One of the worst things that a business can do is not keep their clients informed as to what exactly is going on.
At a dental practice, the thing that infuriates patients waiting to be seen by a dentist is that their appointment does not begin on time and the patient is not told any reason as to why their dentist is running behind schedule.
I’ve seen new patients get up and walk out of a dental practice BEFORE THEIR APPOINTMENT because they had waited too long without anybody from the dental practice informing them or apologising to them for the delay in them being seen.
It’s just common sense, really…. just a few words of explanation from a team member to the waiting patient, or better still, the dentist themselves could come out to speak with the patient…. all of this would easily placate the anxious patient and set their mind at ease.
Customers change where they choose to business if they feel unappreciated or they feel ignored or if they feel that they are being taken for granted.
A small amount of conversation wrapped around a caring and sincere explanation can go a long way towards building a solid relationship based on mutual respect.
I remember one Monday morning in April, sweating it out in an operatory trying to surgically remove a rotten molar and watching time escape me… and a long-term patient waiting in our client lounge simply stood up and walked out without explanation.
When I phoned him later that day to find out what happened, he verbally abused me. Because the television in the client lounge was broadcasting the golf from Augusta, the patient assumed [incorrectly] that instead of treating him on time, I was in my office watching the golf on the TV.
And because nobody from my practice had informed this patient as to the reason I was running behind, the waiting patient simply put the available evidence together into an incorrect assumption, and then hung me out to dry with his verdict.
My mistake was that I did not empower my team members to keep the waiting patient informed.
Similarly…
Similarly, when the phone rings at your dental office and you’re not in a position to spend time with the caller, it’s a very wise decision to still introduce yourself, then find out who’s calling and the reason for their call, before COURTEOUSLY asking the caller for permission to either place their call on hold, or ask them for their number and arrange a time to call the caller back.
Sadly…
Sadly, these sorts of COMMON SENSE behaviours from business owners and from employees aren’t all that common…
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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 key principles of HR [human resources] for a business is that the business needs to be diligent in their processes when employing new people.
And on the flip side, when an employee of a business shows that they are not behaving and performing in the best interests of the business, business owners must move quickly to either remove those incongruous behaviours, or remove those incongruous employees.
In short, this principle is called FIRE FAST AND HIRE SLOW.
When hiring…
Sometimes in small businesses, a vacancy in the team arises with very little notice, for whatever reason
And when this does happen, as small business owners, our impulse often is to think that we need to fill that vacancy as quickly as possible.
And when we do think in this way, and act in this way, we often find that the person that we choose to employ may not end up being the best possible fit for our position, and for our organisation.
Sometimes, when we act in this way, we are doing so because we believe that the “extra pair of hands” is better than having nobody.
When in fact, sometimes the person that we employ is not a good fit at all for the position.
Because of our haste, we can end up choosing someone who does not tick all the boxes when it comes to the position we are trying to fill.
And when this happens, the rest of the team, and the business , can suffer.
Whenever possible, it is advisable to take time in hiring, so that we can evaluate all candidates, and make a fair and accurate decision.
Doing our due diligence, and choosing the right candidate on merit, is far more sensible than choosing a candidate because they appeared to be “the best choice from a bad lot”, so to speak.
Taking less than best may not result in a happy ending for your business.
When employing…
When employing new people in your organisation, it is important to ensure that the new employee has every opportunity to learn what they need to know, and what they need to be doing, and that they are given every opportunity to correct any initial behaviours they show that might fall outside of the company policies and job description.
Our staff education, onboarding, and induction processes need to be complete and thorough so that all new employees have clarity about what it is that they are there to do, and the results that they need to achieve.
When the induction and onboarding processes do not result in the best outcomes for the employees and for the business, then an evaluation and review of those processes and results is needed to determine the next course of action.
Where our training and induction processes are exhausted and our results for our employee are below expectation, with no sign of improvement appearing possible, then the business needs to have a process for the dismissal of that employee from that business.
All employees deserve every opportunity to “get things right” when it comes to learning how things need to be done. However, if there are apparent obstacles preventing progress, then the business needs to act quickly in terms of removing those obstacles so that progress can occur.
When that “failure” to improve becomes apparent, then the business needs to decide quickly when they are going to “let the new employee go”, and replace that employee with another better suited and more appropriate candidate.
The failure of business owners to dismiss quickly those team members whose behaviours do not match the expectations of the business can have a deleterious effect on the morale and performances of other team members who are much more motivated.
As such, FIRING FAST is indeed the process of choice in this situation.
Businesses that struggle with unmotivated, under-performing team members, and with recalcitrant team members as well, do so simply because they have hired too quickly, and been too slow in firing team members that need to be replaced.
To have a business with far less worries you need to do the opposite:
You need to fire fast and hire slow.
