Recent publicity in the hospitality industry about fake one-star reviews of restaurants has highlighted the fact that the whole review process can sometimes be a bit of a dog’s breakfast if not handled correctly.
Restaurants are now finding themselves being held to ransom by unscrupulous “diners” who attend the restaurant and then feign an unsettling experience in an attempt to persuade the restaurant owner to give them a free meal in return for the fact that the diner will not leave a scathing review of their experience on social media or on a review site.
It’s a scam.
It is a criminal offence for a person to leave a bad review for an establishment or business that they have never visited.
Recently a dentist in Victoria Australia successfully took legal action against a fake review, that was actually left by a “former business associate” of the dentist.
So fake reviewers do need to be wary.
In my dental practice, I once had a new patient who presented for a consultation wanting Invisalign treatment.
However, after taking records, I advised the patient that his Class III malocclusion could not be fixed or corrected using only aligners.
This patient was very upset with my diagnosis, and so went ahead and voiced his dissatisfaction on social media review sites.
This was not a good result for my practice. Things would have been better if the patient had phoned me about his disappointment [in paying a fee for records and consultation and diagnosis], rather than launching into my practice on his computer.
What my practice then had to do was to actively seek happy patient reviews to stack above this “unhappy” review and suppress it down the list.
A simple phone call from the disappointed patient to me would have resulted in a refund of his fees paid [a refund was never sought], rather than the resultant mayhem and disruption that was caused.
No review is better than a bad review. It should always be the goal of your practice to eliminate any potential for bad reviews.
*****
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.
“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
And yet Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote, and sang:
“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might find
You get what you need.”
Who was correct?
And how do we apply these two quotations to dentistry?
In dentistry, our role is to help our patients get what they need.
And not what they want.
Because truth be told, if our patients were only given what they want, they would mostly receive cheap patch-up dentistry with the hope that their patches would outlast them [without hurting them].
What our patients need is fine quality dentistry that will look good and feel good and last a long time.
Patches do not tend to fit these three criteria.
And so the dentistry that the patient thinks they want is not the dentistry that the patient actually is in need of.
The oral cavity is a very harsh and savage environment. Dentistry that is not built to last does not last long in such a hostile environment.
What is best for the dental patient is to fix their problem correctly the first time so that their problem stays fixed and the dentistry lasts.
This is what the patient needs.
What the patient does not need is a repair of limited prognosis that is expected to fail in the short term.
What the patient wants is predictability and longevity.
Our role in serving that patient is to educate them about the VALUE of having predictable and functional and long-lasting dentistry.
Allowing the patient to accept anything else is a compromise.
If that happens, we have let our patient down.
*****
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.
What people want is the RESULT that the IMPLEMENTATION of that information will do for them.
Therefore, giving someone information only is not what they need.
What we need to be doing is setting them on the path of taking action so that they implement and begin the necessary stages to guarantee the results they are after.
In this vein then, the providing of information to patients without securing them their next appointment is actually a disservice to the patient and a COP-OUT of the greatest order.
What the patient actually needs and wants is their next step clearly laid out in front of them.
I once had a dental office team member say to me about their dentist:
“When he starts explaining to the patient what they are going to be getting done it’s like he’s trying to teach them a dental degree.”
What she was saying was that her dentist was going into way too much detail that was confusing the patients.
A dentist is good at drilling teeth.
And [hopefully] the dentist is also good at diagnosing dental pathology, and presenting that diagnosis to the patient.
Following from that, the dentist then needs to also be very good at directing the patient to the treatment that is going to be the best solution for their dental problem.
Once the diagnosis and the treatment is “out in the open”, it’s up to the dental office team to then organise the necessary appointments and pathways to achieve the best results for the patient.
The patient is really only interested in the completion of their dental work.
Not many patients are hanging out to talk line angles and gingival margin trimmers with their dentist.
If you SIMPLIFY your dental processes you’ll be surprised at how much more treatment ends up getting scheduled.
Think results.
Think implementation. Not information.
*****
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.
If there is no purpose to our communication, then that communication is purely and simply just noise.
Or fluff.
Or both.
The reason that we communicate with each other is to either receive information or to give information. The mutual transference of information and knowledge should always be the cornerstone of all of your communications.
When you need to find out something, then you can ask somebody who may know the answer to your question. Similarly, someone may seek your knowledge about something they do not know.
The ability to apply CONTROLLED LISTENING is an art or a skill that everyone should aim to master.
There is a reason why we are given tow ears and one mouth, and that is simply that we should aim to spend twice as much listening as we do talking.
When we become truly great listeners and we UNDERSTAND the benefits of active listening, only then can we really begin to offer sage advice.
An active listener will not only assess and digest the information they are hearing, but they will also be strategising their responses and replies in such a way that those responses achieve the best outcomes in the conversation.
