Back in the 1990s I used to play a little golf with a medical doctor called Teddy.
In year 2000, at age sixty-five, Teddy decided to retire.
From medical practice.
And when he retired he simply closed the doors of that practice.
I said to Teddy:
“Why didn’t you sell your practice?”
Teddy told me:
“David, as you age, your practice and your patients will age with you. And what you will find is that young people seek out doctors their own age.”
Teddy said:
“Nobody wants to buy an old doctor’s practice. Especially when it is running low on patients.”
In dentistry, is that the case?
In dentistry, does there come a time when an older dentist becomes less visible, less attractive, as an option to younger patients looking for a new dentist?
Because in reality, nobody really looks forward to the day when they have to replace their doctor, their dentist, their hairdresser?
Do they?
We all really hope that our doctor and our dentist will outlast us as patients.
And when that day does come, the majority of patients choose to choose a replacement much younger who is certainly more likely to outlast and outlive them.
Just to be on the safe side.
Because there does come a time…..
In the world of performing arts, there does come a time when the recording artists that we used to love just can’t hit the notes, play those chords or command those audiences that they once used to do.
There comes a time when Billy Joel just can’t hit those high notes.
There comes a time when Michael Crawford just can’t sing for hours upon hours upon hours.
There is a day when the music does die.
The truly great performers recognise when that day has arrived.
Or should I say, they recognise the day before that day arrives.
Yes, there will always be the diehard supporters who will follow their favourite artist, their favourite doctor, their favourite dentist, to the end of the earth no matter what.
But there will always be those fans and those customers and patients who say:
“Thanks for the memories.”
“It’s curtain time…..”
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
Call Jayne on 1300 378 044 or email Jayne@theDPE.comfor more details.
*****
“How to Bring the Customer Service Magic of Disney Right There Into Your Dental Practice”
ONE TIME WORKSHOP Friday NOVEMBER 15 in SYDNEY.
Are you looking for that competitive EDGE for your dental practice in these questionable economic times?
History has shown that those businesses providing LEGENDARY WORLD CLASS Customer Service to their clients have not only survived, but THRIVED in during difficult times.
For the First time in Australia, Vance Morris brings you his comprehensive one day boot camp style workshop:
“How to Bring the Customer Service Magic of Disney Right There Into Your Dental Practice”
At this FULL DAY EXCLUSIVE workshop, you and your team will learn:
All about the cost that poor customer service is having on your dental practice.
Vance Morris will provide you with multiple examples of the financial impact of what poor service is doing for your practice.
He will explain in detail how to clearly DEFINE the “Customer Experience” (CX) for your dental practice.
You will learn the TEN RULES for WORLD-CLASS customer service, including:
* Anticipatory Service
* You had me at “Hello”
* Customer Service as a revenue generator
* “Everything communicates”
Vance will also explain in detail the art of PROFITABLE Service Recovery, including:
* How PROFITABLE Service Recovery is a systematic business process
* How to uncover your opportunities for PROFITABLE Service Recovery
* You will discover how to anticipate the needs for recovery
* Learn how to Train and empower your frontline employees on PROFITABLE Service Recovery
And much, much more….
Best of all, you will discover Vance’s signature programme Systematic Magic.
You will learn how to easily Out-Serve, Out-Price and Out-Market your dental competition in ANY ECONOMY. Based off his 10 year experience at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, Vance will reveal the 7 Magic Keys that Disney uses every day to create magic for their guests. This is the same system that Vance himself used while at Disney to create some of their iconic attractions.
At the end of the day, all attendees will leave with their own, personal blueprint to implement Disney style service in their dental practices, the very next day.
So if you’re looking for that competitive edge that’s going to set your dental practice APART from all of the other practices in your area, then book your dental TEAM into see Vance Morris NOW!!
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
In every business, no matter how good, no matter how top end, there will always be days when things will go wrong.
There will always be days when things do not go as they are meant to.