When you do, you won’t look back.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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 absolutely have to become ok with not being liked. No matter how loving or kind you are, you will never please your way into collective acceptance. You could be a whole ray of sunshine and people will hate you because they like the rain. So just be you.”
Ain’t that the truth?
Isn’t that true.
Show me someone who spends their life trying to please everybody, and I’ll show you a loser.
It is impossible to please everybody.
When you try to do that, to please everybody, then at some point in time you will actually end up going against your own values and beliefs.
It is impossible to please everybody.
However….
When you work for someone, you must follow company policy.
Your beliefs and behaviours are chosen for you by your employer, who pays you to perform certain tasks.
If you do not share those same beliefs and you are not in agreement with them, then in a democratic country you have permission to leave that employment and go and work elsewhere.
But you can’t have it the other way.
You cannot choose to collect wages for behaving and speaking contrary to legal company guidelines.
At a dental office…
Some things that dentists do to patients are unpleasant for the patient, but are in the patients’ best interests to have completed.
Things such as root canal treatment, and extractions.
These are brutal and barbaric treatments that the public try to put off and avoid.
In fact, the public mostly try to delay necessary dental treatment for as long as they can…
“It’s not hurting…”
“I can’t see it…”
These are just a couple of reasons that patients believe are valid for postponing and delaying treatment.
A dental receptionist who wants to be liked by her patients will allow patients who call to cancel or delay appointments scheduled for NECESSARY TREATMENT that are already made, without considering that the treatment is important and is indeed necessary.
A dental receptionist who wants to be liked by her patients will allow patients who call to cancel or delay appointments already made, does so without understanding that postponing that treatment will always allow the condition that is needing to be treated to get worse.
When a patient with a dental appointment calls to cancel or postpone that appointment, the reason they do so is because they do not understand with clarity, what the harmful consequences of delaying that treatment are.
And maybe they haven’t been told about those consequences…
When this happens..
When this happens, when a patient calls to postpone an appointment, we need to remind the caller clearly of the consequences of their choice here, and not just acquiesce into
“Sure you can. That’s no problem. Just call me when you’re ready.”
Because language and behaviour like that is not in the best interests of the patient’s health and well-being.
No child enjoyed having to take their medicine.
As children, we took our medicine because we knew that if we did not, we could get sick, and even die.
It may not have tasted nice, but we knew that medicine was doing us good.
And so did mother.
So when a patient calls to change their appointment…
So when a patient calls to change their appointment, be firm like mother used to be.
It’s in the patient’s best interests to keep the appointment where it is.
Know that when you are acting in the best interests of the patient’s health, you are acting with autonomy.
Your role in the practice is to help your patients to better health.
Being a “nice guy” and allowing patients to delay treatment, is not good customer service.
Mother didn’t do it with the medicine… she knew what was best.
You need to act in the best interests of your patients.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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 reason people and businesses hire a coach is because they want to be better.
They feel that there is a weakness that they know of that they need to improve, or they feel that compared to others they could be performing better.
Or they feel they are going along OK, but they know that there’s something they don’t know, that they should be doing, that will help them perform better…
It may be they need a coach for the sport that they play.
It may be that they need a coach for their business.
But….if you don’t want to be better, then you don’t need a coach…
Let’s look at sport
Let’s take a look at golf…. golf is one of those games that every player can improve how they play. Whether we are talking to seasoned pros, or rank amateurs, they can all do something better to improve their games.
PGA golfers are the elite of the sport, playing golf for a living. And playing it very well.
Despite how good the PGA golfers are, they all have coaches to help them improve their games.
It’s their livelihood.
They have coaches for their swings, their putting, their mindsets, their fitness, and their strength….
And these are the players you would expect to know it all…
But they don’t.
And they each understand that to gain that competitive advantage, to improve, they each understand that they can’t do it on their own.
The interesting thing is that a golfer can’t see what’s going on in their backswing while they have their eyes focused on the ball they are about to hit. That’s where the eagle eye of a coach becomes important.
A coach brings that extra set of eyes.
And a coach also brings that wealth of experience from all the work they do with other players and clients, both past and present.
And that’s a wisdom that one PGA player on their own can never have…
In business it’s pretty much like golf….
Business is very much like golf.
Firstly, a business owner can be so focused on the day to day minutia of running their own business that they fail to see everything that’s happening outside in the big wide world, much to their own detriment.
And sometimes just like a golfer and his backswing, the business owner gets so caught up in the running of their own business that they fail to see the whole picture of what’s going on in their own business.
When my wife took up golf…
When Jayne wanted to play golf, the first thing I did was get her to have lessons with my golf coach for several months so she could be taught exactly what to do and what not to do by someone who knows how to explain the golf swing.
And although Jayne plays golf less frequently these days than she used to, those fundamental principles she learned when she began playing golf have stayed with her.