And the best outcome in any conversation is a WIN-WIN.
A conversation that concludes with both parties feeling that they have PROGRESSED their positions is the best result for all conversations.
In the dental practice, the aim of all conversations is to lead the patient to the decision of proceeding with the dental treatment that has been diagnosed for them.
Providing patients [and callers to the office] with information is not the best outcome of dental practice communications.
Patients don’t want information.
What patients want is the results that that information can do for them. Patients want their mouths and teeth to be pain free, and comfortable. And attractive.
As one of my dear friends would say:
“Look good. Feel good. Last a long time.”
Implementation of the actions required to achieve a pain free and comfortable mouth is the key result needed.
Anything else is simply unnecessary noise. Or fluff.
*****
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.
Every dental practice is making this simple mistake.
Every day.
Of every week.
Day after day after day.
And this simple mistake, repeated over and over and over day in and day out, week in and week out, is costing you and your dental practice a veritable fortune.
The money you are losing in your dental practice is money that could be used to be sending your children to a better school.
And its money that you could be spending on an overseas vacation for you and your spouse [and children] each and every year.
It’s money that you could be using to reward your valuable staff for their continued help…
This mistake your practice is making REPEATEDLY day after day is costing you your health.
Because you are having to work longer hours, and for more years, just to claw yourself back to the position you should be in if your practice WAS NOT making this mistake.
The good news is that every dental practice out there is making this mistake.
The bad news is that just because everybody else is foolishly doing it doesn’t make it ok for your practice to be doing this.
What is the mistake that is being made that should not be being made?
Putting it simply, the mistake that dental practices are making is to turn away patients without finding out sufficiently what that patient is in need of and whether or not we are able to help that patient.
This is being done every hour of every day in every dental practice.
Someone calls up your dental practice and asks a simple question.
Your receptionist answers the question asked with the answer that SHE THINKS is best FOR YOUR PRACTICE without finding out a little bit more information from the caller.
And without that extra information, the receptionist answers the question THAT SHE THINKS SHE HEARS, rather than clarifying a few things with the caller so that she is able to help the caller with the true reason that the caller has called in the first place.
I was telling this story to my fencer….
I was telling this story to my fencer. Well he’s not really my fencer. He’s a guy who has come and helped me replace all the fences on my property, as well as perform several planting and tree lopping jobs as well.
So he’s really his own self.
Anyway, to protect the innocent, let’s call the fencing guy Bob. [Bob is not his real name].
So I was telling Bob about how the act of poorly answering dental phones can see valuable patients that need significant amounts of dentistry just slip right out of the dental practice because the dental receptionist has answered the question she THOUGHT that she heard the caller ask.
Instead of clarifying a few things with the caller and uncovering the true reason for the call.
So Bob [not his real name] also does some lawnmowing work for a local contractor.
Here’s a story Bob [not his real name] then shared with me.
A while back, Bob sees a “Lawnmower required” sign in his travels and he rings the number, talks to the guy who needs the lawnmower, and does a site inspection.
The site that needs mowing is a new development, so there are a significant number of vacant lots that need to be maintained so potential buyers can walk those lots. There are also some nature strips to do along with a communal park where residents’ children play.
The problem is, the lawnmowing contractor that Bob [not his real name] works for, thinks that the job is a little too far to travel for. So the contractor refers the job to a friend of his who does smaller mowing jobs but lives closer to the development.
To cut a long story short, the friend gets the contract. It’s a weekly mow [the lots need to look spick and span each week for selling] and the job pays $2300 per week, and the contract is for over a year.
That’s a $115000.00 per year contract that the contractor just turned down…
When the contractor was looking for work at that time.
Bob [not his real name] could not believe it.
And the beauty about grass, is that it grows and it grows and it grows.
There’s a lot of long term repeat business mowing lawns.
How does this relate to dentistry?
A caller to your office asks:
“How much do you guys charge for a clean?”
The dental receptionist answers:
“We can’t see you until November, we’re fully booked”
And so the caller hangs up and calls elsewhere.
What the dental receptionist failed to ask was the REAL REASONwhy that person was calling about teeth cleaning.
What the dental receptionist failed to find out was that the caller had just ended their marriage, and they really were interested in veneers and crowns and a full mouth makeover to get back at their cheating husband….
The thing is, it was just that the caller didn’t know what to ask first….
And it’s a pity that the dental receptionist did not know how to ask the best questions to tease out the real reason and purpose of the phone call.
This is sort of thing is happening every hour of every day in every dental practice.
I know because we’re listening to the good practices who are trying to rectify this problem.
The bad practices?
They’re just bumbling along trying to save a few pennies while the big dollars are blowing away from right under their owners’ noses…
*****
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.
You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order
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