And the number one thing I see from dentists is they don’t train their staff properly on the duties and tasks that those staff members need to perform.
This is what happens:
They Never Train Their Staff:
These dentists rely on the staff bringing skills and experiences they learned elsewhere into the practice, with the “hope” that those skills will be ok in their new place of employment.
Sometimes this works.
Sometimes those skills can be adapted and altered to what the new practice needs.
And sometimes those skills are of no use.
And sometimes the new team member doesn’t have any skills specific to what the new practice is looking for, despite having many years of “experience”.
They “Under-Train” Their Staff:
These dentists either do not have the time to properly train their team members, or do not allocate the time to properly train their team members.
Sometimes these dentists aren’t knowledgeable about the requirements needed for the team members performing the roles they are trying to train for
And sometimes these dentists don’t know how to teach, and don’t have any teaching credibility to create an authorative learning environment.
They “Hope” Their Staff Will Pick Things Up Over Time:
These dentists believe that the roles they are hiring for are not that difficult, and so the staff can learn what to do “on the run”… usually at the expense of customer time [and tolerance].
This is a very arrogant stance to take, and to present to your customers.
Your customers want to feel SAFE in the knowledge that the employees they are dealing with know what they are doing.
Here’s What Should Happen:
The dentist [practice owning dentist] should outsource the training of staff so that those staff are given the skills they need and all the resources, as well as allowing those team members the greatest opportunity of adapting quickly into their new role/position.
It also makes more sense for the dentist to be performing high production dentistry on his patients rather than PAUSING that high production duty to perform a training duty that they are unskilled at, that they could outsource to someone more skilled, and pay that someone at a rate far lower than the hourly dentist production rate.
And the outsourced trainer, being a specialist at what they do, would be regarded with more credibility and held in higher esteem by the team members than they would regard the dentist trying to perform a role that the dentist was unskilled at and not trained to do.
When my wife took up golf:
When Jayne decided [twenty five years ago] that she wanted to play golf, I told her the best thing for her to do was to have regular lessons one-on-one with a local golf professional.
Jayne had six months of golf lessons from the golf pro at our local golf driving range before venturing out onto a golf course to play golf proper.
Those six months of lessons provided Jayne with the fundamentals of a great golf swing that have given Jayne the able to hit a golf ball consistently.
Even with the amount of golf that I’ve played, I am not in a position to diagnose and instruct on the intricacies of golf because I’m not trained in the abilities to diagnose errors and then coach techniques that create permanent improvements and solutions.
That’s what a golf professional is trained to do and is skilled at.
You’re trained as a dentist:
You don’t listen to recordings of incoming phone calls.
You don’t answer phones all day long and have to juggle other front office tasks at the same time as answering ringing phones.
You don’t know what’s really going on on your phones.
How can you even pretend to think that you can be an authority on the subject?
Stick to what you know… and do that well.
And delegate the tasks that you don’t know and you don’t do well to others who can do them well.
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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.
Every new patient arriving at your dental practice arrives with some degree of trepidation.
And why wouldn’t they, after all?
They are going to the dentist.
And a new dentist this time, for the first time.
They have very little idea of what is about to unfold for them.
It’s kind of like on the first date, turning up to the house of a girl you’ve just asked out, and meeting her parents for the first time?
Or is it scarier than that?
For these new patients, they are about to meet some people for the first time in a place that they’ve never been before and allow those people to do unspeakable things to the inside of [part of] their body?
And then pay them for the pleasure?
So as a caring professionally behaving organisation, how can we make a new patient’s first visit to our dental office be truly amazing and forever memorable?
That’s simple.
It’s just four simple words:
Be Ready For Them.
Be ready, be prepared well in advance for the arrival of every new patient coming to your dental practice.
Your business’s objective is to make that new patient feel as if everybody in the practice has been looking forward ALL DAY to that new patient’s first visit.
And the two simplest things to do to WOW that new patient on arrival are these:
Be standing, waiting, ready and prepared, for the moment that new patient walks in the door.
You do not want to be doing paperwork, or be on the phone, or be dealing with other patients, at the moment that new patient arrives.
The arrival of a new patient to your dental practice should be as significant to you as the arrival of important dinner guests to your home. Everything must be in order and be ready.
And when that new patient walks in the door, your key team member must BEAT THE GREET with that arriving patient.
And by this, I mean that your team member must greet the arriving patient before that arriving patient has the opportunity to speak and identify themselves. [By the way, this BEAT THE GREET should be something that your team does for every arriving patient at your practice. Be that a new patient or an existing patient.].
The greeting for the arriving new patient must be this:
“Hello, you must be Betty. Welcome to Active Dental. My name is Jayne, I spoke with you on the phone. How’s your day been?
