One of the best things I was told by Dr John Martin when I bought his [my first] dental practice way back in 1987 was this:
“However you want your practice to be, begin that way from Day One.”
These were very wise words.
He said to me:
“Whatever days you want to work, start working those days from Day One.”
And that principle, the principle of ME being in control, carried through to a lot of things that I did in my dental practice.
So many times I talk to dentists who have painted themselves into a corner, or an imaginary corner, because they have failed to stand up for their principles when their principle beliefs and values have been challenged.
And they have always regretted those poor decisions that they made from that day onwards.
Remember, as the owner of your business, your name is the one on the door, it’s the name on the lease of the rooms and the equipment finance, and it’s the name on the bank account that pays the wages and salaries of the employees of the practice.
And that title does have rights.
And one of those rights is the right to choose.
It’s the right to make decisions.
Here are five simple decisions you need to make right now that will alleviate stresses and pressures in your business immediately.
1. Stop allowing patients to make “throw away joking style” comments about you, dentistry, and what you do.
In any other arena, these comments would be seen as acts of bullying.
Which is what they are.
In this day and age, patients need to appreciate you.
Not slag off at you for being a dentist.
Dentistry is what you do.
It is not what you are.
2. Stop giving patients discounts.
Why do you openly surrender valuable profits in your business by giving away financial concessions to your patients?
Often I see dentists give “discounts” [what a VULGAR word] to their patients without the patient even requesting a price adjustment.
Why?
Why?
If you feel your prices are inflated then stop discounting and slash your prices across the board.
And if you feel that you need to reduce your price because you have done a multiple of the same type of procedure at one appointment, just ask yourself this:
Does Michael Bublé give you a discount for buying more than one concert ticket?
Does American Airlines give you a discount for buying more than one seat on a plane at one time?
Do Hilton Hotels give you a price per night reduction if you stay longer?
And does your grocery store charge you the same price for the seventh tin of dog food as they do for the first?
The simple answer is “NO”.
And this is why, when you do six fillings, you need to be reimbursed full freight for each of them.
3. Stop allowing your dental lab to deliver your lab jobs after the patient is seated and in the chair.
Make sure that you schedule your patients outside of your lab’s schedule.
If your lab tells you the crown will be back in fourteen days, then put the date [fourteen days out] on the job sheet and schedule the patient for twenty one days out.
And do this every time.
Always ask the patient this:
“Betty, now that crown will be back here in three weeks, so I’m going to organise your next appointment then, but if it comes back sooner, would you like to come in earlier than the three weeks to have that seated?”
4. Stop seeing patients who do not value and respect your time.
If you have patients who regularly cancel, and reschedule their appointments with you, and continually disrupt your appointment book, you need to read them the RIOT ACT.
You need to tell those patients that they cannot be patients of your dental practice any longer, unless they show respect for their appointments, their health, and your time.
5. Stop seeing patients who can’t behave like patients.
Do you have patients who cannot lie all the way back for dental treatment?
Yet sleep in a bed at night?
And others who need to sit up and rinse repeatedly ad nauseum?
What about patients who continually shut their mouths while you’re changing burs?
And other patients who want to crane their necks out of the chair and peer at your bracket table?
All these annoying behaviors by patients slow down your processes, and extend your appointment times, raising pressures for you, and for your future appointments with others.
Set your appointment guidelines and let these patients know that this sort of squirming around and disruptive behaviors will not be tolerated.
And when you eliminate these annoying behaviors….
When you eliminate these annoying behaviors you will find that practicing dentistry, on your terms, becomes far more enjoyable and far more profitable.
Remember, you should be the one in control….
*****
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.
The arrival of the dental patient at the practice is one of the two forgotten ULTIMATE BUILDING BLOCKS of the patient visit that can make or break the dental office to patient relationship.
Most consultants and advisers out there spend an inordinate amount of time discussing lead generation and marketing, as well as case presentation, but they neglect the very important steps that go on between the marketing and the case presentation.
And believe you me, if your practice is falling down on any of the intermediary steps between what’s getting people to call your office and when they learn about what they actually need to be getting done, it really doesn’t matter how great your case presentation skills are, nor how schmick your marketing is.
The three intermediary components that will make or break your dental practice and which MUST BE mastered are:
How well your phone is answered
How well presented your office is and how the arriving patient is managed
The performances of the ancillary staff who triage the patient from the lounge to the treatment rooms
Today we’re going to look at the experiences of the arriving patient….
The Ultimate Arrival.
The arrival of the dental patient can be broken down into three smaller stages:
The physicality of the arrival and what the patient sees, hears, experiences, and smells.
The greeting of the arriving patient
The management of the patient following their arrival
For each of these stages we need to create a list and define what we at the practice consider to be our standards, both operational and experiential, as well as our opportunities to go Above and Beyond.
Our practice also needs to clearly recognise what can go wrong during each stage as well as what is needed to rectify any disappointments and errors that the patient may experience.
We should also be looking to document any opportunities we may have to Offer the OfferTM to any patients.
How Does Your Office Present?
What does your dental facility look like when patients arrive for their appointment?
Does your building present professionally when viewed from the street?
How does your facility appear as patients get closer to your front door?
Is your entrance clean? Is your doorway clean and swept clear of leaf litter and dust and dirt?
Are your glass and chrome areas kept clean?
How does your office smell? Is it pleasant?
