I often hear dentists say that their dental practice is well-respected in their community.
How is respect for a business gauged?
Where do you go to measure the amount of respect that a community has for a business?
Is there a respectometer that measures this level of respect?
Is it like a thermometer or a sphygmomanometer?
How do we measure respect?
Reviews
Reviews, and review sites, such as Trip Advisor reviews and Google reviews, are one way of measuring the sentiments of visitors to a particular restaurant, travel firm or destination, or business in general…
But…
Reviews and review sites can be “manipulated” to create a specific result.
Reviews can be stacked, in a positive way, and in a negative way, depending upon who wants to have what sort of effect on a business.
A business owner could possibly ask for favourable reviews from people he knows who might never have visited his business. Similarly, competitive businesses could solicit a wave of poor reviews for one of their competitors’ businesses, from people who might never have been customers of those businesses.
I’ve even heard that companies running review sites have been found to “manipulate” reviews in order to have businesses purchase additional services from those companies.
But here’s the rub…
If you really want to see how well respected a business is in a community, then here’s two things that I’d be looking at:
Firstly, I’d look at who is doing business with that business, and how keen are they to do business with that business?
If a business is to exist, it must have customers, but it must have customers who are EXCITED to be doing business with that business.
For a dental practice, this means that the patients are making appointments, and are keeping appointments, and are wanting to come in sooner rather than later for their treatment.
And the patients are turning up on time for their appointments. They are punctual, and they respect the time of their dentists.
The patients appreciate their dental practice and they show this appreciation with their watches and their clocks, rather than with their wallets.
Secondly, if you really want to know how well respected a dental practice is in the community, then look at the punctuality of their staff.
Are the staff arriving early to work, and turning up for work invigorated and READY TO GO?
Are they turning up well-groomed and ready to meet and greet patients?
Or are the team meandering in like brown cows, arriving at a time that THEY FEEL suits them, with little respect for their employer?
Are the same staff keen to down tools and leave on the “stroke of five” when the whistle blows?
Or are they willing to work back if needed, to ensure that the job gets done properly? Do the staff know that what benefits the practice also [by trickle-down effect] benefits the team as well?
Sometimes the publicly displayed negative attitudes of the staff to their place of employment are a direct reflection of the internal thought processes and conversations going on.
Raising the morale in a business is easy. And the benefits of doing so are exponential, especially when it comes to respect.
*****
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.
The language we use in our dental practice can often be “familiar” to us, but may be considered OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE by clients, customers or patients, who either do not know us, or do not speak THAT WAY, or are expecting something better or more professional.
Years ago, when I was in my own practice, I had reason to need to “borrow” some sundry dental supply material from a neighbouring dental practice that for some reason or other [don’t ask me HOW that happened] had we run out of in my dental office.
Anyway, I walked in my neighbour’s front door [his dental office was two doors down the road from my practice] and his dental receptionist was at standing their front desk but with her back facing me and the front door, investigating the contents of a drawer or cupboard below her eyeline .
When she finally turned around and stood up to face me and greet me, she did so, and enquired simply, using one word:
“YOUR?”
Yes. That was it.
That was her greeting.
That was the way she greeted me, and I assume, that is how she greeted anybody arriving at that practice who she did not know.
“YOUR?”
To be frank, it sounded like a noise you would expect a donkey to utter.
It was, to me, one of THE MOST offensive greetings I had ever heard or experienced, to this day.
It reminded me, back in the day, in the 1980s, when I was working as an associate dentist in Western Sydney, that a neighbouring medical practice used to answer their phones:
“SURGERY.”
Or if you were lucky, you might get:
“Hello, surgery?”
with my use of the word “get” being [sadly] the exact way a caller was made to feel.
You see, even the word “get” is an offensive word that to me conjures up images of superiority and of submission.
“You’ll GET what you’re given”
was a phrase I knew only too well as a child [with the implication that the receiver should be grateful to have received anything at all].
In that example, the word “get” could easily be replaced by a more polite word, like:
“receive”.
In a similar vein, I’m hearing dental receptionists now say to patients, on the phone:
“I’ll just GRAB some details…”
Or
“I just need to grab a few details from you…”
You see, in real life, the action of “grabbing” is an action of taking something forcibly when a gentler means would be more appropriate.
Sometimes things are “grabbed” when they shouldn’t be taken at all.
So the use of the word “grab” in our spoken communication is at best lazy, and at worst, offensive, when a gentler word could be used:
“Betty, I just need to ask you a few questions…”
Or
“Betty, can I ask you a few questions please…”
are far more appropriate ways of saying the same thing in a more polite manner.
Think closely about the things that are being said to your valued clients, when they call or visit your dental practice.
