I wrote an article at the start of the year about the Five Essential Numbers I’d be tracking and measuring in my dental practice as we start into the new year of 2021.
The fourth number of the five that I’d be tracking is this one:
The exact referral source of every one of your new patients.
Each and every one of your new patients has found out about your dental practice by either your external marketing, or by referral from one of your patients or your friends.
You need to know each and every source.
For a number of reasons:
Patients referred to your dental practice by either an existing patient, or a friend, or by someone with whom you have a business arrangement with, has come as a PERSONAL RECOMMENDATION and needs to be cared for in a specific manner.
This is because of the fact that not only do we have to “win over” the new patient, but we know that whatever impression we give to that new patient will be reported back to the original referrer.
And if our dental practice does not meet and exceed the expectations of the new patient, then there is a good chance that the new patient will express their disappointment when they report back to the referrer.
Which may result in the referrer ceasing to recommend our dental practice ever again.
If the new patient’s expectations are exceeded, then there is also a very good chance that they will report back favourably to the referrer with thanks and gratitude, which then will fuel more referrals.
If we fail to find out this important information from our new patients we are carelessly damaging our business by failing to collect all this necessary relevant data.
A good patient that refers may even leave the practice because of something bad that was done or said to the person whom they referred.
Patients who refer their friends to our dental practice need to be rewarded and thanked for their recommendation.
“What gets rewarded gets repeated.”
It’s not that we are “buying” referrals from our patients and friends, but simply, if we FAIL TO reward and thank them for their kind recommendations, we may be thought of as “taking those referring patients for granted”.
We need to accurately know why EXACTLY all new patients who come to our practice without a personal recommendation have chosen us to be their dentist.
They may have discovered and chosen us because of one particular piece of marketing we have used.
As a business we need to know which forms of our marketing are working.
We need to know how many enquiries are coming from each marketing effort, as well as how many appointments are being scheduled from each of those, and what sort of revenue and treatment is being scheduled and completed.
Hunches are not good business practice.
Having a hunch about these numbers here today is not good business form.
If you do not know these numbers and ROIs accurately, then you are literally at your marketing and hoping for “some kind of” result.
You need to know accurately the ROI on every dollar spent on your marketing. You need to have an expectation that if you spend $1000.00 on one form of marketing that it will give you an accurate [and positive] return on your investment.
And you need to know accurately that if you spend $1000.00 on another form of marketing that you will have an accurate [and positive] expected return on that investment. In terms of number of patients booking, and the type of dentistry that they are needing, as well as the cost price of that dentistry.
Having only “feelings” and not having accurate data about the ROI on your marketing is sheer madness.
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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 March 20, 2021
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 was reading a book this past weekend and this quote jumped out from the pages:
“Attitude is a choice that is available to everyone.”
Never a truer word was spoken.
Everyone has the choice to choose their own attitude.
Our attitude towards different things, and towards EVERYTHING, is controlled and determined by each of us, individually.
And can be changed.
Have you ever had someone say to you:
“You need to change your attitude”
They have offered you this advice because the attitude that you were conveying was affecting your judgement.
And by that affectation, your attitude was limiting you from obtaining a clear outcome.
In the business of service, we need to maintain our best attitude.
A poor attitude will foster poor results.
Attitude comes in a number of forms.
Positive attitude
A person with a positive attitude will look for the good in other people and in situations, despite the fact that there may be negativity, evil or badness in those situations and in those people.
These people do not care about the hurdles in life, but rather focus on the positive outcomes that can be achieved.
Confidence
A positive mindset, or confidence in the expectation of a good outcome, will lay the foundation for achieving more.
Happiness
Confident people are usually very happy people who show little concern about any negative outcomes that could result from upcoming events and experiences.
Sincerity
People with positive attitudes are known to be sincere.
Determination
Positive people are usually driven to achieve the results they seek through effort and determination, and through ACTION. Rather than through “hope” or wishing.
Negative Attitude
People with negative attitudes often ignore the good things in life and only think about the consequences of underachievement and of failure. They are often concerned with unfair comparisons of themselves to others, which jaundices their views.
Anger
A person with a negative mindset often is angry, and often does not seek any anger resolution that could settle their negativity. Anger is destructive.
Doubt
Self-doubt will lead to feelings of low confidence, denying forward progress. Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
Frustration
A frustrated person is often a negative person. The frustration becomes an irritant that prevents people from moving forward with positivity.
We cannot change our attitude until we have a grasp on that attitude
When we know exactly where we are, and which attitude we have, then we are then in a position to make changes and adjustments.
Without that accurate information, our efforts to amend our behaviour may not be successful.
Empowerment
The key to successful change and progress is empowerment.
We must empower ourselves to look for and action toward positive outcomes and results.
We must empower our team to look for and action toward positive outcomes and results.
