Live chat or chatbot? What is best for successful dental websites?
When it comes to running a dental surgery, your first port of call relating to the attraction of new patients is your dental surgery website.
This means that your surgery page needs to be effective (load quickly), attractive (not too cluttered), and, of course, it should aim to enhance a website user’s experience. With all of these things (and a few more things) in place, you can minimise your bounce rate and will be able to grow your surgery. And, of course, if you want to expand your surgery, you will need to invest in a chatbot to help patients navigate your site.
When you come to Dental Focus, our team will be able to help with the optimisation of any dental websites (irrespective of how they look or how slow they are) and will aim to bring them in line with what is required for the Google algorithm, while also enhancing customer experience.
You may be wondering if it is worth investing in a chatbot, especially if live chat is an option. Here is an overview of both options for dental websites and their efficacy.
What is live chat?
When it comes to dental websites, you may feel that live chat is a better option.
Live chat is a communication tool that enables real-time, text-based conversations between two or more people via the internet. It is commonly used as a customer support tool by businesses and organisations to provide immediate assistance to their customers.
Benefits of live chat
Many patients/customers report a more satisfactory experience when using live chat. It also allows your surgery to engage with customers in real time, which can increase conversions and sales. It also requires fewer resources than phone support or in-person support, thus saving your dental surgery money long term.
What is a chatbot?
It is more than likely that most people have used a chatbot at one time or another. It is a computer program that is designed to simulate conversation with human users. And, as you may have guessed, its place is on the bottom corner of your website, usually the right-hand side.
Chatbots can be programmed to follow specific rules or use machine learning algorithms to learn from user interactions and improve their responses over time. Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of industries as a way to automate and streamline communication with customers or users, to help boost customer service and customer experiences of using a website and enquiring about services.
Benefits of a chatbot
The first and most obvious benefit is that chatbots are available for enquiry 24 hours a day, meaning that even if it is 2 am, your website visitors will be able to get the answers they want about what it is that your dental surgery can offer.
They also free up working time for those who are employed by your dental surgery. For instance, if the chatbot is able to answer basic questions about your dental surgery, this frees up your reception staff to book appointments or to answer urgent queries from potential patients.
Chatbots are also scalable, therefore they can handle multiple enquiries from patients at the same time. This makes it more effective for larger dental surgeries to operate while not negatively impacting the customer experience.