I was at the optometrist last week getting some new lenses in five pairs of glasses.
Yes, five.
Well one of the new sets of lenses involved new frames.
It was a significant transaction.
The optometrist that I go to is very modern and very customer service oriented.
It’s almost as if you need to make an appointment just to buy your spectacles.
Well, actually, that’s what you do there…
The process of buying spectacles there is almost akin to the process of buying a new wardrobe [not the furniture, I mean the new season of clothes] by appointment.
Where a tailor or outfitter spends time with you and fits you out with everything you need from head to toe.
You understand the idea?
New suits. New slacks and trousers. New shirts. New ties. New shoes. New belts. New cuff links… the whole nine yards.
And that’s the feeling that I’m given at this optometrist.
So on this visit, while I’m being fitted and measured, there are other clients waiting for the same service process.
For them.
And they’re happy to wait.
And to be waited upon.
And to be fitted correctly.
And to be made to feel important.
And to be made to feel valued.
So what happens when the phone rings?
What happens when the phone rings when there are customers being served and customers waiting to be served?
Should one of the staff leave the customer they are with to attend to the ringing phone?
After all, a ringing phone usually is bringing new business.
But a ringing phone takes time to be answered correctly, so that the caller feels valued, and wants to come in for their appointment….
There certainly is a skill required to be able to satisfy the live customer in front of you as well as the customer calling in on the phone wanting world class service, at exactly the same time.
So what’s the answer?
The answer is simple.
We need a mathematics lesson.
The same principle that applies here at the optical dispenser also applies in dental practices.
What do you do when you have a live patient in front of you checking in or checking out, and then the phone rings?
Do you let the phone go unanswered?
And go through to your service, hoping that the caller is happy enough to leave a message and wait for a call back?
[What if they aren’t happy to leave a message, and call another dental office to get an appointment right then and there?]
Do you excuse yourself from the live patient in front of you and answer the ringing phone, hoping you can serve that caller very quickly and return back to your live patient as if there never was any interruption at all?
How does that make your live patient feel? Do they feel important and valued?
How about the patient you just had on the phone and rushed away from? Do they feel important and valued?
I know some dental practices where dental chairside assistants and dental steri-assistants are answering the ringing phone when the front office staff are stretched…
But the chairside staff and the steri-staff aren’t trained up to be proficient phone answerers…
They are proficient at clinical and steri- duties.
Having under-trained back office staff jumping in and answering ringing phones is kind of like calling a park footballer up into first grade when a regular seasoned first grader is injured and unavailable…. You know there will be no happy ending…
So back to the mathematics…
At the optometrist, my purchase of new lenses and frames was worth over $4000.00.
If you assume that maybe I spent double what the average customer spends, then let’s say that a customer [new or repeat] is spending $2000.00 each visit.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that at $25.00 per hour, one new customer would cover the salaries for the day of ten additional employees.
So with that much margin in employment costs vs the customer value, or spend, why wouldn’t it be a no brainer that with one or two or three extra trained staff, no existing live customers would ever feel unimportant, and no customer who phoned in would ever be made to feel hurried or rushed on a phone call?
Would they?
Yet so many dental practices, retail stores, and service industries try to cut costs on staff, and then attempt to perform the customer service dance without sufficient staff numbers to provide that necessary THRESHOLD LEVEL required for the provision of the world class service.
The mathematics is simple.
The more service that your business provides, the busier your business will be.
That’s the no brainer…
*****
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.
They tell me they are booked out six and eight weeks in advance.
And they tell me they have closed their books to new patients.
The simple truth is this:
THEY ARE WASTING HUGE OPPORTUNITIES.
Putting it simply, they may be busy, but they are falling short on being efficiently productive.
What I often find is that their appointment books are filled with non-productive appointments and scheduling that are clogging their treatment rooms in the same way that cholesterol and plaque clog vital blood vessels to the heart and to the brain.
And in the case of blood vessels, unless there is a major SHIFT IN THEIR THINKING, the artery will end up closing and then we end up with a stroke, paralysis, or death.
Undiagnosed cardiovascular disease can manifest itself suddenly with dire consequences.
And undiagnosed appointment schedule disease will manifest itself in A LACK OF FINANCIAL FREEDOM, a delayed retirement or worse still a retirement of boredom without benefits.
All because the dentist believed they were “too busy.”
When a dentist in Queensland contacted me seven years ago, I unblocked her appointment book from a production level of less than $60,000.00 per month so that twenty months later she was able to achieve production levels of $150,000.00 per month.
A change in thinking took her practice from a turnover of less than $700,000.00 per year to a turnover of in excess of $1.8M per year, in a time frame of less than two years.
All done by looking at her appointment schedule with an extra pair of eyes… AND IMPLEMENTING AN ACTION PLAN.
Another dentist in New Orleans USA who worked with me took her practice from USD$1.02M to USD$1.2M in a twelve-month period, where she sacked over 1800 patients who were unappreciative of her work and her practice. She went from seeing over sixty patients per day who didn’t value what she did for them to seeing around twenty patients per day who really appreciated her care and her service.
All done by looking at her appointment schedule with an extra pair of eyes… AND IMPLEMENTING AN ACTION PLAN.
It’s really sad…
What is really sad is when I hear a phone call to a dental practice that goes like this:
Caller:
“I need to make an appointment to have all of my teeth crowned. I’m a patient there. I’m just sick of my teeth and I want them all fixed.”
Receptionist:
“We don’t have any appointments available for you to see us for 3-4 weeks.”
Here’s what should have happened:
Caller:
“I need to make an appointment to have all of my teeth crowned. I’m a patient there. I’m just sick of my teeth and I want them all fixed.”
