From time to time I have the need to phone dental practices and talk to the people working there.
Here’s what I do. In this order:
Firstly, I listen to see how many times the phone rings before my call is answered.
Secondly, I sometimes have my call answered by an automatic voice message, that more often than not, tells me something that I don’t need to hear [i.e. it’s not that urgent] before I speak to another human being.
Thirdly, I hear a significant number of calls answered by someone speaking too quickly where:
I don’t catch the name of the answerer and I have to ask them to repeat themselves, or I have to guess what they just said their name was…
The person answering the call doesn’t even say who they are
When the call is answered I always greet the answerer by saying:
“Hi [first name]”
And repeating their name immediately by saying:
“[first name], it’s Dr David Moffet calling. Just wondering, is Dr Brown/Dr Betty Brown/Betty in your office today?”
Depending upon what the answerer says, more often than not I will say:
“[first name], can I leave a message with you and can you have Betty call me back when she has a few minutes please?”
And then I say:
“[first name], has my number come up on your phone?”
[Most of the time now it does, and the answerer will usually read it back to me]
And then the answerer says this to me:
More often than not, which means, ON MOST CALLS, the person answering the phone will say to me:
“What did you say your name was again?”
This is wrong!
This is SO wrong!!
For someone who is paid to answer a telephone, asking this question is a SERIOUS FAIL.
Having to ask the caller to repeat their name over at a point that is THIS FAR INTO A PHONE CONVERSATION shows me that the person answering the phone is not prioritising the information that they need to be gathering from incoming calls to the dental office.
Whether a caller is phoning to schedule an appointment or whether the caller is phoning to try/attempt to speak personally to someone in the dental office, the first priority of the person answering the phone is to find out the name of who they are talking to and be able to repeat that name back to the person on the other end of the phone at regular occasions [as many times as possible].
IT IS PLAIN RUDE NOT TO DO SO.
Dale Carnegie said it best when he said:
“A man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the language.”
Everybody loves to hear the sound of their own name, and everybody loves to be called by their name, often.
And the reverse is also true:
The easiest way to offend someone is to not remember their name, and be caught out admitting that you have failed to remember their name [especially when that person has personally introduced themselves less than one minute before].
When I listen back to recordings of callers into dental practices….
When I listen back to recordings of callers into dental practices, the number one failure of people answering the phone in dental practices is they conduct long conversations with the callers without ever finding out the name of the person who has called, and whether they are talking to an existing patient or a potential new patient.
They fail to ask the caller if they were referred by an existing patient.
Sometimes, when the caller is phoning to make an appointment for their spouse/partner/parent, a conversation on the phone goes on without finding out the name of the spouse/partner/parent as well as the caller.
Asking each person who phones your business their name, and writing it down, and using their name back to them, is very easy to do.
Asking someone who phones your business their name, and writing it down, and using their name back to them, is very easy to do.
It is also very easy NOT TO DO.
Which do you think is better for your business?
A process that never offends the caller?
Or a process that potentially offends every caller?
Remember, it’s the little things that we do, and the little things that we FAIL TO DO that make the big differences to our customers.
Most patients who leave a dental practice and take their business elsewhere do so because of a feeling of being taken for granted, or of being ignored.
And it is these displays of apathy, and perceived apathy towards our patients that causes them to up and go and seek treatment elsewhere.
Don’t allow apathy towards your patients to creep into your business.
Make every patient, and every caller, feel important.
And it all starts with their name….
*****
LIVE 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 LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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.
It’s scary because when your business’s monthly production levels off, three things happen.
Firstly, when your collections start to level off, it means that in reality, your business is going backwards. This is because with inflation, [even at low levels], the cost of living is increasing on a daily basis and over a week, over a month, or over a year, the value of a dollar earned is becoming less and less.
And so in reality, when you plateau, your business is actually going backwards.
And I know, because between the years of 1992 and 1996, my annual collections plateaued.
And I placated myself with excuses that this was OK because I believed that my annual income was fine because my practice was collecting double what the average dental practice was doing at the time.
And to me that made the plateauing OK…
Until I met a dentist whose practice was producing double what mine was, and so I knew then and there that I needed to shift my thinking. Because in business, if it has been done, it can be done.
IF IT HAS BEEN DONE, IT CAN BE DONE.
And it can be done again.
