The goal of every dental office piece of communication is to secure the next appointment for our patient that is valued, wanted, and kept.
“The purpose of an appointment is to make another appointment.”
And the purpose of every piece of communication needs to be to secure that next appointment.
Every time a dental patient leaves without an appointment or phones and fails to make an appointment, or cancels an already scheduled appointment, or worse still, fails to attend an already made appointment without notifying our practice, then we have failed that patient.
You see, the fact is this:
Nobody ever calls a dental practice because they have nothing to do.
When a group of mums have finished playing midweek tennis, phoning around to dental practices is not an after-tennis game that they choose to partake in.
Similarly, a group of men sharing a couple of cold beers at the pub do not start phoning dental practices to see what dentists are charging this week for a scale and clean.
Every person who phones a dental practice does so because they have a dental problem, and they are phoning THAT PARTICULAR DENTAL PRACTICE because they have done their research and homework and decided that this is the dentist they want to help them with their dental concern.
Because the internet now allows all prospective patients the opportunity of doing their homework and their due diligence on your practice.
With that thought in mind, all any dental practice needs to do when prospective patients call your practice is BE THE MESSAGE that this caller wants to hear.
Solve their problem.
If you can persuade your callers, and your patients in your practice, that you will definitely be able to solve their problem at their next appointment, then that patient, or future patient, will most certainly be there for their next appointment.
However, if you FAIL TO CONVINCE that patient of the necessity, and the urgency of their next appointment, and you are “vague” about the consequences of them taking action in the correct time frame, then that patient will delay or defer their appointment.
And in so doing, in allowing that scenario to EVER HAPPEN, your practice has failed to provide the necessary and required service to that customer for them to benefit from your skills as a dentist.
Any patient who leaves your dental practice without what I call a
CLEAR. NEXT. STEP.
has been let down by your practice procedures and protocols and systems.
Because dental conditions that patients have do not resolve by themselves, and because people consume too much sugar and are lazy with their oral hygiene, there will always be a necessary reason for each and every patient you see to attend your dental practice again.
And so team members who say:
“That’s OK”
to patients who call to cancel or reschedule [because the patient wants to] without checking the clinical notes WRITTEN BY THE DENTIST, are failing to look after the HEALTH INTERESTS of the patient, and are actually undermining the professional decision previously made by the dentist.
And that is poor customer service.
The aim of every communication in the dental practice needs to be to keep the patient on course to complete their necessary diagnosed treatment in the recommended time frame.
Anything else is a disservice.
*****
Online Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this unique online ZOOM workshop Saturday November 21, 2020
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.
This quote from Bradley Sugars came across my desk last week.
It certainly is one of the great truths of business.
“The more energy and effort you put into recruiting great people, the less you will have to put into leadership and management.”
So many times I see dental practices scrimping on staff expenses.
And when they do, they end up BURNING opportunity.
And in burning that opportunity, they end up burning money.
Their efforts to save themselves a few pennies ends up costing them HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars.
Sometimes on an annually recurring basis….
Example #1
I recently came across a dental practice that shared rooms, and subsequently, its inbound phone line, with an allied health professional.
Yes. Really.
The confusion created on the phone line for first time callers was dramatic.
“Did you want the dentist or the physiotherapist?”
“Oh, you’re calling for an appointment with the physiotherapist? I’m with the dentist…let me see where the physio girl is…. Can I get her to ring you back?”
It can be very frustrating for all involved.
You’d have to ask yourself this question:
How many new patient callers would find this arrangement annoying and frustrating when they phoned? And confusing?
I’d say a significant number….
And how many callers might say that calling this office was just “a little bit too difficult and confusing”, and might decide to use another dental practice where the phones are answered without any added confusion being created?
Surely the cost of having two separate incoming phone lines for two businesses sharing the same location can’t be all that prohibitive?
And of course there’s the subliminal thought created in the minds of the caller as to how “cheap” the dentist and the physiotherapist are actually being by trying to cut costs on incoming phone lines?
Example 2
So many dental practices DO NOT have enough people employed in places where they are needed.
