“It looks like it’s going to be one of those days….”
when the person saying this has the ability to change the direction of their destiny….
And most people do have the ability to do that…
But there are times when you know that the circumstances that you are experiencing are totally out of your control, and that all that you can do is “survive” the moment, and then regroup and move on…
And often in these sort of situations when things are out of your control, despite your best intentions, which are always honourable, sometimes you are simply just the victims of inadequacy and stupidity of people who JUST DON’T GET IT.
You know it, right?
Last night, Jayne and I dined out in Sydney and the signs and the signals we were getting from the restaurant, and staff, was that we had entered a TWILIGHT ZONE of a group of people who just DID NOT GET IT.
Here’s how the evening began….
We sat down, reviewed the menus, and placed our order with the waitress.
“We’d like to begin our meal with a dozen oysters, which we will share, and then following that we’d like to have these two entree dishes, followed by these two main course dishes…”
That shouldn’t be too difficult?
“We’d like to begin our evening with two margaritas, and following that, we’d immediately like this bottle of wine to be served, but not too early and not too late. Is that okay?”
Again, not too difficult.
We knew we were in for some difficulties….
We knew we were in for some difficulties when we asked the waitress serving up the dozen oysters where these Sydney Rock Oysters were from… and she replied, with conviction:
“They’re from Sydney.”
Very sad.
For those who don’t know, Sydney Rock Oysters is a STYLE of oyster, and not a location. They are grown along 1500km of Australian coastline from Hervey Bay in southern Queensland down to Wingan Inlet in Victoria.
Her answer was about as unqualified as that line from the Blues Brothers movie when Elwood asks:
“What kind of music do you usually have here?”
And Claire says:
“Oh, we got both kinds. We got country AND western.”
It was obvious to us that this server was underprepared in her education about what it was that she was indeed serving up to her customers….
And so the evening progressed…
Sadly, our entreés arrived before our wine.
Or should I say our wine did not arrive before our entreés, as we had requested….
Two simple requests that for some reason seemed very difficult for this restaurant to fulfil.
And it didn’t get any better… the entreés were both very confused when it came to flavours and one of the mains was actually quite flavourless while the other main was inedible.
All in all a very disappointing dining experience was had.
But after our oysters….
After our oysters were eaten, a male waiter appeared to remove our serving centre plate as well as our dining plates which were stacked with our empty oyster shells.
The young waiter took the centre plate, and then took Jayne’s oyster shell plate, scraped the shells onto the empty centre plate, and then asked Jayne if she was having an entree and then returned the “used” plate right in front of her.
When we told him that we had both ordered entreés, he removed Jayne’s “cleared” oyster plate and my “uncleared” oyster plate, and then returned very quickly with clean plates.
Following this, our regular waitress Stacy came and removed both empty plates and our entreés were soon delivered to us as per our specific menu….
I’m not sure what planet this male waiter had been living on? To me it seemed like he was following a whole pile of red tape and protocol about not much at all, that was unnecessary to us….
How does this relate to dental?
In any service organisation, or really, in any organisation, all team members need to be working in unison striving towards a common goal.
The systems and protocols for those team members need to be easy to put in place and also be easily understood by the team members so that there are no system breakdowns in the delivery of service to the customer.
Customers recognise and appreciate good service.
Customers also recognise and dislike poor service.
Poor service can be either accidental or it can be because of poor processes.
Poor processes would include weak systems, and having undertrained staff or inadequate staff numbers. Hiring inappropriate staff is also a poor process.
Customers will accept accidental failures in the delivery of service, provided there is an attempt at service recovery from the organisation. What customers will not tolerate is businesses that ignore the fact that they have poor processes that need urgent attention.
Not employing enough staff in your dental practice is a poor process.
Employing staff who avoid conversations of meaning with their paying customers is a poor process.
Your customers and patients will eventually take their business elsewhere if they continually perceive poor processes are not being attended to at your dental practice.
Jayne and I left no tip at that restaurant.
We won’t be going back there and we won’t be leaving them a glowing review.
Nor will we be recommending that restaurant…
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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 February 24, 2022 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.
All you need to do to be successful is find a pathway to success, and follow that pathway, every step of the way.
Failure comes as a result of deviation from the pathway.
When Dorothy wanted to find the Wizard of Oz, all she needed to do was follow the Yellow Brick Road. Because the Yellow Brick Road was her pathway to the Wizard.
Along the way Dorothy ran into difficulties each and every time that she departed or was distracted from the Yellow Brick Road.
When baking a cake….
When baking a cake there is a set list of steps and procedures that need to be completed in a set order to ensure that we end up with the cake that we so desire.
When baking a cake we cannot complete the steps or instructions in an order that we choose.
There is no point icing the cake mixture before the cake mixture has been put into the oven.
When making the cake, instructions are important.
Success leaves clues.
There are plenty of books written about success.
And there are plenty of successful people who have achieved success by following the wisdom and methodologies of successful coaches who have coached ordinary clients to extraordinary results.
