Ep 136: Rethinking the Phones with Richard May

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John Meis (00:01.554)
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of The Double Your Production Podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with my partner, Wendy Briggs. How you doing, Wendy?

Wendy Briggs (00:10.564)
I'm great, Dr. John. Another great, beautiful day here.

John Meis (00:12.426)
Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. So with us today is Richard May. Richard is from Mango and Richard, why don't you introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about Mango.

Richard May (00:26.41)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here. Yeah, I have been with Mango for about four years now, and Mango Voice is a voice over IP or VoIP phone system. And for a lot of people, that's internet phones. For me, when I started, I was like, what is VoIP? I wasn't even quite sure myself. But we've been integrating and providing phone service to dentists and specialists for the last six or seven years.

Mango's been around for about 12 years, but really got a lot of traction in dentistry when we started to integrate in with the practice management softwares, producing different things like screen pops, click to calls, just making life a little bit easier for the front office staff. But more importantly than that, just providing really great service. Because the phones, at the end of the day, they need to ring, they need to work, they need to be reliable. And it's one of those products you take for granted until it's not working. And then it's a real serious problem when you have phone issues, right? So we're just trying to overcome all those things and eliminate that stress for practice owners and dentists that are out there.

John Meis (01:41.884)
So you really have gotten a lot of traction in dentistry. We have many clients who are using your services. What is it about Mango that makes it so easy to use and workable in dentistry? Why dentistry?

Yeah, I think we kind of got like that early start in a few different patient engagement softwares reaching out and wanting to integrate because they needed someone that was new and nimble and willing to work with them. And Mango was kind of in that sweet spot. Timing is a lot of time everything, right? Like sometimes you have a great idea and the timing's not right, but for us the timing was perfect. But then what we found was that these dentists had some great ideas about how they wanted call flow to work, how they wanted the user interface to operate, and we were able to build it. So in a lot of ways, Mango was built by dentists. So when we implement this into offices, we're really implementing that which dentists already want or already put into thought. we hear there's a lot of products made by dentists, for dentists, but honestly, we were just taking feedback from our dental customers and saying, let's build this because this is a pretty cool idea. And now we're seeing it just a higher adoption rate across the board because of that.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Richard, Dr. John, I just recorded a series of podcasts on our, our foundational pillars of success for dental practices. And we did one segment entirely devoted to patient flow because we've long said we have a practice success loop that we work practices through it at the very beginning of that practice success loop. I'm sure you can identify what, starts the whole thing. And it's the phones, right? And I can tell you that over the years we've talked a lot about the importance of phones.

John Meis (03:11.463)
Yeah.

But instead we really talk about the role of the team and how they handle the phones. We really haven't spent much time on the phone system itself. But what I'm hearing and what I find so impressive about Mango is you have put a lot of thought into the phone system itself. And you mentioned the call flow. You mentioned, you know, some of those things that are really important for practices that in the past have been very, very difficult to change. You know, many practices will set up a call tree and then to make any changes to that, it's a nightmare. I realized this internally at TTI. Just a few weeks back, we had one person who was accidentally deleted from our phone tree and it took more than four hours on the phone with support to fix it. Right. And what I love about Mango, you and I had our very first conversation probably a year ago and you showed me how easy it was for you to adjust call flow. Like that's all it took for me. Right. So maybe walk through that for a minute and why that's so critical to what you've built.

Yeah, most phone providers out there are kind of forcing you to go to them to make changes, even to simple setting changes. And sometimes it is what you said, just adding someone to your call tree, adding someone to a ring group so that their extension rings when the phone rings, right? It's actually a really simple thing to do, but phone companies make it really, really complex. And as soon as you log into your dashboard or your, you know, your user interface, it's like, I have no idea what I'm seeing here. This is the first time I've ever seen this. It's really complicated. And we, a lot of the guys at Mango, we're just, you know, I'm from Rockland, Idaho. Like I, I didn't grow up around a ton of technology. It's a small town, small place. And so I, if I can use Mango, then just about anyone can use Mango.