Have you ever phoned a dental office during regular business hours, where the call goes unanswered and goes through to a recorded message:
“Thank you for calling ABC Dental. We value your call. All our staff are busy with other patients at the moment. Please leave your name and number and we will call you back as soon as we are able to. Have a nice day!”
Or this one:
“Thank you for calling ABC Dental. We value your call. Our practice hours are from 9:00am to 1:00pm and from 2:00pm to 5:00pm. We are closed for lunch between 1:00pm and 2:00pm. Please call back during these hours, or leave your name and number and we will call you back as. Have a nice day!”
Guess what happens in both of these situations?
New patients calling a dental practice for the first time that receive recorded messages like these will simply hang up without leaving a message, and phone ANOTHER dental practice.
Yes indeed.
Let’s do the math on these:
Firstly, let’s employ an additional front office team member who can answer the phone so that recorded messages do not need to be used. And she is able to schedule one extra New Patient each day.
One additional New Patient booked in for an appointment each day means five new patients per week, or 250 new patients per year.
The average value of a new patient in 2011 in my practice was $2430.00 [This is what a new patient spent in my practice in their first 24 months in my practice].
So, in the examples above, in her first year of her employment, the new front office team member will schedule 250 extra patients who will spend $1215.00 that year, or $303750.00. [$1215.00 x 2 = $2430.00]
In the second year of her employment, and subsequent years, the 250 new patients from the previous year will spend $303750.00 [the second half of their $2430.00] and the 250 new patients of the new year will spend their first $1215.00 each. That’s a total of $607500.00 for this second year and each and every subsequent year.
With salaries meant to be 20% of collections, this gives the practice the opportunity of adding $121500.00 to the practice’s payroll budget.
So many times I hear dentists telling me that they can’t afford to put on extra team members.
When you look at these numbers you realise that a dental practice operating on minimal staff numbers is really choking itself.
It’s kind of like trying to push the accelerator pedal on your car to the floor while you still have the handbrake on and the other foot firmly placed on the brake pedal.
In Example #2 above, imagine the results the practice could expect with the new staff member being able to schedule TWO ADDITIONAL new patients each day?
The numbers are palpably staggering!
And yet so many dentists do not see this?
Whenever I looked at opportunities and situations, I always looked from a GLASS HALF FULL perspective rather than from the pessimistic “What if this went wrong?” point of view.
And I guess having that perspective helped me to grow my dental practice from a turnover of $400K p.a. to $3.3M p.a. in a fifteen-year period…
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 goal of providing great customer service is to help your customers get what they want, rather than give them only what you want to give.”
Jayne and I are doing some extensions and renovations on our home.
And one of the feature additions is the creation of a large picture window that dramatically captures the amazing northerly view that our home enjoys.
And so our list of windows for the house were forwarded off to one window supplier, who simply came back to us stating that this picture window that we wanted to create was too wide, and would need to be made as two glass panes with a centre divider.
Now the width of the window that we were trying to create was 4.3 metres. And according to this window manufacturer, for our [rural] location, we could only have a window that was 4.0 metres wide, unless we divided it into two halves with a centre divider.
Which kind of defeated the purpose of the large picture window, if you can imagine…
So, our thoughts were that we could maybe frame up the window space a little on each side so that the window was going to only be 4.0 metres wide, but still only one pane of glass [and no divider].
As you can imagine, the compromised offering from the window manufacturer was not well received.
Well actually, it wasn’t even a compromised offering. It was basically a statement of this is what they will do for us…. as opposed to a suggestion of actually being a preferred alternative…
In your dental practice…
In your dental practice are there occasions where your team have not been flexible in finding a solution for a patient with a particular need or request?
Sometimes when I listen to recordings of incoming phone calls at dental practices I hear dental staff talking to existing and potential patients on the phone as if their dental appointment book is made of stone and has had entries made in it with a hammer and chisel, that cannot be adjusted or amended.
Remember, every person who phones your dental practice has done so because they have a specific dental issue and they have already decided before they phone that they want your practice to be the place where they have that dental issue fixed and resolved.
