Last week I asked the question as to whether your dental practice team members are really working together?
And I mentioned that sometimes I have seen instances where dental practice team members would rather see another team member flounder or fail, than to offer that team member assistance.
Now, before I tell you about one very specific incident that still upsets me to the core, let me tell you this:
At one time in my dental practice I had two dental assistants working together where one of those assistants deliberately and methodically helped the other and “carried” the other dental assistant.
And although this was far from an ideal situation, the stronger assistant valued the other dental assistant so much on a personal level, that she was willing to go above and beyond in the line of duty to help her friend with her tasks at work.
Now, this was not a case of the “weaker” assistant taking advantage of her work colleague.
All it was was that from time to time, the weaker assistant would struggle with her own levels of efficiency.
However, as the owner of the dental practice, I was acutely aware that this was far from an ideal situation that could manifest itself in a potential “breakdown” situation at some point in the future…
And monitor it closely, I did…
But now, here’s that other incident…
In my practice it was customary for dental assistants to set up instrument trays in advance for their own treatment rooms as well as for other treatment rooms in the office.
And because I worked on an alternate-operatory platform, [or a zig-zag appointment schedule] each operatory had plenty of time to be set up and ready to go with every instrument and machine that was going to be needed for the relevant appointment.
Now on this occasion, I had a newly arrived dental assistant working in one operatory and an experienced dental assistant working in the other operatory.
And on this occasion, the set up in the operatory with the newer dental assistant was glaringly wrong.
Instruments were missing from the bracket table.
Instruments and materials were missing from the dental assistant’s bench.
But it wasn’t just one mistake.
It was mistake upon mistake upon mistake.
There were many glaring incorrect errors in the set up that delayed the beginning of the treatment for the patient, and made me and my dental assistant look incompetent and unprepared.
When I questioned the new dental assistant after the appointment as to why things had been set up so poorly, she told me that she had not been responsible for this set up but had asked the more senior assistant to set up the room.
What really happened was that the senior dental assistant and the front office receptionist, who were best of friends, had decided that they were going to DELIBERATELY set the treatment room up incorrectly for the new dental assistant.
To make her fail.
And of course, naively, the new dental assistant trusted that her work colleagues would help her, and that they would not deliberately go out of their way to set her up for a failure.
I was very disappointed in my senior team members and with their deliberate actions of sabotage towards the newer team member.
Their behaviour was very childish and unprofessional, and delivered a far from memorable moment for the patient at the time.
As the practice owner, what would you have done in this situation?
It certainly was very disappointing to see the “true colours” being shown by my more senior team members.
*****
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.
Here are the numbers… let me know if you like this scenario?
For every five fillings that you do….
Across the board, in your dental practice, for every five fillings that you do, here is what happens:
Two fillings fall out
Two fillings break
One filling survives
Would this be good enough?
Would you be proud of this level of competency in your dental practice that only one filling in five that you did was successful?
And would you be proud to tell your friends and colleagues that four out of every five fillings that you do fails at some early point?
And would you like your patients telling their friends and family about the fillings that you did that did not go the distance?
Those numbers really aren’t good enough.
Those numbers really aren’t good enough for a clinician.
No clinician of any substance would be happy having four of every five fillings fail.
Yet, dental practice owners, on the whole, are accepting a four out of five failure rate in other parts of their dental practices.
Are you for real David?
Yes. I am.
In dental practices across the English-speaking western world, only one in five phone calls to a dental practice [people who phone that dental practice] actually ends up in a made appointment.
Yes that’s right.
Only twenty percent of callers to a dental practice finish their phone call with an appointment being scheduled for them.
Which is a really bad number.
Because each and every one of those callers has already decided that they want that dentist to be their dentist, before they have picked up the phone.
Each and every one of those callers has researched the dental practice, looked at the website, and read the Google reviews.
And then phoned to make an appointment.
And the only reason they do not make an appointment is because of the failure of the dental practice to answer the phone correctly and provide a solution for the caller.
Let’s look at those numbers
Our research shows that 38% of all incoming phone calls to a dental practice go unanswered.
Yes. 38% of incoming calls go through to voice mails, answering machines, or worse still, go straight to an on-hold recorded message of some sort.
And the majority of those that are new patient enquiries do not leave a message.
They hang up.
Most new patients calling a dental practice for the first time and not having their call answered by a person, are less than impressed and move on to call another dental practice.
Most of these people believe that if the practice cannot provide a sufficient level of service to be having their phones answered promptly by a live person, then that could be indicative of a lower standard of care purveying through the whole practice.
First impressions count.
And you only have one chance at making a good first impression.
Let’s look at the 62% of phone calls that do get answered…
For those 62% of phone calls that are actually answered “live” only one third of those actually end up making an appointment.
42 of the 62 do not make an appointment because the conversation that they have when their call is answered does not provide a solution to their problem, or does not inspire confidence in that practice as being the dental practice that this caller is looking for.
Putting it simply, two out of five calls fail to get answered, and two out of five calls fail to go to the next step.
That’s a 20% success rate for incoming dental practice phone calls.
And we know because we measure and listen….
The reason we know this is because we listen to our clients’ phones and we measure the results they are getting.