So getting in there and making a change is, is really easy to do. And, and we just said, okay, if I'm the user on the other side of this, what kind of experience do I want to have? And so that's the kind of thought we put into it. We want to make it simple. We don't want to be complicated. And we get it. Sometimes you're just like, hey, this is intimidating to me even still. And this is where we really outshine all the other competitors. So year to date, the average VoIP answer rate for a support call is around 18 minutes. So if you're working with any of these large players or you're working with any type of phone provider that you just got or inherited, you're gonna be on hold for 18 minutes just trying to get a simple support call answered. Mango year to date is less than 55 seconds. So if you call Mango right now, you'll speak to a live agent. It's not outsourced, it's all just done in little old Utah where we all are.

You'll speak to a live agent and they can troubleshoot or change a setting for you or reset a password, whatever it is, no matter how big or small. This is just how we're different. And we work at a phone company and we just believe we should answer the phones when they ring. I mean, I know it's a crazy idea, right? But just by doing that, that simple thing has changed the entire experience for people because they trust us. They know that when they call, someone at Mango is gonna pick up.

John Meis (07:00.795)
Yeah, awesome. So there's tons of VoIP phone systems and there's all different kinds of companies that provide the service. What are some of the things that make your product better?

Yeah, so as far as like from a product standpoint, our core architecture is very advanced. So we are completely hosted on AWS, that's through Amazon. So everything is in the cloud. So we have the same uptime essentially as Amazon does, which last time I checked, I can order anything from Amazon anytime. I never have any problems like getting an order through Amazon, right? Where a lot of other phone providers are using different systems that have constant outages and downtime and they're trying to cut corners and go a little bit cheaper while still jacking up your prices but going cheaper on their own internal providers. We're not doing that at Mango.

And then future-wise, we're still providing the core needs. We record all the calls, which you got to have for training and for quality assurance. even if it's just to settle a simple angry, angry patient who says one thing, but the call recording says another. Those are easy to look up, easy to get a hold of. We have a mobile app which comes included with the service. And this is great because let's say your internet goes out or your power goes out or you're, need to take a call from home. You can still do that from your business number because you're using the Mango Voice mobile app, which allows you to really manage your practice from anywhere. Because like Wendy said earlier, it all starts with the phone.

And now you can take that wherever you want to go. And if you don't want to be bothered, you can just put it on, do not disturb, and you can enjoy your time off with your family or on a vacation, right? So those features are really important. But then again, the core things like we can do your e-fax. So can get rid of that old fax machine and all that paper, right?

You can set up different types of ring groups. So if you want phones to ring in the front and then in the back later, alerting the back, the staff in the back or the lab or the doctor that, hey, we're busy up front and someone needs to step up and pick up that call because it could be a new patient. It could be someone who needs a crown. It could be someone looking to settle their bill or it could be a complaint, right? You don't want to miss any of those calls for any reason. And then, last but not least, we have this really great feature that's called the missed call text because no one's perfect. You're going to miss opportunities every once in a while, but we can customize that text message.

So let's say I call your practice, Wendy or John, it says, it goes to voicemail. So I can leave a voicemail, but I will get a text message from your main office number saying, hi, sorry I your call, but for a quicker response time, you can use this link or even if you want to, you can text us back on this number. So you're still getting engagement even on missed calls. It's almost like another employee working for you. Even though you missed that opportunity, you never really did.

John Meis (10:08.22)
So then tell me about the reporting that Mango puts together. Obviously, if you're texting people, there's got to be some place to look up who we've texted, then do they text back, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we have a really simple dashboard. can log in from anywhere and you can see your text messages. You can see your voicemails. The voicemails are transcribed too, which is really nice because a lot of people just like to read through them to see, you know, which ones are more important or not. then also on the reporting side, we can check your missed call and answer rates. So this is really big because when we ask practices, do you know your missed call rate? And like, I know this is a big one for Wendy too, right?

Most, a lot of practices either have no idea and they guess at it and they say some number, but when you actually dive into it, I mean, our reporting shows it's like around 40 % is what the average is, is of missed opportunities, which is crazy because you think about all the money you spend on marketing and training and coaching and then to only answer 60 % of your incoming calls is kind of crazy. And once you show that to people and you can say, hey, you're missing this much.

Okay, so how do we fix that? And we can walk them through, hey, here's better call flows. Maybe you need to add a phone here. Maybe you need to add a voicemail here or like a call forwarding here. Download a couple of mobile apps so when you're out of the office, you can pick up those calls. we tend to see the average Mango user is only missing about 15 % of their calls, which is a huge step from missing 40%.

