Shropshire firm expands workforce as it completes major milestone

Dental membership plan provider, Practice Plan has just passed the major milestone of having 1.2 million patients signed up to its branded schemes.

Demand for plans has been so great since the pandemic that earlier this year, the company created two new field-based roles to support the RSMs and provide enhanced customer service for customers.

The head office team has also been bolstered with 16 people being recruited into the Customer Engagement and Quality Assurance teams so far this year.

Established in 1995 by husband-and-wife team, Jan and John Tinsley, Practice Plan set out to offer dental practices a membership plan structure that was branded to their own practice rather than to a third party and so increasing the loyalty of patients to the dental practice brand. Along with administering the dental plans, Practice Plan has a team of more than 20 field-based support managers (RSMs) who can offer help and guidance to practices on subjects such as HR and recruitment, practice management and marketing.

There is also an office-based team at the Oswestry Head Office to deal with customer services and administration queries.

The firm was acquired by specialist financial services provider, Wesleyan Group, in 2013, but bosses say it has managed to maintain the feel of a family-run business.

Director of Sales and Marketing, Nigel Jones said: “As a company, our aim is to help practices to be successful and to help them maintain quality of care for their patients.

"A plan is a means to achieve that. The support we offer to our customers is second to none. Indeed, over the past couple of years we have been able to ensure some practices facing closure remain open for their communities, especially in rural areas.

"We have also helped keep much needed dentists in the profession when they were thinking of changing career. It’s very satisfying when these sorts of things happen.”

During the first lockdown of 2020, as well as setting up online resources and webinars to help practices keep on top of things, one of the ways the company chose to help its customers was by halving its fees for two months.

This supported them with their cashflow and has been described as ‘a lifeline’ by some practices.

“When adversity hit our customers, we just knew we had to do the right thing for them,” Nigel added. "We weren’t really thinking in terms of what’s the right thing for dental plans and our business. We were thinking what was right for practices.

“We have a structure that allows us to be quite agile,” he continued. “Wesleyan gives us a lot of freedom to run the business the way we think is the right way for our clients and teams. It’s that level of empathy that sets us apart.

"We develop relationships that mean we’re close enough to our clients to understand the problems they’re experiencing and try to find ways to support them.”