Success Stories

OrthoChats improves their patients experience with LiveChat

3 min read
Jul 29, 2016

Finding a niche is the first step to becoming a successful affiliate marketer. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to understand every single industry but when you concentrate all your efforts on a smaller but well defined segment, it will be easier to identify its needs, problems and how to solve them.

Niche marketing is the combination of a specific market and a specific service. Every great marketer knows not only how to look for a niche, but also how to create them.

A perfect example is our Expert OrthoChats. The company offers chat outsourcing services and focuses only on the orthodontic market. Here’s their story.

LiveChat services for the orthodontic niche

For the past four years, Scott Hansen, the owner of OrthoChats, has managed a dental practice in Kansas City. They have been recognized as one of the 5,000 fastest growing private businesses in the United States by Inc. Magazine.

scott hansen photo


Scott Hansen - OrthoChats

At the end of last year, I noticed that we had thousands of unique web visitors to our site at Hansen Orthodontic Specialists, but were only converting about 16% of the visitors into new patients. Like many business sites, the consumers don’t surf on the sites for fun; they are on the site for a deliberate purpose. In our case, they were visiting our site to learn more about straightening their teeth. So I thought to myself, ‘What might happen if we gave our web visitors a risk-free way to interact with our office? Might we interact with more people and, in turn, schedule more new patients in our practice?’ After installing LiveChat on our site, staffed by our own dental team, we learned that online chat was an effective way to lead-capture. Not only that, but chat was a unique way to improve our patient experience and gain a competitive advantage.

After experiencing the benefits of chat, they decided to outsource the chat service to be staffed by another business. They looked extensively but ultimately decided that chat agents that received a generic training could not express the nuances of their dental practice, nor could they represent their brand or services to their standard.

orthochats logo

“I called eleven orthodontist buddies and, after we beta tested for two months, I launched OrthoChats. OrthoChats focuses exclusively on the orthodontic niche,” explained Scott. “We are the world’s leading provider of professionally managed online chat for orthodontists. Focusing on a niche was something that naturally occurred."

As they have grown and served nearly one hundred offices in three countries, they have experienced the benefits of focusing exclusively on a specific market. “Our dental focus benefits our clients because of the specialized training of our Smile Specialists (our in-house chat agents)”, said Scott. Their agents (Smile Specialists) receive their certification after they meet specific qualifications such as: getting orthodontic and college education, English/grammar certification and a sales training.


Doctors who decide to outsource their customer service to OrthoChats can be sure that the agents who represent their practices are able not only to book an appointment but also to answer any orthodontic-related questions.

According to Scott, there are a number of advantages of concentrating fully on niche marketing. “Our focus helps OrthoChats collect a higher margin from each client, which in-turn helps us maintain a more highly trained team. This cycle result in happier clients, more frequent client referrals, and sustained growth for OrthoChats. If you are not currently focused on a specific market, I suggest exploring the possibility. When you master your trade, nothing feels better than getting great feedback from our customers”.