Two weeks ago I published an article discussing how some dental practice team members have difficulty having conversations with patients that come to their practice.
And I mentioned how there are serious consequences for dental practices that have team members who cannot master the art of conversation between each of their patients and each of themselves.
This is because patients will only tolerate being ignored for a certain number of times before they start feeling that they should be taking their business elsewhere.
Last week, I wrote about one of the four great ways that any staff member can quickly and easily become a conversational guru, no matter how shy they are.
These four great ways involve being able to converse with any patient at any time on any one of four very straightforward topics.
Today I will continue with the second topic that your team members can use to strike up deep and meaningful conversations of any length with every patient who visits your dental practice.
Occupation
Probably one of the easiest topics to discuss with anybody at all is what they do for a living.
Especially at a dental practice…
Because dental practices primarily function during business hours, patients often come to the dentist before going to work, during their work hours, or after completing work for the day.
Unless they do not work, or are having some time off from work.
Interestingly, the clothing that someone wears to their dental appointment could be a dead giveaway for what they do for a living.
They could be wearing a uniform?
Or a suit?
Or Hi-Vis clothing?
These attires are certainly easy to spot and easy to use as conversation ice-breakers.
“Where do you work?”
“How long have you worked there?”
“How long have you been doing that?”
If they’ve been doing this or working there for a long time, you can say:
“You must like it?”
Or
“You must like it there?”
Or simply say something like:
“Tell me about that?”
Or
“Tell me more…”
If this is a new career or job for your patient, or a new place of work for them, you can ask:
“How do you like it?”
Or
“How do you like it there?”
Or
“How is it there?”
You can also ask about where they work, and who they work for.
You can also ask them where they used to work. And what they used to do for a living before this new job.
Without sounding like you don’t know their business or what that business actually actually does, you can ask about where it is located and how many people work there.
Your patient will probably tell you at this point whether it is a one site operation or a multi-site operation, in case you didn’t know.
You can ask this:
“What do you do there?”
“What’s your role there?”
“How big is your team?”
“How big is your department?”
You can ask if they are a nice bunch of people, whether they are a friendly lot, and also whether you see any of them or many of them outside of work?
You can ask your patient who they have to deal with:
“Who are your customers?”
“Are customers difficult to find?”
And of course, if at any time your patient tells you something that you have no real idea about whatsoever, you can simply ask questions for more details about what exactly it is that they do, or their job involves, or that the company they work for does.
If your patient doesn’t work….
If your patient doesn’t work, or used to work, you can still ask them a lot of the questions above.
If your patient is looking for work, you can also adapt some of the questions above.
If the have not worked or are not working, you can ask them what their relatives do for a living, and then follow on with some of the questions above. This is a good option when talking to school children or stay at home parents.
You can also ask stay at home parents what they used to do for work, whether they work part time, or whether they will be returning to work or planning to return to work.
There are so many options for good conversation….
It’s not difficult to lead a conversation especially when you get people talking about themselves.
There is a skill in staying on point and not dropping back into a “ME TOO” type of situation. You must not start talking about yourself.
When you are well prepared with a mental list of subjects to ask your patients, you will be well on the way to being recognised as an interesting person, and also a great conversationalist.
And all you really did was simply ask questions.
If the patient asks you a question about yourself, it is always polite to answer, but you must also have the skills to redirect the conversation back to the patient. This is done by finishing what you say with a question back to the patient that gets them replying to you again.
Be genuinely interested in your patients and what they have to say.
In doing this, each of these patients will find you to be a very interesting person…
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
Sometimes when you’re running a business the lines get blurred between being a business owner and an employer, and being a friend.
Ultimately there always needs to be a clear distinction between business owner and employee.
And that’s because one party has skin in the game.
And the other has no skin in the game.
And therefore there needs to be recognition of rank, and there needs to be respect shown towards rank.
A dental assistant who worked for me for five years had had a career as a dental assistant in the Royal Australian Navy, and had told me that this part of her employment history had taught her recognition and respect for those with higher rank.
My old boss….
A dentist who was a previous employer of mine, in private practice, had been a dentist in the Royal Australian Navy before starting his own practice.
He told me how, while in the Navy, he had been treating a sailor and making that sailor a set of full dentures.
At the try-in appointment, my employer had seated the waxed up dentures into the sailor’s mouth.
When the sailor was handed the small face mirror, a broad smile came across his face and he said to the dentist, beamingly:
“Thanks mate!! These look great!!”
The dentist, my boss, was about to remove the waxed dentures from the sailor’s mouth when he felt the hand of his commanding officer upon his shoulder. Pausing for a moment, the dentist heard his commanding offer say softly:
“Let him go”
And so the dentist, my boss, allowed the sailor to leave the dental clinic wearing the waxed up dentures.
My boss was confused. These waxed up dentures were meant to be returned to the dental laboratory to be finished into acrylic base dentures.
My boss asked his commanding officer for clarification.
The commanding officer said:
“Son. Sailors don’t call officers ‘mate’.”