And we work with our clients to improve this number from 20% to up to 79% on average.
Which is a nearly 300% increase in new patients making appointments, without spending one more penny on marketing.
The potential is there in every dental practice to increase their new patient appointment numbers simply by adjusting how their phones are managed, and how their phones are being answered.
The problem is….
Every dentist knows that their phone needs to be answered better.
But nobody is recording their incoming calls.
And nobody at the practice is listening to the recordings.
And nobody at the practice has the time to listen to those calls and to then take time to teach and nurture the dental team on better ways to answer the phones….
And so the phones remain the same.
Same. Same.
Apathy in the practice dramatically affects the opportunity for the practice to improve its performances.
Fixing the phones is simple.
But you cannot do it well without professional help.
If you want to play better piano, you need professional help.
If you want to play better tennis, you need professional help.
And if you want the most important piece of equipment in the dental office being utilised in the best possible manner, [that’s the phone, by the way], you need professional help to get the best results.
How hard can it be to answer the phones properly?
“Can I grab your name?”
“Who do you normally see?”
These are just two of the many things we hear being said on dental practice phones that can be replaced with much better, service-oriented language.
Using better language gives us better results.
What we say on the phones, and how we say it, dramatically affects the results we achieve on those phones.
*****
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.
It always disappoints me to see team members who do not help each other when there is a need for help presenting itself.
Sadly, sometimes some team members would rather see another team member flounder or fail, than to offer that team member assistance.
The team member who is in need of assistance may be in that situation because of a number of reasons:
They may not know how to proceed and complete the task or duty at hand
They may be overloaded with other tasks and not have sufficient time to complete all that they need to do
They may not know where to locate the resources needed to proceed with the task they are working on
In all of these situations, the old adage that I attribute to my dear friend Dr Ron Arndt rings true:
“None of us are as smart as all of us”.
And it is so true.
In fact the word TEAM is an acronym for:
Together Each Adds Meaning.
Team members need to know that the success of the business relies on the harmonious integration of their individual efforts and skills to create something greater than the efforts that one or two alone can create.
Sadly, from time to time, I hear and see instances in dental practices that do not exemplify the qualities and standards of excellence that we are striving to create.
When I hear an inexperienced team member struggling with a phone call enquiry from a caller wanting a first appointment, I wonder why that team member has been allowed to answer the phone while being “under-trained”, and I also wonder, if it’s an office manpower thing, why they simply aren’t trained to say:
“Mrs Smith, the person here that you really need to speak with about that and who can help you best is Becky. I can see that she’s just helping another patient here at the moment…. Is it OK if I take your number and have her call you straight back in five minutes? Would that be OK Mrs Smith?”
When an inexperienced team member gets out of their depth on a phone call, there is no winner.
The caller leaves the call frustrated and without an appointment.
And the team member drowns. They feel as though they have failed.
And the practice misses out on the opportunity of helping a patient in need.
Look deeply into what you and your team members are doing at your dental practice and see whether you have created unity and strength, or whether you do have weaknesses, and glaring weaknesses, in your team roster and your team’s performance.
If you are truly focussed on creating a great dental practice and a great dental team, you cannot brush over these weaknesses.
They need to be addressed.
*****
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.
The Vision Statement is the WHAT that we create in defining our business.
Following on from the WHAT for our business we also need to create the HOW for our business.
The three Supporting Pillars for our Vision Statement are the “How” that we create for our dental practice.
Having a Customer Service Vision Statement and the Supporting Pillars are imperative as the First Step before we even take a look at the customer experience cycles in our business.
The Customer Experience Cycles are the step by step journeys that each of our customers or patients experiences each and every time that they visit our dental practices.
And putting it simply, if we don’t have the What and the How to apply to the Customer Experience Cycles, then it will be a much more difficult task for us to be creating The Ultimate Patient Experience for our practice, won’t it?
The three components or supporting pillars to the Vision Statement are:
Quality
Service/Product
What are we delivering exactly?
Expertise
Are we perceived to be at the forefront of our field?
Technical
Is our product innovative and can we explain it in an interesting manner?
Operationally
Do we have all our ducks in a row with this product. Do we know what we are doing?
Customer Interaction
Hospitality
Are we friendly and approachable with our customers?
Relationship
Do we see our customers as friends, or simply as patrons? Do we look at them from a financial point of view?
Connection
Are our team members really making that emotional “connection” with our customers?
Personalisation
Are our responses to each and every patient and customer tailored to each of those customers, as opposed to being of a generic or “vanilla”.
Above and Beyond
Exceed
Are we looking for an opportunity to exceed the expectations of our clients and members and guests?
Opportunity
The opportunities to exceed our patients’ expectations are always there. We just need to grasp those opportunities as they arise.
Proactive
We must be actively on the lookout to be gathering those chances to our patients.
Unexpected
Patients do not expect exemplary service from a dental practice. That is why it is so easy to stand out from the regular “noise” out there in the community.
~
When we have the What and the How to apply to each of the steps of Customer Experience Cycles, then it will be a much more difficult task for us to be creating The Ultimate Patient Experience for our practice, won’t it?
*****
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.