And again.
Secondly, if your business income is plateauing, your profits are most likely decreasing because of increased costs and expenses for your business.
Rental agreements have built-in regular annual increases. Wages and salaries paid always rise with time. And materials and utility costs always rise.
Your profits are being eroded by time.
Thirdly, you can guarantee this fact:
If your business collections are plateauing, there is opportunity for a competitor in your industry to simply overtake you while you are treading water and marking time.
My good friend Dr. Charles Samaris was told once:
“If you’re not growing, you’re actually dying.”
So why does this happen?
I believe that complacency is the issue.
I believe that at some point in time, as business owners, we stop trying to grow and we impose glass ceilings on ourselves.
And it takes thought, and action to break away from this.
Whether it is a self-limiting belief that creeps into our psychy, or whether it’s a belief that we are not worthy of the rewards from growth, it is really only a belief.
It is not a fact.
And as a belief it can be replaced with a more positive belief.
Abraham Maslow said:
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
The fear of the future needs to be overcome.
Fear is False Evidence Appearing Real.
The fact that your business income is plateauing is a WARNING SIGN that things are perilously dangerous, and that urgent action needs to be taken to accelerate away from complacency.
It can be done.
It is up to you to make those changes, and to make that necessary shift in thinking.
You owe it to yourself to do so. You owe it to your family to do so. You owe it to your customers and your staff to choose growth.
*****
LIVE 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 LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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 speak and sound as if they don’t want to be where they are.
And more often than not these people look as though the action of transporting them bodily from where they are to another place will not make them any happier.
These people look and act and speak so miserably that they look as though nothing is ever going to change their outlook.
Have I just described someone that you might know?
Have I just described somebody that you might work with, or even employ?
Have you ever encountered someone who looks and acts this way within an employed situation?
Maybe it’s somebody that you have to deal with on a regular basis?
It’s a scary thought.
John DiJulius used to ask people who did not look happy:
“Are you happy?”
To which they would say:
“Yes.”
And John would then reply:
“Well, you need to tell your face!!”
I saw Vinh Giang speak live last weekend, and he raised some interesting points.
Vinh said this:
“Your face is the remote control that allows you to inject TONE and emotion into your voice.”
He asked the audience to pull a sad face, and then try to say something happy… it was impossible.
He asked the audience to smile and then try to say something nasty or unpleasant…. also very difficult to do.
And so Vinh said that the action of smiling more frequently and more often was not actually fake, or phony. He said that smiling more often was simply difficult for some people to practice because it was a facial action whose increased frequency of use was unfamiliar to most people.
But he said, it can be done.
Wearing a smile on your face can be a learned behaviour.
In the same way that babies can learn to speak, and children and adults can learn to use more words, the human body can learn to use the muscles of the face more often so that they can smile more often and speak more happily.
Vinh pointed out that a piano [you know, the musical instrument!!] has eighty-eight keys.
Every piano has them.
Eighty-eight keys.
But he also pointed out that most people are only familiar with the middle twelve keys of a piano.
And as he said, the other seventy-six keys are there and are available to be used and played at any time… he said they are not fake or phony keys…. we are, on the whole, just unfamiliar with these other keys and their uses.
And so musicians and those people musically inclined can at any time actually play around with these keys at each end of the piano, and get to know them, and humanise them.
And Vinh said, in the exact same way, if your face can “pull a face”, or smile for instance, then if those muscles that allow us to do that actually do exist, then they can be used and trained.
Just like those piano keys can.
And so the point is this:
If we can train our muscles of our face to smile more often, this will have a positive impact on the tone and emotion in the spoken words that emanate from our mouths.
Training our facial muscles to smile more often therefore becomes an important factor in helping us to convey a more positive verbal image towards those people that we encounter each and every day.
In the dental office, wearing a smile on your face behind a mask, or whilst on the telephone, is just as important as wearing a smile whilst having face to face contact with people, clients, and co-workers.
*****
LIVE 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 LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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.
Over the past two weeks we’ve been discussing the workplace relations situations revolving around having your dental office team members working as a team and playing as a team.
And I shared with you an incident where two senior team members had deliberately and wilfully gone out of their way to set up a newer team member for failure.
While writing that article, a memory of another unacceptable incident in my office came into my mind.