Twenty minutes later…
Twenty minutes later the sailor returned to the dental clinic in a state of distress.
The sailor had felt so proud, with his new set of wax dentures… but drinking a cup of hot tea had caused the wax to melt and the sailor started spitting out individual denture teeth….
The lesson is simple
In business there must always be respect, especially for a business relationship that involves favour.
Business owners must respect employees who provide labour in their business.
And employees must also pay respect to business owners who have given them the opportunity of employment.
Neither of these relationships should be taken for granted, but they are not equal relationships, because without a business there is no employment. A business can exist with fewer employees. But employees cannot exist without a business.
A great employee understands this relationship and works it in their favour.
Great employees are rewarded for their exceptional performances in the business. The efforts of great employees help businesses to grow, and thrive. And with this growth comes recognition, and financial rewards.
Employment is not an entitlement.
When employment is “taken” as an entitlement, it simply gets taken back, or taken away.
Very quickly.
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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 published an article discussing how some dental practice staff have difficulty in having conversations with patients that come to their practice.
And there are serious consequences for dental practices that have team members who cannot master the art of conversation between each of their patients and each of themselves.
Because patients will only tolerate being ignored for a certain number of times before they start feeling that maybe they should take their dental business somewhere else.
Today, and over the following three weeks I’m going to be sharing four great ways that any staff member can quickly and easily become a conversational guru, no matter how shy or quiet they think that they are.
And those four great ways involve being able to converse with any patient at any time on any one of four very straightforward topics.
Family
Asking your patients questions about their family is one of the easiest ways of striking up a conversation, and also finding out very interesting facts about our patient.
Remember, the whole point of being conversational with our patients is to have them start talking openly and freely about their favourite subject, themselves.
And when the patient opens up about themselves, it allows us to mentally take notes about them, that we can then use in later conversations with them down the track, as well as share with other team members.
And everybody has a family.
People have parents:
“Tell me about your parents?”
“Tell me about your father?”
“Tell me about your mother?”
Parents have family:
“Did they come from a big family?”
“Tell me about your aunties and uncles?”
“Do you have a favourite cousin?”
Parents have parents. Those are grandparents:
“Tell me about your father’s parents?”
“Tell me about your mother’s parents?”
And all these people lived somewhere:
“Did they live nearby?”
“How often did you see them?”
And often these relatives had jobs, and careers:
“What did your [father] do for a living?”
And these relatives sometimes had hobbies:
“What did your [uncle] like to do in his spare time?”
“What hobbies or interests did your [mother] have?”
Older patients have brothers and sisters:
And older patients have children, and grandchildren:
And all of these people live somewhere, have jobs and careers, and hobbies and pastimes…
It’s not difficult…
It’s not difficult to manoeuvre a conversation especially when you get people talking about themselves.
There is a skill in staying on point and not dropping back into a “ME TOO” type of situation. You must not start talking about yourself.
If the patient asks you a question about yourself, it is always polite to answer, but you must also have the skills to redirect the conversation back to the patient. This is done by finishing what you say with a question back to the patient that gets them replying to you again.
When you are well prepared with a mental list of subjects and topics to ask your patients about, then you will be well on the way to being recognised and regarded as an interesting person, and a great conversationalist.
And all you really did was simply ask questions.
You were interested in them.
Genuinely interested in them.
And in so doing, by being interested in them, each of these patients will find you to be an interesting person…
Isn’t that interesting?
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
One of the beauties of owning a dental practice is that that ownership gives you as the owner the ability or the choice to decide whether you want to run a business that has a CONSISTENT REGULAR income or run a business that has an irregular and inconsistent income.
Let me make myself clear:
There are those two distinct types of businesses out there that exist [that I just described], and then between those two types of businesses are businesses that could best be described as a BLEND of the two. And that blend could be quite variable depending upon where exactly the needle on the gauge was located between the two “poles” we are using at each end….
Here’s an example:
Farming is an example of a business that provides irregular and inconsistent income.
Traditionally farmers are paid on the harvesting of their crop, which occurs annually, but throughout the preceding year the farmer works and incurs expenses that he is not compensated or reimbursed [financially] for until the harvest is sold.
And sometimes, due to circumstances outside of the control of a farmer, hail or fire or flood or drought, or some other natural disaster may impact significantly on whether or not the harvest has been profitable, or even goes ahead at all.
On the other hand:
Selling groceries, selling food, or selling newspapers, or selling running shoes [depending upon your climate] can be more regular and consistent. People have to eat. The news changes daily. Shoes wear out.
You get the picture….
Owning a dental practice does allow you as the owner to determine whether or not you want to receive an income that is regular or irregular.
Now, I do hear people ask me how this can be so, because a dentist can’t control where and when their patients have toothaches, or when their patients break teeth, or have infections.
But a dentist does have the power to address their availability of when and whether they do certain types of treatments.
In my practice:
In my practice I used to be frustrated by the days where I seemed to work my tail off and was poorly remunerated, and those other days where the workload wasn’t as demanding and the remuneration was much higher.
