Case study: Building a phone system that’s truly worth smiling about

As the nation’s fastest-growing network of orthodontists, Smile Doctors maintains over three hundreds in more than twenty states.  As the name suggests, theirs is a network that wants to not only give their patients the confidence to smile, but also a reason to do so. A big part of that means making the patient experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible.

This is not something that can typically be achieved through Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS), as Smile Doctors IT Systems & Telecom Engineer Jerry Maye learned firsthand. At the time, Jerry was an IT Systems Admin for Devereaux Wynn Orthodontics, a modest dental practice with 11 offices in Mississippi and Louisiana. 

In many ways, Deveraux Wynn was suffering from success, growing so fast its infrastructure simply couldn’t keep up. A year after replacing the practice’s POTS with a competing solution, Deveraux Wyn outgrew it. Jerry and his colleague quickly replaced that platform with an enterprise solution. 

Then Devereaux Wynn joined the Smile Doctors network, which at the time consisted of 140 offices — it added another 60 in the year following the merger. 

It was almost immediately obvious that, though this solution was supposedly built for enterprise, it could neither scale effectively nor support advanced calling features. Call quality and reliability suffered as well, culminating in a 72% call abandonment rate. This cost them roughly $50,000 a month. 

After putting together a shortlist of potential UCaaS replacements, and engaging in countless sales calls with vendors that didn’t fit their needs, Smile Doctors found G12 Communications. 

“They had all the right answers, they were honest and to the point, and they were genuinely interested in helping our deployment succeed,” Jerry recalls. “This wasn’t just about securing a new revenue stream for them, and their customer service reflected that. When we committed to work with G12, they provided us with our own dedicated resources, including a provisioning team, porting team, and project manager.” 

Today, Smile Doctors has connected 200 of its 300 offices to a G12 cloud phone and UCaaS solution, and is in the process of migrating the remaining 100. With the new system, affiliates are able to bring in more customers and take more calls, all with a minimal IT workload.

Most importantly of all, Smile Doctors affiliates can now offer a customer experience that truly leaves patients smiling — just as it should.