People can be so mean at times
Here are the details of this other incident:
I had a new addition come to work at my dental office.
She was a very good worker.
She was efficient, systematic and proud of her work.
She was younger than some of my other team members, and because of her heritage, she spoke with an accent and followed a different God to other team members.
She was my dental assistant and was very loyal.
But for some reason, my other team members did not like her.
Now, there was one particular occasion where the newer girl went out of her way to bring cakes and chips and food to work to celebrate the birthdays of two of the other team members.
The newer girl prepared our staff room at the end of the day with a wonderful spread of party food, and invited the birthday girls and all the other team members to stay after work to celebrate these birthdays.
But nobody stayed back.
I felt so disappointed for the newer girl who had gone above and beyond to prepare this wonderful presentation.
The deliberate avoidance of a workplace celebration by the other team members was noticed and mentioned to them as being an inappropriate response in this situation.
I felt embarrassed for those who went out of their way to make the newer girl feel uncomfortable and rejected.
But this sort of stuff happens all the time in dental practices.
Your staff can act very immaturely towards each other and they can also behave and talk inappropriately about the people who pay their wages and salaries…
And that’s the customers, clients and patients of your practice.
Have you ever heard your staff speaking poorly about the “odd” habits and behaviours of different patients?
It’s totally inappropriate.
Even way back in my first job as a shop assistant in a news agency, I was horrified when I heard the owners joking amongst themselves about idiosyncrasies of regular customers of the news agency.
Comments of a derogatory nature are best kept as thoughts [at worst] rather than becoming poor attempts at humour, or gossip.
Those are unacceptable and are inappropriate.
*****
LIVE 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 LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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 know of a number of dental offices where the reception staff believe that allowing patients to defer, delay or even postpone their dental appointments is quite OK, because in so doing, these dental staff believe they are providing great customer service to the patients, by allowing the patients to choose a time that is “less inconvenient” to their busy schedules.
But consider this:
In medical terms, if a doctor recommends to a patient a course of treatment, should the patient be “permitted” to delay or defer that treatment?
In reality, is there a compelling reason why patients should allow anything, ranging from “social events” to “I’m not feeling well” to be used as a reason for delaying diagnosed medical treatment?
In the provision of health services, the question [or debate] is often raised as to whether letting a patient choose whether they [the patient] should be able to defer or delay diagnosed treatment, is best practice, or is negligence.
And in dentistry, where time is our enemy, are we as a dental office then negligent for allowing our patients to delay their diagnosed treatment?
Because in delaying, aren’t patients then allowing cavities to become bigger, pockets to become deeper, cracks to further propagate?
Does caries advance with time?
Do cavities get deeper if we leave them for a period of time?
Medical practitioners have a duty to exercise reasonable care and skill in the treatment of patients. This duty extends to the examination, diagnosis and treatment of the patient, the provision of information, and follow up.
RACGP Standards:
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners for medical doctors has a list of Standards for General Practices. And interestingly, Criterion 1.5.4: System for follow-up of tests and results includes the following:
The GP’s and practice’s responsibilities reflect the recognition that the GP-patient relationship is a special one based on trust. It is also characterised by the GP having knowledge that the patient generally does not have.
The practice needs a system aimed to ensure that clinically significant tests and results are followed up. The system needs to be designed to anticipate that individual cases will require different levels of follow-up depending on the clinical significance of the case.
The following factors are important in determining whether something is clinically significant and therefore requires follow-up:
The probability that the patient will be harmed if adequate follow-up does not occur
The likely seriousness of the harm
The burden of taking steps to avoid the risk of harm
In my opinion:
In my opinion, a dental practice that diagnoses disease and fails to do everything in its power to have the patient treat that disease and remove it or control it, is failing in its duty of care.
In my opinion, the diagnosis of decay, periodontal disease, malocclusion, bruxism, and sleep related issues, are all diseases that cause harm if left untreated.
Allowing patients to delay treatment longer than the originally recommended time frame allows the disease to advance and get worse.
The Dentist has knowledge that the patient generally does not have.
And there is a definite probability that the patient will be harmed if adequate follow-up and follow-through does not occur.
As health care professionals [and I include dental office employees in that category], we OWE IT TO OUR PATIENTS to ensure that they complete all the necessary treatment that our dentists diagnose for them.
*****
LIVE 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 LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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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