What’s First Call Again?

If you’re a Sesame member, you probably remember hearing about First Call when you were given an overview of your services. You may also recognize the name as the heading of a section that comes up in your monthly progress reports. It’s also very possible that you may not remember what First Call actually is, or what it does. Well, we’re here to remind you.

Simply put, First Call is a phone call tracking system that helps you determine where your online calls are coming from. This is a great way for you as a practice to figure out where you’re more likely to get that new patient “first call” from, which can help shape your marketing strategies down the line.

So how does it work? When we launch your services, we put a unique phone number on your website which is different from your office number. Whenever someone finds your website for the first time via a search engine, they will see the First Call number. This number will reroute to your office so all the calls will continue to go to the same place. The only difference is that with the First Call number, you’ll be able to gather valuable data such as whether the person calling came from organic traffic (finding you by typing keywords into Google) or paid traffic (a paid ad campaign).

Any time the number is used, the caller will hear a prompt to press 1 if they’re a new patient or 2 if they’re an existing patient, giving you a better understanding of how many new calls are coming to your office over a certain period of time. As part of the prompt, the caller will also be notified that the call will be recorded. Recording can be useful for a number of reasons, but it can be especially useful as a training tool for your staff.

The best part is that you can view all of this great data on your First Call dashboard. Once you log into your First Call dashboard, you’ll see graphs that detail the numbers for things like leads per day in an easily digestible way. When it comes to online marketing, there’s nothing better than making an informed decision, and your First Call data helps you do just that.

If you need help accessing your login information or navigating your dashboard, don’t hesitate to reach out to our SEO or social teams!

—Michelle Hammond, Social Media Specialist, Sesame Communications