Encouraging our team to understand that actions are better than inactions, and that there are no wrong results, just lessons to be learned, goes a long way towards reducing the emotions in them that lead to those negative attitudes that we do not want in our organisation.
Everyone has the choice to choose their own attitude.
As business owners, we must encourage our team members to choose positivity.
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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 March 20, 2021
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 wrote an article at the start of the year about the Five Essential Numbers I’d be tracking and measuring in my dental practice as we start into the new year of 2021.
The third number of the five that I’d be tracking is this one:
Are all patients that you’re seeing each day leaving with their next appointment being made for them?
If your practice is NOT TRACKING this number, you seriously need to ask yourself, why not?
Thirty years ago, I was gifted this mantra:
“The purpose of an appointment is to make another appointment.”
The mantra came from a distributor with the Amway Corporation.
Amway was/is an American and global MLM or network marketing company, whose growth was dependent upon members signing up other people to become members, who then all purchased their day to day consumables from Amway.
To help in this recruitment drive process, members would meet with prospective members to convince or persuade them to join the programme. And it was important then to follow up on all leads or prospects in this process, to maintain the recruitment drive.
One of the things that Amway members did in this recruitment process was give their prospects an audio-cassette about the benefits of the programme to listen to, and then another, and then another, as needed. The thing was, the giving of the audio-cassettes wasn’t about the cassettes. It was about the connections, and the appointments, and maintaining a continuing contact or connection with each prospective member.
And so it was very important:
“The purpose of an appointment is to make another appointment.”
And it is the same in dental practice.
Every patient who completes an appointment needs to schedule a subsequent appointment.
In order to maintain their dental health.
Failure of the patient to schedule an ongoing appointment results in the patient [possibly] slipping through the cracks and never rescheduling, which is not in the patient’s best interests.
At the dental practice, we need to know which patients are leaving without scheduling their next appointments. And we need to know why they are doing this.
We also need to know who on our team is allowing patients to leave without their next appointment being made?
What we are looking for here is patterns of behaviour that are not in the best interests of our patients, and are not in the better interests of our practice.
I want to see a list each day of every patient who leaves without their made and scheduled appointment.
And the shorter the list, the better….
A long list at the end of each day just creates unnecessary follow up work for our dental front office staff.
A short list is far more desirable.
Days where we have zero people on our list are actually what we are aiming to achieve.
It’s in everybody’s best interests to be scheduling every patient their next, ongoing appointment with our dental practice.
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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 March 20, 2021
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 phoned a dental practice this week and went straight through to their voice message service.
I phoned during regular working hours. No human being picked up the phone
Now, before I continue about THIS particular dental office, let me tell you something….
Some of the dental practice voice messages out there that I’ve had to listen to over the past month are TRULY CRINGEWORTHY.
Seriously.
Some of these dental practices need to listen to their voice messages from the perspective of a first-time caller phoning their practice.
Because the messages on their services are WAY OFF TARGET.
A lot of these dental practice voice messages are missing the mark BIG TIME.
Anyway, in this instance this week, I phoned this particular dental office at 4:30pm only to be put straight through to this message:
“Thank you for calling XYZ Dental. Our office hours are 8am to 8pm on Mondays to Fridays, and 8am to 5pm on Saturdays and Sundays.”
Well that was incongruous.
The website for XYZ Dental told me that they were a two-location practice, and there was somewhere close to ten dentists’ profiles listed on their website.
Are you getting what’s wrong with this picture here?
If XYZ Dental has lots of dentists available to see patients some seventy-six hours each week, why do they NOT HAVE enough people available to make sure that no incoming phone call to their dental office ever goes unanswered?
A voice-mail service is not a safety net.
A voice mail service is not a safety net that catches all phone calls to your dental practice that go unanswered.
These days, more and more new patients calling a dental office where their call is not answered by a living and breathing person simply hang up, and call the next office on their list.
Failing to have someone answering your dental office phone leaves a nasty indelible impression for first time callers to your practice.
Period.
Especially when your website, and your message, imply that your dental practice is a big business.
Sadly in the case of XYZ Dental, their dental practice gave the impression that they were too big to care.
Let’s do the numbers.
What if XYZ Dental missed answering [and scheduling] just one new patient each hour, or just each business hour?
Just one?
That’s eight new patients each day.
Multiplied by five days each week.
That’s forty new patients each week?
At $500.00 for each new patient?
That’s $20,000.00 of future revenue lost each week….
Or $1,000,000.00 of future revenue lost each year.
Just by missing one call per hour.
Do you think that employing one extra person on the phones might help catch those eight phone calls each day?
Do you think that employing one extra person on the phones might help catch those eight phone calls each day?
How much in wages would one extra person cost your dental office each day?
$25.00 per hour multiplied by eight hours?
$200.00?