And those results have been achieved by those clients because they followed the instructions and teachings of their coach.
The pathway to success is simple:
All you need to do is:
Paint by numbers
Follow your instructions
Do the work
Nobody falls off the path to success.
People fail to achieve success because they BEHAVE their way off the pathway to success, known as The Green Line.
A coach’s role is to prevent his clients from behaving their way off The Green Line.
The only question a client needs to be asked is this one:
“How long should you wait before you jump onto the Green Line?”
A successful coach will guarantee the pathway will lead their client to success.
Just as long as the client does not behave themselves off that pathway…
People fail to be successful because:
They try to work out their own pathway rather than find a proven pathway and follow it [adding years to their journey that most often are never be recovered]
They fail to follow the instructions they are given [they create their own detours and roadblocks]
They fail to do the work [they stop moving along the pathway]
If success was easily achieved then everyone would achieve it.
It’s not finding success that is difficult. It’s maintaining the needed behaviours that people find difficult.
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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 February 24, 2022 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.
Last week a good friend pointed out to me the latest cancerous phrase that has swept the world of service.
This cancerous and thoughtless phrase has been in use for some time, and to my surprise, had slipped under my own radar.
In the world of verbal cancer, this phrase is up there with:
“Not a problem.”
“No worries.”
And
“How ya going? All right?”
These three phrases lead the scoreboard across the world when it comes to SPEAKING WITHOUT ACTUALLY THINKING.
Or should I say speaking without actually considering the meaning of the words we are actually espousing…
When I visit the local Coles Supermarket…
When I visit the local Coles supermarket the self-serve scanner announces to me:
“If you have a FlyBuys card, please scan it at any time.”
it kind of gives me a twenty-four hour window to scan it… or maybe a forever window?
I’m thinking that Coles probably would prefer me to scan my FlyBuys card more promptly rather than “at any time”
Careless language is just that….
Careless language is just that. It’s careless.
Careless language implies CARELESS EVERYTHING.
Careless language is truly a “broken window”. It’s one of those things that users become used to, or relaxed about, although it’s really something that should be attended to and repaired. And promptly.
So what is this cancerous phrase?
The reason this phrase is cancerous is because it is lazy and can easily be improved.
This phrase occurs in retail and in service, and occurs at the time that the customer is settling their transaction.
We all know it… the employee keys in the dollar amount required into the terminal, holds out the EFTPOS machine or card scanning device to the customer and then says, as the customer waits with baited breath to swipe or insert or tap their card or their phone…
The employee says:
“When you’re ready.”
[There is always an upwards inflection on “ready”.]
“When you’re ready.”
They all say it.
And yet, everybody could say something much nicer…
What really is happening here….
What really is happening here is that the employee is asking the customer for money, or settlement, for goods and/or services provided and received.
And so it would be better if the employee thanked the customer [in advance] for their payment by simply saying:
“Thank you”
Or
“Thank you very much”
to the customer with a similar upward inflection, in anticipation of the financial transaction proceeding to completion.
And although there are other moments that follow after this where the employee will thank the customer again, I believe that one more additional
“Thank you”
is by no means out of place, and adds to the gratitude of the EXPERIENCE being provided to the customer.
It certainly beats
“When you’re ready.”
hands down.
What do you think?
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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 February 24, 2022 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.
Every Wednesday I record a Facebook Live video titled MOVING DAY.
Each Wednesday I map out the reasons why viewers should not consider Wednesday to be “Hump Day” but rather they would be better off to consider each Wednesday as “Moving Day”.
The concepts surrounding Hump Day are simple but are poor concepts.
Those who consider each Wednesday to be a Hump Day believe that it is the middle “mountain” of the week and that once that mountain summit has been reach then the Thursday and Friday that follow that Hump Day are days where people who choose to, can choose to COAST downhill to the weekend.
I believe that people who view Wednesday as “Moving Day” see and create so much more opportunity for themselves on the Thursdays and Fridays of every week.
My concept of “Moving Day” is based on the use of this term during four day professional golf tournaments.
Golf tournaments traditionally have a cut off after two days [after Friday] where the players with the bad scores at this point fail to qualify to play on the last two days [Saturday and Sunday] of the tournament.
Only those players who qualify to play for Saturday and Sunday receive prize money.
Those who fail to qualify do not get paid.
And so Saturday in the golf tournament is then considered to be MOVING DAY where those golfers who knuckle down move up the leader board and those golfers who fail to capitalise move down the leader board to a more difficult position for the last day, Sunday, which is pay day.
As such, the Saturday performance seriously affects the Sunday outcome.
In a similar way, those people who believe that each week at work presents opportunity for those who “knuckle down” on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, are the people who frankly GET IT, and end up GETTING STUFF DONE on a consistent basis.
Putting it simply…
Putting it simply, if you believe that you can “move the needle” with hard work while others choose to coast, you absolutely can.
And will.
Succeed.
The choice is yours…
And the choice should be simple..
Send “Hump Day” packing….
**************
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 February 24, 2022 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.
You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order
You can order your copy here: 