Typically, before they ask, do we answer better than, how do we catch more than we're catching? Usually they argue with you though, don't they? says, we are answering way better than that. Having gone through this over and over and over again, I can tell you that's typically, there's a performance perception gap and people perceive that they're performing at a higher level than they really are. And so that's the first hurdle to get over is to help them understand, no, this really is the data.

Thank you.

John Meis (12:14.832)
Why is that? I understand that you don't have any perception of this and here's why, but here's how we go about making it better.

Yeah, I mean nobody ever wants to admit that they may not be doing well, right, or that they're struggling in some area, which I totally understand that, but it is important to take a look at the health of your practice, right? And Mango allows you to do that and say, okay, maybe we need to hire another person to man the phones. Maybe we just need to get another phone because we're getting more calls than we thought. There's a lot of things that you can start to consider when you have a really good metric that shows you how many missed calls we actually have.

And, you know, for every practice, it's going to be a little bit different, right? Everyone's going to be, you know, taking lunches at different times, or they're going to be having different schedules of open and closed times. but we can, we can still take a look at all of that and say, not only can we see your missed call rates, but we can see your call volume. So we can say, Hey, you're most busy on Tuesday at one. And like, that's when we've been doing our, our team huddles or that's when we've been doing like a team lunch. And it's like, well, stagger your lunches or you know now it's time to get the mobile app and have someone you know take a turn stepping out of lunch to go answer the calls because it you know sometimes ignorance is bliss

And here's the craziest one John and Wendy that we see is that people are still on analog phone systems or you know like a landline and they have they're paying for one or two lines and then if they get a third call that comes in it's you're hearing a busy signal which in today's phone world, if I call any number listed anywhere and I hear a busy signal, I mean, my assumption, my brain is like, I called the wrong number or they're out of business. that's just, a busy signal is the deaf tone, you know, out there.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to remember what a busy signal sounds like.

Yeah, yeah. I know a couple dental practices, I give you their numbers and they are still on analog systems and if you call enough, you'll hear it. So, but with Mango, you don't have that anymore. Yeah.

Yeah, we've had experience that, you know, we've actually had that happen when we pre-called people and figure it out. Just like you said, they only had two phone lines. So it's, stunning that that still happens today. I've got a couple of things I want to ask you about Richard. So two things, first of all, one of the things that I really like about Mango, I just want to confirm that this is accurate is that when team members are logged into the mobile app, they can text patients and it comes from the office number, right? So we're not sharing any of the, the team members' personal information with the patient. It's not coming from their personal cell phones. I know there's a lot of practices that do that, and there's a lot of team members that are slightly uncomfortable about that. And in today's world, it really isn't the best approach, right? So let's talk about that real quick.

Yeah, just to confirm that. So when you download the mobile app to your phone, it is the business number that you're texting from. So no office manager or team member that's texting a patient from that mobile app is sharing their private number at any time. So it's always going to be coming from the business number. It's always going to be coming from the practice. Just to protect identity, to keep things business and personal separate.

And you can do it from our web app, which is, you can text back and forth from a PC or from a Mac, but you can also just do that from your phone if you're on the go or it's just easier, more convenient, right? Yeah, the idea that some people are texting back and forth about patient information from their own personal line, I don't know if that's HIPAA compliant, I don't know if that's secure or safe, or if I would want that, doesn't seem like it, you know, but.

John Meis (16:01.938)
Nope. Yep.

And the good thing too is, mean, I know we have a lot of orthodontic practices out there and we have a lot of specialties that are taking pictures and you can send picture messaging through our application as well. And you don't want that just being airdropped from Janey's phone to someone else's phone. That's not how it should be working, right? But you can do that through Mango with no hassle. And we are HIPAA compliant completely, so there's no risk that you're taking on there too when you're using the mobile app.

Yeah, we've heard horror stories about that over the years as well. Team members that were texting patients and then left the office and then still texted patients telling them to leave the office. There's been a whole host of things like that that have happened that should not have happened. And this is a great way to protect yourself against that. The second thing I wanted to ask you about is years ago, I still to this day wish I had a recording of how one particular team member answered the phone. It was awful. And everyone knew it was awful. But still, they were often the first one to get to the phone, right?