Would you spend $200.00 per day to make an extra $4000.00 in future earnings?
But it’s worse than that….
Every person who phones XYZ Dental and gets a voice message service [that’s really an oxymoron] will actually in theory EACH go and tell eleven other people about their lousy experience…
That’s not good marketing.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression.
When you have a big dental practice like XYZ Dental, $25.00 per hour is not a big expense to ensure against making a lousy first impression.
But if you have a small or smaller dental practice, is $25.00 per hour a small expense to ensure against your practice making a lousy first impression with first time callers to your practice?
Remember, if you say that you’ll put on extra staff when your dental practice gets busier, what you might actually be doing is PREVENTING your dental practice from getting busier by not employing the extra staff members in the correct places in the first instance?
Is this food for thought?
With change being such a constant in life, as well as in business, are you putting yourself in a position to be able to anticipate change, or is your business just hoping to react to change?
Because knee-jerk reacting, is not a good way to be operating your dental business…
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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 March 20, 2021
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 wrote an article at the start of the year about the Five Essential Numbers I’d be tracking and measuring in my dental practice as we start into the new year of 2021.
Today we are going to talk about monitoring the number of phone calls coming in to your dental practice.
You need to ask yourself these questions:
And you need to know these numbers on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. [Some may even say on an hourly basis]
Because you want to know when your phone is ringing, and when it is not ringing.
How many phone calls are coming in to your dental practice each day?
Is your dental practice phone ringing?
The number of calls coming in to your dental practice each day determines how many people you need to be employing to answer the phone when it rings.
If your dental practice is receiving only ten calls per day, then you probably could get by withy only one designated person answering your practice phones.
However, if your practice is receiving thirty or more incoming calls of any type per day, then you will need to have more than one skilled person answering your phones to adequately service those people calling your office.
Once we know the number of times your dental office phone rings, the next thing we need to be looking at closely is the dissection of what type of calls exactly that your dental office is receiving.
This means keeping a record of the conversations had with each and every caller, and the purpose or intention of each one of those calls.
How many of those calls are new patients calling to make an enquiry or an appointment?
Remember, a request for an appointment, and an enquiry about a dental procedure, are the same thing.
This is because nobody phones a dental practice to find out about dentistry, when they can Google search the answer they are looking for.
The reason a caller phones a dental practice and asks the cost of a procedure, is because that person is in need of that procedure.
Once we a cognisant with this fact, then we can answer price enquiries by leading the caller to the appointment that they are in need of.
Knowing how many people are calling for an appointment allows our dental practice to schedule and plan the size of our practice as well as the hours of operation of our dental practice, so that our practice can satisfy that demand.
How many of those new patient enquiry calls result in a made and kept appointment?
The ratio of made and kept appointments compared to the number of enquiry phone calls is our CALL CONVERSION RATE.
The Call Conversion Rate is an indication of the conversational skills of those people answering your dental practice phones.
As I said before, nobody phones a dental practice for the fun of it. Everybody phones a dental practice because they have a dental problem that they need solving. And the role of the person answering that dental office phone is to schedule an appointment for each caller in such a way that when the phone call has ended, the caller thinks to themselves:
“I am so glad that I have called this dental practice and made an appointment, and I am so looking forward to that appointment that hope that they will call me and bring that appointment forward if possible.”
The Call Conversion Rate will be a number that each person answering the phone will have, as well as a number that the practice will have.
How many existing patients are calling to make an appointment?
All patients leaving the practice following an appointment should leave with a future appointment made.
The only patients [existing patients] who should be phoning the dental practice are those experiencing pain or discomfort or have a broken filling or tooth.
Knowing this number on a monthly basis allows us to schedule sufficient emergency flex time in our days so that we are not turning these patients away in their “hour of need”.
How many patients with appointments are calling to reschedule or cancel those existing appointments?
This number should be as low as possible. There are reasons why this number does get high in dental practices, and there are ways to keep this number low.
When this number is high, it means we need extra staff to be taking these calls and to be reshuffling appointments.
Ask yourself these questions:
What are these numbers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?
When we know these numbers and how they compare over time, we can forecast rather than react.
The ability to reliably forecast allows us to be ahead of the curve, rather than to be reacting AFTER the horse has bolted.
Knowing these numbers allows us the luxury of knowing which of our staff members are better at scheduling appointments, and knowing which of your staff members are allowing patients with treatment booked to cancel or reschedule their made appointments.
When we know these numbers it allows us as practice owners to be able to educate and train our team accordingly.
Having a detailed knowledge of these numbers allows practice owners to remove the guesswork from their forward forecasting.
And that’s a much better place to be coming from.
Measuring your incoming phone call numbers on a daily basis will take you a long way towards building the dental practice of your dreams in 2021….
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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 March 20, 2021
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: 