Otherwise they would be calling another dental practice instead of yours.
Your team member’s job, or their duty, is to help that patient into an appropriate appointment that allows your dentist to resolve that patient’s issues in a time frame considered reasonable by that patient.
So many times I hear dental phone staff saying:
“I can’t get you in until the 12th of …..”
And when I look at the practice’s dental appointment book, it’s filled up with weeks and weeks of unproductive, less than urgent dentistry, and there are no emergency flex-time appointment spaces and no empty and available pre-blocked new patient appointment times.
And the reason that the practice offers me for that is simply:
“Well David, this is how we’ve always done things around here…”
The problem is the old way doesn’t serve anyone well.
A well-structured thought out pre-blocked appointment schedule that is run well and done well will be more accommodating for all patients and ultimately will provide for better production and better patient and instrument flow for the busy practice.
In 1997 I had PRK laser eye surgery on my left eye by a local ophthalmic practice because that’s the way that THEY did laser eye surgery. [I actually needed to have laser eye surgery on both eyes.]
Post operatively, my left eye hurt like heck. I couldn’t bear to be in direct sunlight or indirect sunlight for a fortnight and overall my eye took a good month to heal.
And I still had to go back to them six-months later so that they could do the same “treatment” to the other eye.
Because that’s the way this ophthalmic practice operated.
Out of frustration and desperation, I contacted a different ophthalmologist whose rooms were way across town away from me, to see whether I could have my right eye operated on “differently”.
When I visited his rooms for a consultation, the difference in the way his business operated was palpable.
Long story short, I was able to have Lasik eye surgery on my right eye at this second practice.
The postoperative recovery after Lasik was painless and I was out in broad daylight driving a car safely the very next day.
Putting it simply, the first ophthalmic practice was so set in its ways about how THEY wanted to practice that they were killing their own business.
Is your dental practice so set in its own ways that you are killing your business?
Back to the picture window…
Jayne contacted a second window manufacturer and visited their showroom and factory, where all their windows are made on site.
On this visit, Jayne was made to feel welcome, comfortable, important and understood, by everybody she came into contact with.
Ultimately, this second window company can make the large picture window that we are wanting for our home.
They recognised and enquired about what we were trying to do [and view] with that window, and they were flexible enough to be able to offer up the option of creating the right window for what we were wanting to achieve.
They listened….
At your dental practice, are all of your employees consistently making all of your patients feel welcome, and comfortable, and important, and understood?
Because when your business can do these four things CONSISTENTLY, and make your patients and your customers feel valued, then you will find you have built yourself a business that will always be sought out by customers in your community, with a reputation that will be the envy of all other businesses in your area.
*****
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.
A recent article I wrote discussing when to ask for the money, raised an interesting conundrum, especially with one reader.
Last week I had eye surgery performed.
On me.
This involved a private hospital visit and day surgery.
So, this one reader contacted me about an article I wrote last week.
In that article, I wrote about my objection to receiving a phone call from the hospital on the morning before my procedure, about their fee [bill], and the money, before I received a call from them about the agenda for the day visit.
This reader told me that he felt that I was being unreasonable, and that he saw no problem whatsoever with their approach.
In fact, the reader “assumed” that because I had scheduled the day surgery, that I was in total acceptance of their procedures and processes, and that for me to question the order of their processes was actually unreasonable behaviour by me.
Well, let me put it like this:
When you bake a cake, is there a time when it is better to ice the cake, or can you ice the cake at STEP 1?
Of course, it makes sense to prepare the ingredients, mix them in the recommended order, bake the cake, and then ice it?
That’s why we have an order of instructions when baking the cake…. So that we achieve our best results, consistently.
At my dental practice, we found there was an order of events at the end of the appointment that worked best for our practice, and for our patients, that allowed the practice to achieve its best results.
And going for payment first was not doing it for our results, and for our patients.
What we found was that when we arranged our post treatment discussion, and worked out the best order for discussing things, well, that’s when we started to notice a dramatic decrease in cancellations, and a dramatic decrease in patients leaving without making a next appointment.
