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Five Actionable Ideas to Improve Customer Experience at Checkout

Author: Austin Vrabel
08.31.16 / 10:35 am

Customer experience within your dental clinic can be improved by extending patient care through to the checkout. Collaboration of advanced payment technology and the oath to do right by your patients is certain to result in a seamless level of service, and consistency of care, in every element of your customer’s experience.

By implementing any one of the following five actionable ideas below, you can yield results in improving customer experiences that will both extend to your clinic’s longevity and your credibility as a merchant:

1. Ingenico terminals: Since October 2015, it has been a legal – yet slow to enforce – necessity for all businesses, including dental clinics, to have the equipment to accept card-present payments with an EMV (EuroPay, MasterCard and Visa) chip. EMV chips are computer chips within credit and debit cards that replace old magnetic stripe technology in order to offer a more secure payment verification service. Use of the EMV chip shifts liability away from merchants in cases of fraud. With card use on the rise, alongside time-of-service payments, adoption of chip and PIN terminals is strongly encouraged for business and client longevity. The rise of EMV and acceptance of it in your dental clinic results in an added layer of security for your patients.

HIPAA/FIPA compliance encourages this level of protection of patient information, despite its financial basis, as the liability shift now comes with greater consequence for merchants. Financial security is now to be considered within any and all data breaches that compromise patient protection.

Data shows that a customer’s trust is most recognized and required in healthcare than in any other merchant business. Helcim™ can help guide you through merchant systems and PCI compliance to ensure point-to-point encryption of all transactions. An all-in-one processing solution service, adoption of Helcim’s terminal products comes with 24/7 technical support to ease your transition.

Providing a streamlined experience for your customers, higher models of Ingenico’s products also accept contactless payments for the added convenience in customer transactions.

2. Virtual merchants: Strongly recommended for non-accepting EMV merchants, the virtual merchant acts similarly to EMV technology. Processing a transaction through a virtual merchant encrypts the previously vulnerable magnetic stripe. Much like EMV, virtual merchants offer real-time authorization, alongside the option to digitize and email receipts and invoices.

Like payment terminals, virtual merchants are now accepting a majority of banking cards. As Helcim’s most popular payment solution, virtual merchants are web-based interfaces with access across popular operating systems and smartphones.

Within its interface, this payment solution has the added benefit of acting as a secure digital ledger. As a result, the virtual merchant can act as a customer credit vault, providing quick access to customers’ billing information and transaction history.

With the convenience of having your patient’s payment on file, payment can be easily accessed and even automated.

Customer security is maintained through virtual merchants through ‘Tokenization’. Tokenization will supplement vulnerable information with other values upon processing transactions. Instead of assigning a vulnerable credit card number to your patients, patients will be assigned secure client IDs that can be accessed for payments within your individual merchant system.

Initial card information is secured in Helcim’s secure servers, allowing only these unique card tokens to be processed to verify new transactions.

3. Smile Savings insurance plans: By accepting this widely used, and cost-effective insurance plan for your clients, your business will become optimized for real-time payments, as well as an elevated customer experience. Usage of this plan excludes the common necessity of patient billing and deductibles. As part of their policy, regular visits to a patient’s dental clinic is encouraged in order to obtain the most value from the plan. Consequently, this affords merchants with the opportunity to offer continuous care and a standard of experience. These real-time payments, noted to come with real-time authorization, can be configured to accept a range of payments that adopt EMV technology. This affords merchants with regulatory receivables and customer longevity, which can be enhanced with the convenience and ease of optimized payment technology.

4. Auditing: Inclusive to the adoption of the aforementioned technology, it would be considered actionable to implement insurance auditing and patient chart auditing within your business. Using tokenized payment verification, a customer’s experience can be maintained and monitored. Auditing allows a business to monitor and assess their own growth and security, while reassuring patients that they have a vested interest in the maintenance of their own insurance efficiency. Using the digital ledger, patient treatments can be kept up to date, and assessed for their quality of service in order to tailor the customer experience upon each scheduled visit.

5. Mobile pay: Although mobile payments are often limited to $100, it is a simple and secure way to streamline the customer experience. Though some are dubious as to this payment solution’s security, popular services such as Apple Pay require fingerprint and/or passcode verification. Furthermore, Apple Pay adopts encryptions not unlike EMV chips, creating unique security codes and device numbers to counter EMV’s unique transaction numbers. Apple Pay can even be configured to implement your business’s personal loyalty program and rewards system. The adoption of mobile pay services reassures customers’ security concerns, even allowing them to leave their credit or debit cards in the security of their own home for the substitution of their smartphones, tablets, and even computers at checkout.

The adoption of these ideas seeks to improve the customer experience through healthcare automation, allowing you to focus on what matters most, customer interaction. These methods are sure to further secure a trusted and strong bond between you and your patients on an individual, and tailored level, throughout every level of service.

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Austin Vrabel

17 responses to “Five Actionable Ideas to Improve Customer Experience at Checkout”

  1. We’re also looking on the Smile Savings insurance plans for our dental clinic. We’re still conducting a study to ensure that all the cons will be addressed properly before formally launching it.

  2. Hi Austin Vrabel,
    Great Information, All the 5 points which you have mentioned should be adhere globally. But there are still security issues in developing countries with payment system which you have mentioned in first two points…

    Cheers!!!

  3. Hey,

    Thanks for sharing such an amazing and informative post. Really enjoyed reading it. 🙂

    Kim

  4. Thank you for sharing these. There are dentists who are passionate about providing the right treatment with utmost care, but tend to overlook making the checkout process convenient. It’s easy to forget that this is an important part of the complete customer experience. With advancements in technology, there’s so much that a dental clinic can do to make it more convenient for customers.

  5. We have numerous payment options to make affording dental care easy and manageable. Our staff truly cares for our patients. We do everything we can to make visiting the dentist a joy!

  6. Thank you for posting these great tips! The customer experience in dental offices is very important yet often overlooked. I appreciate your attention to this matter. Great post!

  7. Interesting read. It is important that the right dental practice finance is put in place to help ensure dentists are providing their customers with the best service and technology available.

  8. Great tips…improving all levels of the sale cycle is very important and something we advise all our dental partners when trying to improve retentions as well as word of mouth.

  9. Interesting post, thanks for sharing!
    Ensuring you find the most appropriate ways to finance your dental practice is of paramount importance for streamlining your tax flow.

  10. Thanks for sharing this great information. One solution to execute these ideas is to outsource some services to achieve excellent customer experience for patients. Outsourcing select dental practice roles isn’t just a great cost-saving strategy for practice but it also allows practitioners to provide quality treatment and care for all patients without distractions. Dental admin tasks such as billing and payment, insurance processing and appointment management can be handled by trusted outsourcing companies, such as Cloudstaff. With outsourcing, not only you provided excellent customer service to patients, it’s also a cost-saving strategy on the dental clinics as well.

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