SELECTION CRITERIA

• Selection criteria that is most important to dental patient's customer journey is dependent on research done by dental patients before they enter the clinic for their initial appointment.
• Dental patient's selection criteria is based on four main points: expertise of the doctors and clinic in general, convenience of services, accessibility of location, and social media presence.
•  Emotional experiences that are also relevant to the patient's end choice of dental clinic include any prior visit to other doctors and their experiences with those visits, the feeling of potential anxiousness to meet a new doctor, worry about potential queues in the new clinic, and the responsiveness and friendliness of the clinic staff.

DIGITAL TOUCHPOINTS

•  Digital touchpoints for the dental patient's customer journey can be divided into those prior, during, and after the visit.
• Digital touchpoints prior to the visit to the clinic include the Google search regarding clinics in the patient's nearby area, the dental clinic's website, social media, and digital touchpoints provided by insurers as part of referral schemes.
• During the visit, digital touchpoints usually include tablets where patients will enter their patient details, and digital databases doctors use for tracking of patients.
•  After the visit, digital touchpoints include review websites where patients go to review their visit, email that is sent to patients' after their visit, and the website of the clinic for any additional follow up information.

USEFUL CONTENT TO USERS

• In medicine, including dental medicine, patient's customer journey should be based on providing the following: continuous care, better communication, continuous improvement, reducing blind spots, and education patients.
•  Continuous care includes patient referrals outside of primary care providers, including insurance companies, other patients, and social media mentions.
•  Better communication is the primary way of cutting down on negative patient interaction. Better communications usually involves putting more empathy when dealing with patients and making sure they are contacted often and thoroughly.
•  Continuous improvement involves collecting and using patient journey data in order to create plans for reviewing this data and leveraging it to highlight problems that keep coming up with certain patients and scheduling recurring appointments.
•  Reducing blind spots in dental care involves making sure patients are covered when it comes to scheduling to discharge as well as have regular follow up calls or emails.
•  Educating patients allows patients to be in the know about their care and to feel less anxious about their visits.

HIGH-END DENTISTRY

•  Showering the customer with gifts is a go-to practice in high-end dental clinic. Gifts such as branded water, tickets to local events, and different freebies regarding dental hygiene are given to patients at every visit.
•  High-end dental practices schedule the next appointment before the person leaves which allows clients not to waste time with calling and scheduling the follow-up appointment.
•  Every high-dental practice sends an email a day later to ask how the experience went. High-end dental practices do not send a survey but instead send a link to post a good review about their practice online.
• If the experience was bad, the practice will offer discounts for follow up appointments or mitigate the risk of a bad review online in some other way such as providing a chance to speak to the clinic on the phone and voice the disappointment in order to find a way to keep the customer.