”The purpose of the greeting is to identify the new patient before they have time to introduce themselves.
We already know who they are because they have scheduled an appointment to see us, and we have their name, and the time that they are due. If we are logical, it won’t be too difficult to figure out that someone who you don’t recognise who is arriving through your dental office front door just before 2pm has a fair chance of being the new patient you have scheduled in your book at 2pm.
And the new patient arriving is going to be WOWWED by what they just experienced because in their mind they probably thought that they were going to have to go up to an unmanned front desk counter and ding a bell and then wait for someone to appear and serve them up a clipboard?
When your dental practice gets these two things down pat it will have immediately set itself up in the eyes of the arriving new patient as being truly different from anything else they have ever experienced anywhere ever before….
And isn’t that the feeling or the memory that we are trying to create for our customers and patients, each and every time?
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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 big turnoffs I get is when this happens:
“Thank you for calling Aren’t We Wonderful Dentistry. Do you mind holding?”
I of course answer:
“Sure”
And then I wait….
Here’s what happens…
After forty seconds I ask myself this question:
“Who was it that I spoke to?”
And then I ask myself:
“Why did they not identify themselves when they answered?”
And then I ask myself:
“How long should I wait for them to come back to me before I hang up this call and phone another dentist?”
This is what happens:
At about the forty second mark [after being on hold for forty seconds] I start to ask myself this:
“If I was ringing to book myself in for a consultation about veneers, or Invisalign, or implants, and I were to hang up now and call another dentist, would this dental practice even know who I was, why I rang, and why I felt offended that they did not BOTHER to find out my details before they put me on hold?”
At about the seventy second mark [after being kept on hold for seventy seconds] without human contact, I usually end the call.
And then I wonder…
I wonder if the dental receptionist [whose name I do not know] even bothers to worry about the call she put on hold, and who it was, and why they ended the call and could not wait on IN LIMBO until she was finished doing whatever was more important and came back to me to let me know what was happening…
I wonder was she worried that the opportunity of booking in a new patient for maybe a veneer case or an implant case, or an Invisalign case had slipped through the practice’s [figurative] fingers, never to be seen again?
Did she wonder whether the person who rang but hung up had been referred by one of the practice’s valuable patients and was now going to let this valued referrer know about this LESS THAN OPTIMAL level of service that they had experienced?
The answer is…
In most cases, the answer is:
The dental receptionist isn’t bothered.
In most practices, the number of phone callers who hang up after being put on hold is a metric not measured.
In most practices, a record of the phone numbers of those callers who are put on hold is not kept, or not referred back to [if it is kept], when a caller can’t wait any longer.
This is a lost opportunity….
The phone rings at a dental practice for only one reason.
The caller has a dental problem and they have chosen that dental practice [for whatever reason] to be the practice they want to fix their problem.
The dental practice has paid, in one way or another, for whatever form of marketing [be it paid marketing or word of mouth] that has resulted in that caller phoning this practice.
And all that the person whose job it is to answer the phone has to do is just that:
Answer the phone and help the caller make an appointment.
And so anything…..
And so any phone call to a dental office that does not result in a made [and kept] appointment is a BIG FAT FAIL, and that failure needs to be rectified.
And so:
And so, answering the phone at a dental practice and saying:
“Thank you for calling Aren’t We Wonderful Dentistry. Do you mind holding?”
is not what should happen.
It’s money down the drain.
There is a much better way of answering the dental office phone than saying:
“Do you mind holding?”
Of course….
Of course I mind holding.
Of course I don’t like listening to those bells on hold.
Of course I don’t like your on hold message telling me that my call is important…. If it was important to you then you’d have me talking to a staff member rather than being on hold.
And of course I despise your message telling me:
“Thank you for holding. We’ll be with you in just a moment.” …. for every thirty second interval that you keep me waiting on hold.
The really great dental practices…
The really great dental practices know the number of calls they receive for each hour or half hour of each and every day that they are open, and make sure that they have adequate and sufficient manpower available to service and answer all of those calls with a real live human being trained in the skills of customer service that their callers are going to marvel at.
The really great dental practices know that the extra two hundred dollars a day they pay in salaries to have an extra person there answering the phone will pale into insignificance when compared to the financial benefit that the practice receives from being able to book and schedule these [valuable] missed phone enquiries.
The facts are these:
If a caller has bothered to call, your practice has a far greater chance of securing an appointment if you have a real live person answer the call.
And if you think that a recorded message directing the caller to leave a message, or to go to your online booking service is going to work for every caller who hears it, my thoughts are well, straight out of the award winning movie “The Castle”:
“Tell ‘em they’re dreaming…”
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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.
