Cairns Precision Dental Group partnered with Podium to adapt to a new online market

Cairns Precision Dental Group is a much-loved business that has been a core part of the local Cairns community for over 17 years. The highly skilled professional team of dentists ensure its community have the best possible solutions for their dental treatment.

We sat down with Melissa Morgan, Practice Manager at Cairns Precision Dental Group, who is responsible for the management and operations for the practice, to find out how they make their customer’s smile.

Reaching thousands of patients with speed & convenience.

Three years ago, Melissa and the team noticed a shift in their patients’ communication preference, especially amongst the younger demographics.

“We found that a lot of the younger generations generally preferred communicating via SMS, especially when it came to scheduling appointments and responding to offers and promotions.”

Driven by their ongoing commitment to ensure excellent customer service, Cairns Precision Dental Group worked hard to keep patients informed and updated and wanted to utilise the channels that their customers preferred.

As a result, the team decided to work with Podium to implement its Campaigns solution, which enabled communication via SMS for customer service, updates and promotions.

“By offering SMS as a communication channel, our customers have an easy and convenient way to contact us directly. It simplified scheduling appointments and allowed our patients to opt in to be notified about upcoming promotions and offers that the practice was running each month.”

Since working with Podium, Cairns Precision Dental Group’s opt-in list for text communication has grown to over 3,300 subscribers.

“The rapid growth of subscribers is proof that our patients really prefer SMS as the way to communicate,” Melissa said.

Impressing patients from the first search.

Melissa wanted to improve the practice’s online presence after seeing that it was lacking Google reviews. The only way patients could leave a review was to fill out a form after their appointment—a process that had low engagement rates and little to no impact on the business. 

To combat this, Melissa sought a solution to streamline the review collection process. 

After seeing how SMS had transformed communication with patients for scheduling appointments and sharing promotions and updates, Melissa decided to implement Podium’s Reviews solution to assist in the review collection process. 

With Podium Reviews, the practice now automatically sends patients an invite to leave a review via text message after their appointment, encouraging them to share their experience. By streamlining the process of leaving a review, Melissa and the team noticed a significant increase in customers posting a review within an hour—in some cases minutes—of their appointment. 

Since implementing Reviews, Cairns Precision Dental Group’s average star rating has increased from 4.47 to 4.92 with over 100 reviews posted in a month. 

“This solution has reduced additional admin for our staff, enabling them to focus on providing quality service for our patients. Over time, we hope to see the number of reviews continue to increase as this could entice potential new customers to try us out.”

The result? Everyone’s smiling—employees and patients alike.