Receptionist:
“I have an appointment available this afternoon at 2pm or tomorrow morning at 10:30am. Which time suits you best?”
In the actual call above, there was no solution offered to the caller, and no care or concern was shown.
There was no urgency to create a relationship with the caller [or RECREATE the relationship], or to exceed the caller’s expectations.
The caller would have felt flat and underwhelmed by the way they were treated.
I’d have been very surprised if that patient ever bothered to call that practice again.
The receptionist should have said this [of course after finding out the caller’s name]:
“John, let’s do this. Let’s organise a time for you to come in so Dr Smith can see exactly what’s going on and let you know your best options. I have a time available this afternoon at 2pm or tomorrow morning at 10:30am. Which time suits you best?”
When a caller to your practice is made to feel welcomed, and understood, and appreciated, when they feel care and concern, and their phone call creates a sense of urgency in the practice, then and only then will the practice truly grow to its full potential.
The sad part is that most dental schools don’t teach appointment schedule management for success.
Most dental schools don’t teach Appointment Schedule Management 101.
As a result, most dental appointment books look like a messy old wardrobe or closet…. when there is truly so much potential being wasted.
The day you restructure your appointment schedule for production is the day that you unlock the financial freedom for your future and your family’s future that your dental practice can truly provide.
*****
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.
I had a massively HUGE floater removed from my left eye.
The surgeon said it was one of the biggest that he had ever seen, and he had seen and removed a lot more of these than most ophthalmic surgeons.
He said that on a scale of one to ten, this one was a nine.
So here’s how it all started….
I had been having trouble with my vision for about a year. I had felt that my two eyes were not working together.
This gave me difficulty seeing things clearly, and I had difficulty with far and near depth perceptions, so much that, I used to often close one eye when reading the computer as well as following live sports, such as golf, or cricket or rugby league.
Putting it bluntly, trying to see things clearly was no fun.
My vision concerned me…. So about a year ago, I visited the local optometrist and had a new prescription done, and new glasses made up to that new prescription.
The result: Minimal improvement.
Both eyes seemed to work fine individually, but together?
Same, same problem. No depth perception.
After a couple of months of toughing things out with these new glasses, I went back to have my vision re-appraised.
Sadly, this dispensary was more concerned with their cost of re-doing my prescription and re-making and re-fitting me with new lenses, than actually trying to diagnose what exactly was causing my vision issues.
End result: New prescription. New lenses.
Same problems.
Still blurry vision in my left eye and no depth perception.
What do I do now, then?
Think. Think. Think…..
I own some very expensive European prescription sunglasses.
I’ve had these sunglasses for some time now. One pair has multifocal lenses, for day to day use, and the other pair is long distance only, for playing golf. Currently, there is only one distributor in NSW, who operates from a ground floor street front retail outlet in Sydney CBD. [Read: EXPENSIVE rent!]
Their retail space is well fitted and the owners are very personable. There is a certain VIBE to the place.
So I made an appointment to see the optometrist there. This requires a long trip into town [two hours drive each way], and I knew that the visit wasn’t going to be cheap.
The optometrist was very thorough. Drops and measurements and tests and more measurements and photos and all sorts of tests…
End result: Referral to a Vitreoretinal Surgeon and Macular Disease Specialist.
But not just any old Vitreoretinal Surgeon and Macular Disease Specialist… I get referred to one who is also an Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at a local University!!
Looks as though my condition, and my solution, have been elevated on the urgency scale.
So, to cut a long story short, when I saw the surgeon, I persuaded him to operate sooner rather than later to remove this Titanic sized floater from my left eye.
And five weeks after the surgery, my vision in my left eye is clearer, but still out of focus.
I’m working better on the computer, but for distant sports watching, I’m back to using only my right eye…
I’m thinking:
“What is going on?”
What IS going on?
The surgeon warned me that floater removal surgery hastens lens degeneration and the formation of cataracts, which means, in lay terms, cataract surgery and artificial lens placement will be necessary in about twelve months’ time.
For the left eye.
So where I am now is simple: I need a new prescription, and new lens, for my glasses on my left side. Until I need cataract surgery.
I now have an action plan.
By consulting with the best in the business, I now know exactly what has been wrong with my vision, and I know the timeline I need to operate under to solve my problem, and improve my vision once and for all.
I’ve had my prescriptions updated.
And I’ve ordered new lenses for my glasses.
And I know that sometime in the near future, I’ll need another new prescription and more left eye lenses, until I require lens replacement surgery.
I now have a plan.
I know it has cost me more in terms of dollars, but the result, and the care that I have received by seeking out better providers has been absolutely worth it.
When I consulted with the local optometrist and dispenser, all they wanted to do with me was pigeon-hole me into a treatment process that suits most of their customers, but does not solve problems outside of the box.
And that’s what happened to me.
At the local place, they diagnosed me based on what they “thought” was going to happen, as opposed to listening to me and solving the ACTUAL problem I was telling them that I was having.
Are you guilty of this same thing?
In your own practice, are you guilty of jumping to conclusions too quickly?
Without collecting all of the facts, and pre-diagnosing without looking at every “what if” scenario.
Remember, your patients are there to see you and not your impressive wall of degrees, or your library of textbooks.
Do you listen to all of their comments, and do HEAR everything they are telling you?
Or are you only listening so that you can pigeon hole them where YOU WANT to put them?
Is your action plan what is needed?
Or is your action plan what you think is needed?
Are you acting on what is said?
Or are you acting on what you want to hear?
Or what you are only willing to hear?
The world is full of educated bigots who only hear what they want to believe, as opposed to listening to understand.
When we truly listen to understand, our response is always more valuable.
Listening with intent to understand is undervalued.
And yet, it is so worth it.
It’s the only way to truly be a problem solver.
*****
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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