And when those days, or moments arise, the things that really make your business WORLD CLASS and stand out amongst others is the way that your business manages its service recovery processes.
What Are Service Defects?
Service Defects are defined as any obstacles and challenges that can occur at any stage of the Customer Experience Cycle that can ruin the customer’s experience.
What is Service Recovery?
Service Recovery is the processes that our business initiates when a service defect is recognised to have occurred.
Our dental office’s service recovery systems and the way we seamlessly swing them into action are what defines us as a business that cares unconditionally about our customers.
While these customers may complain about the service defect that just happened, they will be in awe at the way our business handles that defect through its service recovery processes….
Is it a Double Edged Sword?
If our business offers great customer service, doesn’t that mean that whenever we have a failure or a defect in that service that it is far more noticeable because of the difference between our service and the failure?
I mean, wouldn’t it be better just to give poor or minimal service to our customers, so that whenever there is a service defect, the difference between our stock standard level of poor service and the defect is not that big?
After all, a patient who receives poor service most of the time is far less likely to be bothered by poor service than a patient who receives World Class Customer Service and then experiences a World Class Service defect?
Is that right?
The Problem with Basic Levels of Service…..
The problems that businesses that offer only basic levels of service have is that they simply are not operating in the ideal pond when it comes to “fishing” for business.
Factually, customers who expect and receive World Class Customer Service do spend more and buy more than customers who accept baseline service.
Twenty to twenty-five percent of the population will not care what your competitors are charging and will happily pay your prices if they feel that the service you offer is World Class and represents good value to them.
These really are two completely different worlds to be operating in.
Returning To Service Recovery….
Yesterday my wife and I celebrated my birthday with a lunch at our favourite restaurant.
We eat there three times each year to celebrate our individual birthdays and our wedding anniversary, which fortunately for us are fairly evenly spaced throughout the year.
The food is exemplary and the service is always World Class.
It’s the reason why we keep going back there, year after year after year.
And we have been going back there, on this basis, for maybe ten or fifteen years.
In March this year, when we last ate there, there were a couple of small things that we felt were overlooked in our service that made our visit slightly less than perfect that time.
And we did raise these at the time, mainly to make sure that the restaurant was aware of our disappointment so that they could be more attentive to their other customers in the future.
When we raised these questions in March we received instant apologies from several people involved in the restaurant service processes.
And that was all we wanted.
But interestingly, when we arrived for lunch yesterday, we were greeted by the floor manager who apologised again for the disappointments in March and then presented my wife with a beautiful bunch of fresh lilies that he had purchased at the local market that morning and that his six year old daughter had personally chosen.
He also offered to us a complimentary bottle of Eden Valley Shiraz that he had personally been working on with a well-known Australian Wine Maker exclusively for the restaurant.
He made us feel like royalty.
And although there was no need for these extra acts of Service Recovery, we graciously thanked him for his noble efforts and we felt so honoured at those efforts to make small past wrongs right.
In your Dental Practice….
What are you doing in your dental practice to WOW your patients when small things go wrong in your Customer Experience processes?
What are the Service Recovery processes that your team instantly swing into action to not only make wrongs right again, but to make your customers forget those wrongs because your Service Recovery processes scream WOW out loud to them?
Our Service Recovery processes should be the tales told across the land in our suburbs and our towns.
It is our ability to create these World Class Experiences that lets our valued patients really know that they are indeed valued and respected by our business, and our people on our team.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
Call Jayne on 1300 378 044 or email Jayne@theDPE.comfor more details.
*****
“How to Bring the Customer Service Magic of Disney Right There Into Your Dental Practice”
ONE TIME WORKSHOP Friday NOVEMBER 15 in SYDNEY.
Are you looking for that competitive EDGE for your dental practice in these questionable economic times?
History has shown that those businesses providing LEGENDARY WORLD CLASS Customer Service to their clients have not only survived, but THRIVED in during difficult times.