The LAZY use of language by people employed in your practice to provide service could be affecting your practice profitability in a very negative way.
We’ve all heard someone describe an employee at a business they have visited as:
“She was SO RUDE!!”
Don’t let that be your dental practice that they are talking about.
Analyse every phrase and sentence used in your conversations and ask each other this:
Is what I just said THE VERY BEST USE of the English language, or could I have said the same thing in a nicer way?
Only complete this exercise if you want to improve YOUR dental practice [pun intended].
*****
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.
If you have to terminate the services of an employee, the only way to really do it is in a face to face meeting.
Terminating the services of an employee by SMS, email, or by mail, is a very low and underhanded and gutless method that nobody with any personal pride should ever contemplate.
Termination by phone call is also very poor form.
Years ago, a member of my golf club left his wife a note on the fridge:
“I’m leaving you for my secretary. Don’t bother calling me. I’m not coming back.”
In shock, the jilted wife took the note up to the golf club, and showed her lady golfer friends.
The note became folklore and the husband never lived the story down.
Breaking up of relationships between lovers via SMS or Message services are similarly poor form.
If you’ve got to end the relationship, including a working relationship, then have the decency to end it face to face.
Although I never enjoyed terminating employees, I became adept at creating effective face to face exit procedures to make the process of departure as efficient and as pain-free as possible.
And really, when an employee needs to be terminated, the chances are that mentally and emotionally, that employee has already LEFT THE PRACTICEand is really only present in body only.
That’s what really makes the process very easy.
Expanding the employment opportunities for an already mentally departed employee is a liberating experience for both the employee, and for the employer, as well as often being what the practice needed as well.
But no “Dear John” letters…. Please.
*****
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.
Last week I was on a coaching call with one of my coaches where he was demonstrating the difference between replying to what we hear, and replying to what we think we hear.
My coach asked a series of ten questions, each one only one time only, and the answer to each question needed to be written down. The answers were checked after the tenth question had been answered.
Before checking the answers, my coach enquired as to how confident I was with the test.
I told him that I thought that I had answered each question correctly, because I felt that I had listened very attentively to each question.
My score was six correct out of ten.
My coach told me that most people fail to complete this test and rarely pass it…. Most people taking this test score less than five out of ten.
The reason for this is simple:
Most people in a conversation hear what they want to hear and think that they hear what they want to hear.
When in fact, what they ACTUALLY HEAR is totally different from what has actually been said to them.
We must first listen to understand.
Most people listen only to respond, or plan a response.
In fact, most people are thinking about their response before their conversational colleague has actually finished speaking.
They are failing to hear the full intention of what has been said, because their mind has been hijacked already into planning a response.
When we listen firstly to understand, and secondly to respond, it is only then that we become a true communicator.
Test yourself:
See if you catch yourself out, answering or interrupting someone before they have finished speaking, only because you are in such a hurry to make and add in your own comment.
If you speak before you are meant to, you may be interrupting some comment of extreme significance, and you’ll never ever know what that comment was, nor how it might have been to your advantage to have heard it.
Hmmmmm….
*****
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.
And one of those truths is that you don’t have to agree to be agreeable.
By that I mean that you don’t need to disagree every time that you don’t agree.
Just because you do not agree with something, doesn’t mean that you have to vocalise your disagreement.
Sometimes it is better to just agree with someone, even when you disagree with them, just to shut them up.
And by shutting them up, you actually WIN.
And they are none the wiser.
I remember discussing this many years ago with a friend of mine who owned a fitness centre.
One of the employees at the fitness centre regularly made errors of judgement on a consistent basis.
Now it was thought that these random errors made by this employee were at best, acts of carelessness, and as such were just simply errors in his personal judgement.
Whenever my friend had reason to raise these errors with his employee, the response from the employee was always the same.
And that response was one of apology. The employee was always agreeable about any error and they were truly apologetic for the inconveniences or failures caused.
By responding in this manner each and every time, the employee ALWAYS diffused any antagonism that might have arisen in the mind of his employer [my friend the fitness centre owner].
In so doing, the employee always was able to create a situational result akin to “dropping the rope” in a tug-of war.
No resistance = game over.
The key thought.
I don’t know whether the employee was living by the doctrine I am about to suggest, but his actions and responses were certainly aligned with the key principle:
And that is:
“In a year’s time, will what I think, say or do now, in this moment, really matter?”
Sometimes letting things “go through to the keeper” is often the best strategy.
Failing to “bite”, just because a bait is thrown, is not a sign of weakness, but rather, is a sign of intelligence.
A good batsman knows which balls to hit, and which balls to leave.
Do you?
*****
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.
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