My story is quite different. I learned how to play golf by trial and error…no lessons… and it was tough.
When I finally decided to become serious about my golf, at the age of thirty-one, I found a golf coach, and was able to take my game from a 22 handicap down to a 12 handicap in six months.
And golf became far more enjoyable.
As a dentist and business owner…
Between 1992 and 1996 I was told by those in the know that my dental practice was doing well. I was told my practice was doing double what the average dental practice was doing… I was told I was doing OK and so I thought that I was doing OK….
Until I met a dentist doing double what I was doing, in a dental practice in a lower socio-economic area than where I was located.
I knew then, that I needed to find out what he was doing…
And the difference was, he had a coach.
So I hired a coach for my dental practice
In 1996 I hired a dental coach.
And it was a disaster. My coach and I did not get on at all, and we ended up in court.
But I knew that the problem was not the coaching. The problem was that coach.
And so I hired my second coach, who I worked with from 1997 until 2002, and in that six year period I tripled the production of my dental practice…
With additional coaching, from 2002 to 2007, I was able to double my dental practice production again, and from 2007 to 2011 with more coaching, I was able to add another $1M to my collections…
With that total of 15 years of coaching, I was able to grow my dental practice turnover by some 8.5x.
None of us is smarter than all of us
A good friend of mine used to always say:
“None of us is smarter than all of us”
meaning, that trying to work things out on our own was not the correct solution path to follow.
Some people feel that because they have excelled at school and university, that in their business career they should be smart enough to solve every obstacle that comes in their way.
Sometimes that intelligence is actually an obnoxious arrogance that hinders these people from reaching their true potential.
Dr Omer Reed told me in 2010 that 95% of dentists in the USA reaching the age of 65 cannot afford to retire because they haven’t created a retirement income that can replace their practicing income. So they have to keep working to maintain their lifestyles.
They haven’t accumulated sufficient wealth along their life journey to fund their retirement.
And that’s a tragedy, when you consider what a GIFT the ownership of a dental practice truly is…
My aim as a coach is to help as many dentists as I can be in that top five percent who can retire when they want, to where they want, and do what they want…. without a worry in the world…
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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.
A friend of mine who helps dental practices with their finance for purchasing new equipment once told me a story where on this particular day, a dental receptionist that answered his call had literally slammed the phone down in his ear with such force, and with such hostility, that my friend was truly shaken.
What my friend said to me about this incident was quite interesting.
My friend asked me whether he should tell the dentist whose practice he had phoned about this incredible behaviour.
Because the dentist had no idea that this woman was REPRESENTING HIS BRAND in this manner.
I see this all the time…
I phone dental practices for a living.
And I ask to speak with the dentist.
I introduce myself, I find out the name of the person I am speaking with, and I ask if I can speak to the dentist.
If the dentist is with a patient, I make a point of not disturbing the dentist and simply ask the person answering the phone to pass on a message to the dentist, asking the dentist to phone me back when they [the dentist] have a couple of minutes to do so.
You’d be surprised…
You’d be surprised that there are dental receptionists who still feel that it is ok for them to be rude to me when I politely and courteously ask them to do this.
These rude receptionists really don’t realise the flow on effects of behaving so rudely to non-patient phone calls. After all, the caller could be a maven who might happily be a recommender of their dental practice.
But now will not.
Because they [the receptionists] have been so rude.
And with our clients….
Sometimes when listening to phone call recordings in our client offices we occasionally hear an employee speaking rudely to a non-patient calling the practice
And like I said above, just because the caller isn’t phoning to make a booking, doesn’t mean that this caller won’t know someone in the area who might need a new dentist, or know someone who is a patient of that practice that could be thinking of changing dentists.
The best referrer at my dental practice..
At my dental practice the person who was the best referral source for me was a real estate agent [realtor] who referred one of his tenants to me… that tenant was a dentist who was retiring who was going to close his practice.
As a result of this referral, the retiring dentist gifted me his patient files, and diverted his office phone to my phone, and that referral ended up being worth over $880K worth of dentistry to my practice over the ensuing four years… all from a realtor.
Imagine how different that story could have been if someone in my practice had decided to be secretly rude to that realtor?
Who is representing your brand?
Is everybody on your team truly representing your brand?
Do all your team members lead with their best foot forward, all of the time?
For my friend the financier, his experience was not a one-off experience.
Sadly in dentistry, because of front office isolation, there exists an opportunity for some employees to behave badly when they think that nobody else will find out…
In 1998, I had to make the decision to let a long-term employee of my practice go, because her behaviours with patients in isolation from the rest of the dental team were not in the best interests of the dental office.
The employee who replaced this team member was such a breath of fresh air to the practice that the difference to the business was palpable.
We never looked back…
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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.
