volume justified it.
So keep a close eye on your actual call volume. If one person is handling all of reception and scheduling, and new patient volume is high, consider splitting those roles. If reception and scheduling are already split and new patient intake alone is substantial, a dedicated new patient coordinator may be the next step, with the receptionist simply routing new patient calls over to them. The point is realistic capacity: could this person actually give every call the time it deserves without feeling overwhelmed.
Now, what kind of candidate are we looking for? Someone upbeat, someone who communicates well. If you're interviewing a prospective receptionist, new patient coordinator, or anyone at the front desk, and they can't hold eye contact or barely speak during the interview, that's not your candidate. You want someone genuinely friendly, and also someone comfortable directing people. We need to schedule you at three o'clock, said with confidence, not hesitation, that's a core requirement for reception, scheduling, or new patient coordination.
Even with a strong candidate, the last thing I'd do, especially with someone new to the practice or the industry entirely, is make their very first assignment the receptionist role. That's a common and costly mistake: you spent 10,000 dollars on marketing this month and hand your newest, least proven hire the job of converting all of it. Start them somewhere they can genuinely help and where you can evaluate fit, supporting the office manager, helping the scheduler with outbound calls, running reactivation calls. I wouldn't put a brand new hire directly on incoming new patient communication.
Now, what do we actually train this person on? This assumes basic onboarding is already handled, they're oriented to the practice, understand your mission statement, have read your policy manuals, know the basics of pay and logistics. With that foundation in place, and while they're contributing elsewhere in the practice, here's the training sequence.
First and most important: why does this job exist? What's its actual purpose? This is where even strong candidates go wrong if it isn't made explicit. Receptionists often default to seeing themselves as a gatekeeper, keeping unwanted calls away. That instinct is useful for filtering out sales calls, but it's genuinely damaging if it bleeds into how they treat new patient calls. If you don't tell them their purpose clearly, they'll invent one, that's simply human nature, people want to understand why they're doing something.
Say a receptionist puts through a call they shouldn't have, a sales rep interrupting the doctor mid-patient, and the doctor's visibly annoyed. Or a shopper call goes poorly and gets mentioned around the office. Without a clearly stated purpose, the receptionist might quietly conclude, I'm supposed to be hard to reach, or shoppers are bad, and start treating legitimate new patient inquiries with unwarranted suspicion. People will adopt strange, unintended interpretations if you don't spell out the actual purpose clearly.
One related thing we tell every new receptionist we've ever hired, including our own team here at MGE: a small percentage of people simply aren't pleasant to deal with, and that's worth naming directly so it doesn't get generalized. If 20 patients come through in a day and 19 are genuinely lovely and one is a real jerk, guess who everyone's talking about at the end of the day? We have a natural tendency to fixate on the negative outlier. If a receptionist isn't prepared for this, one bad call can start to color how they perceive every caller, or simply rattle them in a way that affects the next several calls. Name it upfront: a very small percentage of people are like that, focus on the people who genuinely want your help.
Next: expected outcomes. What does success actually look like in this role? If you're getting 100 or 200 new patient inquiries a month, be explicit: I expect 80 percent of those callers to schedule and show up, that's the target, that's how I'll know you're succeeding. Without a stated expectation, you get strange results. Tell a scheduler simply, I want my schedule full, and you'll get a full schedule, just not necessarily a productive one, denture relines and filler appointments instead of real production. State the actual outcome you want: a productive, efficiently scheduled day at a specific production target, not just a full one. The same logic applies to reception: state the conversion rate you expect, understanding they may start lower, 30 or 40 percent, and build toward it over time as they improve.
Next, they need to be able to answer basic questions about the practice confidently. Almost nothing is more frustrating as a caller than someone who has to put you on hold repeatedly just to answer routine questions, or who sounds uncertain about what they're even scheduling you for. They need a clear understanding of appointment types, what a second opinion visit is versus a new patient initial, and why, along with the general categories of calls they'll field.
Next: the new patient intake form, which is genuinely the foundation the entire position rests on. A well built form does more than collect name, number, and insurance, it starts painting a picture of the patient so you know what you're actually walking into. I have a sample form available as a download on the episode page, from our scheduler and receptionist training on DDS Success, also linked there.
A few key fields worth highlighting: beyond the basics, name, number, whether they're a returning or new contact, minor status and guardian info, address, cell, email, you'll want to ask how they heard about your office. This is genuinely important for tracking whether your marketing is working, and it's commonly handled poorly. A vague how'd you hear about us, mail, isn't useful. You want specifics: was it a specific postcard design, ideally with a trackable code, or a Google search, and if so, was it a paid ad or organic. That level of detail is what actually tells you whether a specific campaign is working.
Next, ask when their last dental visit was, which starts to inform the sales process to come, since for many new patients, that process effectively begins right here at intake. If they were seeing another provider, get that doctor's name so you can request records if needed.