For the First time in Australia, Vance Morris brings you his comprehensive one day boot camp style workshop:
“How to Bring the Customer Service Magic of Disney Right There Into Your Dental Practice”
At this FULL DAY EXCLUSIVE workshop, you and your team will learn:
All about the cost that poor customer service is having on your dental practice.
Vance Morris will provide you with multiple examples of the financial impact of what poor service is doing for your practice.
He will explain in detail how to clearly DEFINE the “Customer Experience” (CX) for your dental practice.
You will learn the TEN RULES for WORLD-CLASS customer service, including:
* Anticipatory Service
* You had me at “Hello”
* Customer Service as a revenue generator
* “Everything communicates”
Vance will also explain in detail the art of PROFITABLE Service Recovery, including:
* How PROFITABLE Service Recovery is a systematic business process
* How to uncover your opportunities for PROFITABLE Service Recovery
* You will discover how to anticipate the needs for recovery
* Learn how to Train and empower your frontline employees on PROFITABLE Service Recovery
And much, much more….
Best of all, you will discover Vance’s signature programme Systematic Magic.
You will learn how to easily Out-Serve, Out-Price and Out-Market your dental competition in ANY ECONOMY. Based off his 10 year experience at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, Vance will reveal the 7 Magic Keys that Disney uses every day to create magic for their guests. This is the same system that Vance himself used while at Disney to create some of their iconic attractions.
At the end of the day, all attendees will leave with their own, personal blueprint to implement Disney style service in their dental practices, the very next day.
So if you’re looking for that competitive edge that’s going to set your dental practice APART from all of the other practices in your area, then book your dental TEAM into see Vance Morris NOW!!
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
“Either you do it, or you get someone else to do it. Or guess what? It doesn’t get done!”
Fairly simple straightforward advice.
When organising your list of tasks in your business, you need to work out a few things.
Firstly, you need to work out a complete list of all tasks in your business, and beside each task you need to make a note as to who those tasks can be legally performed by, and who would be best at performing those tasks.
Secondly, we need to make sure that we are delegating evenly amongst the team and NOT overloading one or two team members with an excessive number of duties, while other team members are not being engaged efficiently.
There is also no point in having overqualified people in your business doing simple routine tasks that can be performed by others, while those others are doing nothing, and certainly are not doing the things that the overqualified team members can do.
For example, dentists should be fixing teeth and not filling in lab forms, writing patient notes, and assembling matrix bands. These duties can be performed by clinical support staff.
You also need accountability in your workplace.
This is what Lloyd was referring to.
You cannot do everything yourself, so you must delegate tasks to responsible people.
The phrase:
“But by the time I train someone to do this task, I may as well do it myself.”
Is NOT a valid reason.
So stop saying it.
Hire your team members to ASSIST you in your daily duties.
You are employing them and paying them to help you.
The reason you have employees is to make your life easier.
If they are not helping you then you need to train them, and if that does not work, you need to change them.
Remember “If you do not have an assistant, you ARE the assistant.”
And at a dentist’s hourly rate, that’s pretty dumb business.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
Last Saturday night at the farm we finally got around to igniting a huge burn pile in our top paddock that had been there, and been growing, for the past seven years.
We decided to create this bonfire last Saturday as celebration of my upcoming birthday, and we invited a few neighbours around to share in the warmth and enjoy a bottle of wine and some pizza.
Pizza is great with bonfires as you can easily dispose of the pizza boxes into the burning fire.
When I phoned for the pizzas, I was mindful that an order of six very large pizzas could have a detrimental effect at the restaurant to their regular flow of pizzas to the local eat in and take out diners.
The pizza restaurant was very friendly on the phone.
They took the order down easily, and then let me know the estimated time for pick up.
After I had gotten off the phone, I realised that we were sending one of the adult children of one of our guests to collect the pizzas, and so I decided to call back the restaurant to make payment over the phone.