Are your carpeted areas clean and are your surfaces free of dust?
How about your reading material? Is it neat, tidy and current?
And are your bathrooms clean and well stocked?
Do you have fresh flowers at reception?
How about a welcome board welcoming new patients to the practice?
And what about something that REALLY differentiates you from every other dentist in town.
Incents
Mood lighting and music
Lounge room chairs
Coffee table books and magazines
Privacy
How each patient is made to feel when they first come in to your practice sets the tone for how they’re going to act with you, and your team during their appointment. Including… how receptive they’re going to be, to accepting new (and sometimes expensive) treatments.
Our goal should be to make our patients feel like welcome guests at our homes, rather than be treated like they are nameless, faceless “strangers”….
When we achieve this, we will go a long way towards truly differentiating our dental practice as being DIFFERENT from not only other dentists around us, but also being different from most other businesses around, in the way that we treat and respect our customers.
*****
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.
Employers and managers need to be leaders of their teams.
Team members look to their superiors for guidance and direction.
But providing instruction is not enough these days.
Your team members want more.
The best way to show your staff that you truly care is to understand who they are as people, and not just who they are as employees.
Failing to CONNECT on a personal level can leave your staff members thinking that their leaders don’t really care for them at all.
The out-of-touch leadership style is now redundant.
Leaders these days are expected to be more CONNECTED with their team members by being emotionally intelligent, actively listening, and being more available for their staff for conversations on all sorts of things.
One way of engaging better with team members is to have regular discussions with them on a one-on-one basis from early on in their engagement.
As well as discussing their progress and performance, important emotional topics should be addressed, like finding out what motivates your employee, and also how they like to be recognised at work.
It’s also important to understand how they feel about their career, and to even discuss why they chose to work for you and whether they have any feedback for management.
Even just meeting with team members one-on-one on a regular basis and asking them how things are going can be a very liberating and emotionally connecting discussion, that says to the employee:
“We value you. And we care about you.”
The thing to remember at work is that a lot of your team bring their “whole self” to work, and not just their “employee personas”.
And although we do want to see our team leaving their excess baggage at the door each morning, acknowledging the existence of the baggage with team members can go along way towards saying:
“I care, and I understand. How can I help?”
Businesses that can embrace the soft side, as well as the practical side of things, will experience better results in these days of increased awareness for management of emotional intelligence.
*****
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.
One of the things that I see more and more of these days in dental practices is that the person who answers the phone is not one hundred percent committed to their duty of answering the phone.
They are not getting IN THE MOMENT with the caller on the phone.
It’s as if they’re mind is wandering to someplace else, when their mind should be one hundred percent committed to the call and helping the caller.
What is distracting them?
There could be a number of reasons why the dental receptionist is not one hundred percent committed to listening attentively to their incoming phone caller:
Is the receptionist attending to a live patient in front of them at that moment when the phone rings in the dental office?
Has the receptionist been on another phone call that they just now had to put on hold?
Has the receptionist been drawn away from a serious meeting with their boss by this ringing phone?
Was the receptionist otherwise involved in a private conversation with another office team member when the phone rang?
Were they being distracted by trying to multi-task and attend to something else on their computer at the same time that the phone rang?
Here’s what needs to happen:
The dental practice team need to understand that the ringing telephone in the dental practice represents an opportunity to serve someone.
And that someone is usually an existing patient, or someone who has decided to call our practice because they have a dental problem and they have decided that they WANT YOUR PRACTICE to solve their problem.
[Yes, in this day and age, there is the opportunity for any dental practice to put sufficient information out there on the internet for anybody without a dentist to be able to decide whether they want to be your patient, or not.]
The ringing phone is NOT an interruption.
How we perform on the phone will determine whether the caller will become [or remain] a patient of the dental practice.
Or not.
Here are some tips to ensure that you are indeed an active listener.
The person calling the dental practice on the phone must feel that the dental receptionist has been waiting and looking forward all day to them calling in.
If your front office people can convey this feeling on the phone to every caller to your dental practice then you will go a long way to securing a heck of a lot more business.
Sadly, the converse is the reality.
Most dental receptionists feel that the ringing phone is an interuption to their day, rather than being an opportunity to help someone and solve their dental problem.
The caller must feel that your receptionist is truly invested in the outcome that will solve their dental issue, and at that time on the phone, nothing else AT ALL matters [to the receptionist].
The receptionist must operate with a checklist and also make written notes of everything said by the caller, as a reference and as a cross reference point as well.
Nothing infuriates a caller more than being asked questions about things they have already provided information about, that was clearly ignored by the phone answerer.
At the end of the call, the caller must be so looking forward to coming to the dental practice with such anticipation, that they seriously HOPE WITH ALL THEIR MIGHT that a change in the practice schedule does arise and the receptionist phones them to bring their appointment forwards.
Ultimately, the caller should feel that they have now discovered a brand-new friend, and that they are looking forward to meeting them [the receptionist] in person.
So….
Pay attention to what the caller says.
Pay attention to the outcome that the caller is hoping to achieve.
Pay attention to the tales of discomfort and pain that the caller is enduring.
Pay attention to the caller’s name and whether or not they have been to your practice before….
Lastly….
Get feedback from the caller that your dental office has been able to be of great assistance to them.
Unless you receive accurate feedback from your callers you will only be guessing as to how well things are really going on your dental office phone.
*****
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.