Then ask about any discomfort or dental concerns. This is where a receptionist's communication skill really matters, since patients will often open up here, which builds real rapport and a strong first impression. If someone mentions an upper right molar that's been bothering them for a few months with a visible dark spot, that's valuable context to capture. Follow up with something like, is there anything the doctor should know to make your visit more comfortable, which often surfaces things like interest in implants for teeth lost years ago, or curiosity about clear aligners. Noting these gives the doctor real context walking into that first appointment.
On appointment length: the average new patient initial runs about an hour, whether scheduled in hygiene or on the doctor's own schedule is a practice preference, the doctor ends up doing the exam either way. But some clients have experimented successfully with booking select new patients for an hour and a half instead of an hour, specifically when intake reveals signs of more extensive treatment needs, missing teeth someone's considering replacing, or clear indicators of a larger case. A healthy 20 year old with no concerns is a standard hour appointment. Someone showing signs of a bigger case gets the extra 30 minutes, so there's still time to actually present a treatment plan at the end of the exam rather than running out of room entirely. This only works if your receptionist understands the distinction and applies it consistently, otherwise you'll end up booking a straightforward case for 90 minutes with nothing to fill the extra time.
One more field worth considering, and this ties back to what we've covered in referral focused episodes: when asking insurance questions, you'll often learn the name of the primary insured and their relationship to the caller. If a caller mentions their spouse as the primary insured, ask directly whether that spouse currently has a dentist. You'd be surprised how often the answer is no, especially with anyone who's recently relocated, and that's a natural, low pressure opening to mention a new patient special and schedule them too. You could just as easily ask directly, is there anyone else in your household currently looking for a dentist, there's nothing wrong with asking that on a call to a dental office. One new patient call can turn into two, three, or four new patients from the same household, worth building into your intake process wherever feels natural for your team.
Once they know the intake form thoroughly, next comes handling actual scenario questions: do you take my insurance, how much is a crown, I'd like a second opinion, and so on. Just as you don't want them fumbling basic practice questions, you don't want them caught off guard by these either. We're planning a dedicated phone skills episode to go deeper here, but for now, we have new patient phone scripts available as a download on the episode page covering the most common scenarios, along with a full course launching soon on DDS Success, and we cover scenario handling in depth at the MGE New Patient Workshop as well. When you download the scripts, you'll also see an option to request a free mystery call for your own practice, so you can get an outside assessment of exactly where your receptionist stands today.
Once they understand the purpose of the role, expected outcomes, the intake form, and the phone scripts, the next step before letting them handle live calls independently is drilling, essentially structured role play. Have them run through the intake form repeatedly with someone skilled at it, the office manager playing a new patient, for example, identify what they get wrong, correct it, and repeat until they're genuinely comfortable and confident. Do the same with scenario questions and phone scripts. This usually doesn't take long to click.
Even after drilling, I'd still apprentice them briefly before giving full independence. Have them listen to real recorded new patient calls if your call recording software allows it, and if you're not already recording and reviewing enough calls, that's worth addressing separately. Other staff should listen too, to reinforce what proper handling sounds like. If your state doesn't allow call recording, find another way to bring them along, live shadowing works too. Once they're ready, let them take real calls with the office manager or trainer nearby, able to step in and salvage the call if needed, so you're not risking real practice opportunities during the learning curve.
One more recommendation: if any verbal coaching or role play happens with a new receptionist, record it. Video quality on any modern phone is excellent at this point, a basic tripod and your phone is all you need. Just keep all of this training material in one centralized, accessible place going forward.
That's the core framework, and yes, it's genuinely a lot of work. But consider the payoff: moving your receptionist from a 23 percent conversion rate to 70 or 80 percent, depending on your call volume, that's a meaningful number of additional new patients essentially for free, since you're not spending anything new to get there. It also gives you real confidence to expand your marketing further, knowing the front desk can actually convert what that marketing generates, assuming your hygiene program is equally solid to support that growth.
One last point, unrelated to receptionist training directly, but worth sharing since I wasn't sure where else it fit. A client running a practice open four days a week noticed he was missing a significant number of after-hours new patient calls, people who didn't want to leave a message with an answering service or voicemail, evenings and weekends included. He extended his phone coverage, staffing it through call forwarding to a cell phone with full software access, and saw a 25 percent increase in new patients purely from that change. You could structure this through staff rotation or a dedicated after-hours hire, as long as they're properly trained on new patient handling. Extending availability alone moved the needle meaningfully for him.
I know this ran well over 30 minutes, apologies, but this topic warranted the depth. Your receptionist plays a genuinely critical role in the practice for all the reasons we've covered. Real attention here, proper training, and the right materials, which are all linked as downloads on the episode page, can be the difference between success and failure, or between your practice producing an extra 10, 20, even 30 thousand dollars a month and helping that many more people, which is really the point of all of this.
That's everything for this week, I hope it helps. Links to all the downloads are on the episode webpage. If you have questions about anything covered here, email me directly at jeffb@mgeonline.com, or use the Contact Us page on the Dental Business Rx site. For more on MGE, call 800-640-1140 or visit mgeonline.com. Have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.