So one of the things that I love about Mango is that the team, the doctor, the office manager, whoever, can really easily make an adjustment. Let's say we know we have four people up front today and we have three of them that are really great on the phone, one that's not so great. You can change the flow of those phone calls with the click of a mouse, right? It's super easy to change the priority of who gets the phone call with Mango, right?

Yeah, and so this is where Mango is, it probably outshines other phone providers, is how easily customizable it is. So it's not like Mango is trying to say, here's your phones, this is what you can do, and that's it. It's like, we're basically asking you, how do you want your office to operate? Because it's your practice, we're not gonna tell you how to run your business, but we can help you run your business in the most successful way.

So if you have a person who's much better on new patient calls or, you know, they just have more tact on the phone. Yeah, we can make it so that that person gets the ring first, just at their extension, their station where they are. And then you could have, we call it, you know, like a failover or after 20 seconds, it will ring to your backups or, you know, the next person available. And basically, if you can dream it, if you take five to 10 minutes and sit down and say, here's my priorities of where I want calls to go. It's really easy to go in and draw this out yourself, or you can call one of our product specialists and we'll do it for you as well. So we're always happy to help offices optimize the usage of their phones within the practice.

Yeah, I mean, like I said, I wish I had a recording because I can duplicate it for you, but it was like, Dr. Jensen's office, this is Peggy. Like literally every time that's she gets the phone. And we'd hear it and we'd be like, you've got to be kidding me. There's no one better that can answer the phone in that way. So, you know, even just that, even like you said, if someone's more tactful, but someone's, you know, more smooth with the new patients. We want to be able to harness and leverage those skill sets, right? So we want to put people in the position where they can be the most successful. And I love that. I've seen that click of a mouse, click of a mouse.

Let's say we have somebody that calls in sick and they usually on the, on the point lead, it's super easy to change it for just that day and then change it right back. That's a tremendous advantage, I think, especially when we talk about patient flow and the practice success loop and how important that entry point is, you know, if we can set ourselves up to have a higher level of success with that very critical entry point. I think everybody wins in that scenario.

Yeah, absolutely. you know, I think we kind of live in an age where we do a lot with texting, we do a lot with online calendars and booking things online. And that's super convenient. I'm glad we live in that age. It's I basically if it's on my calendar, I live by it. Right. But, you know, we're still we're still seeing millions and millions of calls happening every month.

So it's like, what is happening on these calls? People are, I think that as practice owners, sometimes we forget when you're running a business that people are calling because they're talking about their spouse or their kids. These are their loved ones they're getting scheduled for. They have serious questions about pain, because they're in pain and they want to make sure that they can get their pain taken care of quickly. know, like if you have a root canal, an emergency root canal needs to be done, you don't text the doctor and say, when can you get me in? And hope that they respond promptly. They call and they say, "I need to get in now."

And they're calling because they have a bill. There's finances involved. Or it's just the fact that it's their smile. It's one of the things that we talk about the most on people is their smile. And so they don't just want to text about these things. They have serious questions because it's about really important stuff. And so we actually believe that, you know, the most important interactions in the dental practice are still happening over the phone. And that's why now more than ever your phone provider has got to be reliable, it's got to be dependable, and it's got to be easy to use.

That's awesome. Well, Richard, I want to thank you for coming on and talking to us about Mango, what Mango does, how they help practices in a very, very unique way. We appreciate you being with us today.

No, thanks for having me. if anyone ever has any questions about Mango, think we're going to... I'm probably taking your guys' lines here, but there's going to be some links and some access to get in touch with us, right?

That's right. So you can look in the show notes.

Absolutely. So on our podcast home page, yeah. I was gonna say on our podcast home page in the show notes, we will put a couple of things. We'll put a link to some resources that Richard's created for our listeners, as well as a link that you can schedule a call to visit with someone at Mangle about improving your phone system. I can also say we've done some investigation and I think your pricing is really competitive. I love that about you as well. So you often save the practices money in addition to providing all of these incredible resources. So I think that's something that our listeners need to know about as well.

Absolutely, yeah, we're just trying to do right by all the dentists out there. actually, believe it or not, we actually do care.

John Meis (22:36.831)
Well Richard, thanks so much for being with us. That's it for this episode of The Double Your Production Podcast. We'll see you next time.

Thanks again, everybody.

Ep 136: Rethinking the Phones with Richard May

Ep 136: Rethinking the Phones with Richard May

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