I’d often ask myself whether I had the ability to control the consistency of appointments and bookings from day to day, from week to week and from month to month?
And the answer was that I could…
Through careful analysis of past bookings at my practice I was able to ascertain that each month I would average a certain number of fillings, a certain number of extractions, and a certain number of crowns and a certain number of check-ups….
And I understood that it was within my power as the practice owner to distribute these appointments throughout the month in any way that I saw fit to schedule them, so long as I also paid attention to the necessity to be available a certain number of times per day or week to help new and also existing patients who were presenting with painful emergencies…
And once I understood this:
And once I understood that it was entirely up to me and that I could create consistency within my schedule from day to day, I then knew, and was at ease with the fact that on any given day that I was booked to treat patients I would be consistently rewarded with my average daily income.
A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
And why not?
Because bills and expenses come regularly.
Rent and loan repayments are monthly.
Staff salaries are paid weekly.
Why shouldn’t I do all that I could to create consistency of my own income to balance against these regular outgoings.
A surgeon’s life was not for me.
A specialist medical surgeon performs surgeries at a hospital on Mondays. Mondays are paydays.
On Tuesdays the specialist returns to the hospital and does his rounds. Tuesdays are poorly paid days.
On Wednesdays the surgeon consults in his rooms with new patients. These days are paid but not paid as well as Mondays.
Are you getting the picture here?
It’s kind of like a year of farming being compressed into a seven day time period…. up and down and up and down…. ok for some, but not ok for me.
The other good thing with a dental schedule is this:
A dental practice can look to the past and predetermine the future hygiene appointment bookings.
A dental practice can calculate with ease, how many new patient hygiene visits it can perform on a weekly basis, along with how many regular patients it will be seeing for regular hygiene visits, along with how many quarterly periodontal appointments it needs to be booking.
The past can be used to predict the future.
The past can be used to predict the future.
By looking at what we have done, we have the ability to forecast what we will be doing.
And we also have the ability to control or vary the outcomes of the future by working with our experiences of the past.
If we do not look back at the past we can only guess the future and hope for the future.
And hoping and guessing are not good strategies.
And doing nothing is also not a good strategy.
Doing nothing is like being in your car and being broken down on a motorway.
Firstly, you’re stationary. And you’re going to be passed.
But also, being stationary is not the answer…. Eventually someone’s going to run up the back of you and cause you some serious damage because you were in the way, when you should have been moving along…
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
This last week I was talking to a dentist and the topic came up about how some dental practice staff have difficulty in having a conversation with the patients of the practice.
Over the following four weeks I’m going to be sharing four great ways that any staff member can quickly and easily become a conversational guru, no matter how shy or quiet they think that they are.
You know the situation…
You walk past a treatment room and there’s a patient sitting in the chair, bibbed up, and there’s a dental assistant in the treatment room standing behind the chair, where the patient cannot see them, and NOBODY IN THAT ROOM IS TALKING TO NOBODY.
The patient is sitting staring straight ahead at the wall…
It’s like a scene from a horror movie.
And the silence in the room…. well that silence is DEAFENING.
Well it could be worse:
The patient could be sitting ALONE in the treatment room, all bibbed up, and the dental assistant who is meant to be in that treatment room with that patient is out of the room doing something that can wait, like scrubbing instruments, or putting a stock order into cupboards….
All while a paying customer is PARKED in the chair in the treatment room ALONE, until the dentist arrives to begin treatment.
And I’ve seen this:
The patient is just about to have two of her back teeth crowned and fork over $4600 of her hard-earned to the practice, and she’s probably thinking:
“And they can’t even be BOTHERED to talk with me!”
If I was that patient, and that happened to me, I’d definitely be thinking about taking my business elsewhere.
Some staff have difficulty holding a conversation.
I get it.
Some staff do have a difficulty in beginning and maintaining conversations with people they perceive that they have very little in common with.
Over the upcoming next four weeks, I’m going to be sharing a secret formula with you that any person can use to be able to strike up a conversation with any other person, despite there being age differences, cultural differences, educational differences, or differences in interests.
But before I share that formula with you, there’s one KEY THOUGHT that needs to be the GUIDING PRINCIPLE for all conversations, and that is this:
Ask questions.
Ask questions. Lots of questions.
And listen to the answers.
And then ask more questions.
Always be asking questions…
Always be asking questions…
In a conversation, the person asking the questions is the person controlling the direction of the conversation.
When you are in a conversation, and you ask a question, and the person you are talking with replies, then to keep control of that conversation you need to follow their answer with another question.
And then another question.
Followed by more questions…
The person answering the questions can [and should be allowed to] talk for as long as they wish to.
And the reason for this is simple:
The questions being asked need to be focused on the other person in the conversation.
When you talk to someone and you ask them lots of questions about themselves, and they answer those questions with information about themselves, that person will actually believe that YOU are one of the most interesting people they have ever met…
And all this happens purely because they believed that you were INTERESTED in them.
Isn’t that fascinating….
If you want to be regarded as being INTERESTING, first you must be INTERESTED.
It’s really that simple.
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