When I called back [it was only a few minutes after placing the order] the lady who had taken my order apologised to me because she said that for large orders the restaurant takes payment over the phone, and she had erred in not doing this.
I happily paid over the phone, and thanked her for taking the order, as it was a large order.
Her response to my thanking her was to say:
“No, thank YOU.”
At all times, on both calls, this lady was professional and appreciative.
She was a pleasure to deal with.
How many times is this not the case?
How many times have you phoned a business and felt as though you were not even being treated as if you were good enough to be a number?
Let alone being treated as though you were a valued customer?
Or had the potential to become a valued customer?
How many times have you phoned up a business and been made to feel as though you were an inconvenience or an interruption to that person who answered your call.
At our dental practice, we want every person who phones in to feel as though the person answering the phone has been waiting all day just for them to call.
And when that phone call is over, we want that caller to be so looking forward to the appointment that they have made with such anticipation, that the caller is actually hoping that our office will call to bring that appointment forward.
When we look at the phone call from the callers’ points of view we see there is a whole OTHER perspective that needs to be considered.
And when the caller understands and feels the respect that our business shows them, the caller, then we have gone a very long way towards creating a valued [and kept] appointment.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
There are always those days in your life that you remember forever.
Or should I say, those days in your life that you never forget.
Days that stamp themselves indelibly in your psyche.
You know them.
We all have them.
For me, one such day was a day some twenty-five years ago.
I attended an all-day seminar.
It was a seminar with a line-up of speakers of epic proportion.
A line-up of superstars.
The day began with Brad Cooper, who was very entertaining. And then followed Stephen Covey, talking about his Seven Habits. Sadly, Stephen Covey has left this earth now.
Rounding out the morning was the enigmatic Brian Tracy.
The afternoon session began with broadcaster Alan Jones, and the day finished off with Norman Schwarzkopf and then Lee Iacocca.
It was indeed a star-studded line-up.
A good friend of mine was working for the organisation that put this show together.
And I remember talking to him on the phone during the week after the event.
And I said:
“Rob, I can’t believe how rude some of the attendees were at the event.”
I said:
“I felt so sorry for Brian Tracy, with all those people getting up and walking out for an early lunch while he was telling the audience how they could buy his recordings.”
I said:
“It looked so bad”
And Rob said to me:
“David. Don’t feel so sorry for Brian Tracy. I’ll have you know, that Brian Tracy sold more information product that day than the other five speakers added up and combined…”
Now I’ll never know whether some of those people walking out during Brian Tracy’s session were actually WALKING OUT, or whether they were walking out to purchase some of Brian’s product?
But whichever way you look at it, Brian was there that day to ensure that those who wanted to learn from him actually had the opportunity to receive MORE from him.
And those who didn’t want any more from Brian had the opportunity to walk away and say “No thank you.”
Because, you see, if Brian had decided he was going to be pressured into not offering any product to his audience by those who thought him to be too salesy, then Brian would have accidentally “played God” and predetermined their destiny, without ever giving them the opportunity to choose to take more information from him.
And that would have been a travesty.
Who in the audience has the right to prevent other attendees from taking that BIG step towards improvement?
Just because those selfish people came there to hear information, and did not want to buy information.
Statistics will show that over 70% of all seminar attendees do NOTHING with the notes they have taken at workshops much like these.
Why should the seventy percent who do nothing with their seminar notes have any say whatsoever in the educations of others who wish to learn and improve.
The goal of those who provide ongoing continuing education at these events is to be able to do the most they can with the little time that they have.
And it is those presenters’ duties to ensure that appropriate information can be offered to all attendees so that those who want to can choose to partake in additional education.
It’s a choice.
The audience is made up of grown adults who are free to choose.
A speaker who does not offer that choice to an audience, and sends his audience home with NOTHING extra, is professionally negligent.
It’s the same in dentistry.
As dentists, if we were only to do bare minimum dentistry, and not offer our patients more comprehensive options, we would indeed be failing our duty of care to them.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
Click on this link for all details