So, at your dental practice, in what order do you place these events [listed below] at the end of a dental appointment?
Are some of these subjects taboo in your dental office?
A. Take payment
B. Schedule next appointment
C. Discuss today’s treatment
D. Social conversation about the patient
E. Social conversation about practice employees
F. Social conversation about the dental front office employee’s plans for the weekend.
G. Discussion about world happenings and events.
Every dental practice should have a simple, and repeatable process that creates stellar results.
That’s just common sense.
And so is this thought:
When you get dressed each morning, there’s a reason why it’s wiser to put your underwear on prior to your shirt and trousers, and not the other way around….
There will always be a preferred order of events that gives best results.
Hopefully this hospital [and my reader] will work out their own preferred orders….
*****
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 Friday I had a phone call scheduled with a dental Practice Manager to discuss some issues they were having at their practice, and whether or not I would be able to assist them.
This call was scheduled by the Practice Manager after I had exchanged a couple of emails with her.
Here’s what happened:
At the agreed time, I phoned the dental practice.
When the phone was answered by the dental practice receptionist, I told her my name, and explained that I had a call booked at this time with the Practice Manager [who I named].
The receptionist responded gruffly:
“Where are you from?”
And
“What are you calling about?”
And of course, she said:
“What was your name again?”
The switch had been made….
As soon as the dental receptionist came to the realisation that the purpose of my call WAS NOT to make a dental appointment, she switched her demeanour immediately.
My call was placed on hold.
When the receptionist resumed my call, she explained that the Practice Manager was “busy” and would return my call at a later point in time.
The Dental Receptionist took my number.
And the call ended.
Why is the switch bad?
The switch is not a good move.
The reason is simply this:
Just because the caller has not phoned for a dental appointment this time, doesn’t mean that they will never ever need a dental appointment or want to refer someone to that dental practice for treatment.
The execution of a switch is a very short-sighted behaviour
This is because you don’t know what will ever unfold from the act of just being pleasant and helpful on the phone.
Or for that matter, the act of just being helpful and pleasant to people who might visit your dental practice, or who you might come in contact with in your day to day travels while at work.
Years ago, we had a postman named Jim, who used to hand deliver our mail into our dental practice each and every day.
Jim used to carry the mail in a satchel over his shoulder, but what was remarkable about Jim was that he offered to and indeed did take our outbound mail back to the post office with him.
This was an amazing offer because I know that if that was my job, I’d be looking forward to my satchel getting lighter as I worked each day toward the completion of my postal round.
Now, I figured that my dental practice was not the only dental practice that Jim visited each day. After all, there was a dentist in the suite next door to my practice inside our building, as well as a dentist in the building two doors up the road and another dentist two doors down the road as well.
So I was pleasantly surprised [and honoured] when Jim chose to become my dental patient and completed a course of dental treatment with us.
Because he could have chosen to go to a number of other dental practices instead.
[And, just as an aside, not only did Jim become my patient, he was also a very good referrer of patients to my dental practice.]
The lesson is this:
If any of my dental team had performed THE SWITCH on Jim, and treated him as “just the postman”, then we’d have never had the opportunity of becoming his dentist and treating him, along with those patients that he referred to our practice.
Yet so many times, especially with phone calls to practices, I hear dental receptionists switch their persona to “prison officer” or “gatekeeper” mode, often for no other reason than JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN.
And I know, there will always be hawkers and canvassers who phone dental practices, trying to sell their wares to the dentist.
But just because they do, doesn’t mean that it’s OPEN SEASON for being rude to all of these people.
Bonus:
So, what did I learn from my phone call to this practice?
I learned that in the first instance, the practice needs to ELIMINATETHE SWITCH from their dental receptionist.
And if that doesn’t work, then they need to re-deploy their receptionist.
Secondly, this dental practice needs to review it’s on-hold message recording… too many big words, too many dental words, and too much me-me-itis…. And not enough points of difference…
*****
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.
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