Playbook, dental clinic
What the assistant can say when somebody asks what a crown costs
Price is the most asked and least published thing in dentistry. The difficulty is not secrecy, it is that the honest answer is a band, the patient wants a number, and the distance between the two is an examination.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for pricing questions holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Dental prices are published as bands and starting points, and the gap between the band and the invoice is a clinical examination, which is the whole of the difficulty in this question.
- Where a funded scheme runs alongside private fees, the same treatment carries two prices, and which one applies depends on a route the assistant cannot determine.
- The visitor is usually comparing your figure with one a friend quoted them, so a bare number without the band it sits in reads either as expensive or as too good to be true.
- For larger work the real question is what it costs a month rather than what it costs, so a price answer with no finance arrangement beside it is only half an answer.
How it arrives
- how much is a crown
- how much do implants cost
- what does a filling cost privately
- is whitening included in the check up
- how much to fix a chipped front tooth
- do you do monthly payments for braces
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your full price list with bands | Every treatment you publish a figure for, given as a range rather than a single number wherever the work varies. The single highest value document to index at a dental practice. |
|---|---|
| Funded scheme bands beside private fees | Where both apply, the two prices for the same work and what determines which one a patient pays. Do not let the assistant infer this from a page written for one audience. |
| What a quoted figure includes and excludes | Whether the examination fee counts towards treatment, whether x-rays are extra, whether a review appointment is included. This is where most price arguments actually start. |
| Payment plans and finance terms | Which arrangement you offer, what it covers, the minimum amount, and what a patient has to do to apply. |
The reply
Our price list gives crowns as a range rather than one figure, because the cost depends on the material and on what the tooth needs underneath [1]. The dentist confirms the exact amount in a written treatment plan after an examination, and larger plans can be spread over monthly payments [2]. Would you like the page for booking an examination?
It quotes the published range and immediately names why it is a range, which stops the number reading as evasive. It then points at the mechanism that produces a firm figure, a written plan, so the visitor knows exactly when they will get one. Finance appears because on larger work it changes the decision more than the price does.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor describes their own tooth and asks what it would cost to sort out, which is a quote for work nobody has looked at.
I cannot price work that has not been examined. Leave me your name and an email with a short description, and the team will arrange an examination so you get a written plan with the cost on it.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never give a single figure for treatment on a tooth nobody has examined.
- Never say a price includes something the price list does not list.
- Never say which funded band a patient's treatment would fall into, because that is a clinical decision.
- Never compare your fees with another practice's.
Questions
- Is publishing prices not just inviting people to shop around?
- They already are. The difference is whether they do it on your figures or on a guess, and a range with an explanation of what moves it within the range reads far better than silence.
- Can it quote finance figures?
- It can state the arrangement and the terms you publish. It should not calculate a monthly payment for a treatment plan that does not exist yet.
- What if our price list is out of date?
- Then that is the first thing to fix, because the assistant will quote it confidently. Pointing it at a page you maintain is safer than uploading a copy that quietly ages.
Keep reading
- Everything for a dental clinicThe questions a dental practice actually gets, the ones that must reach a clinician, and the documents worth indexing first.
- Handling pricing questions in generalPublished price versus the price for this buyer. Bands, ranges and from pricing, and why a firm number for unscoped work is the damaging failure.
- Answering what actually happens at a first dental appointmentFirst appointment questions at a dental practice are usually anxiety in disguise. What to answer, and how to word it.
- Passing a dental visitor to a person the moment a symptom appearsA described toothache is not a support question. Spotting it mid sentence and getting the patient onto the phone.
- A patient wants to move their appointment. Which one is it?Which dental appointments can be moved, why a crown fit is harder to shift than a check up, and what may be said about notice.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.