Last week Australia’s national airline Qantas announced that it was placing an order for new aeroplanes that would allow the carrier to fly non-stop from Sydney to London and non-stop from Sydney to Paris and non-stop from Sydney to New York…. starting in 2025.
The announcement stated that “the airline will order 12 Airbus A350s capable of flying direct from Sydney to international cities like New York and London by the end of 2025”.
That’s a long way off into the future…
Timewise, the end of 2025 is a long way away.
It’s like more than three and a half years away…
A lot of things, more important things, could happen in that three and a half years…
Who would want to wait three and a half years for a birthday present?
Imagine being told that that birthday gift that you’d always wanted will be yours… in three and a half years’ time!
Who would really wait that long?
The Qantas announcement really is a CLAYTON’S announcement…. it’s the announcement you make when you haven’t got an announcement to make.
[Clayton’s was a non-alcoholic mixer drink promoted in the early 1980s with the advertising slogan “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink”.  As a result, the word “Clayton’s” was used liberally to describe any item or process where an inferior replacement was substituted for the real item]
Really?
Qantas, an announcement like this is really poor form. It comes at a time where the airline has had to apologise to customers for excessively excruciating LONG wait times on the phones at their call centres.
It comes at a time where it seems that Qantas is having difficulty in getting back into the habit of running an airline, with long delays at airports in processing passengers to fly, causing passengers to spend more time on the ground at the departing airport than they spend in the air on a domestic flight.
And really, with more people flying domestically than internationally at the moment, and more Australians actually not flying, and not flying Qantas, the announcement of non-stop flights to glamorous destinations in 44 months’ time is about as relevant to the average Joe as announcing that Elon Musk will be flying Australians up into space….
In your business…
In your business, your customers really want to know what you’re going to be doing for them TODAY  that’s going to improve their experience TODAY. What your business has planned for 44 months’ time is of little relevance to your customers today.
After all, forty four months is a long time in business.
In that time, your disgruntled customers could have changed to another provider of the same service.
And changed again.
And changed again.
So here’s my advice:
Get your own shop in order first.
Your customers don’t give a rat’s about what you’ve got planned for 44 months’ time.
What they really care about is what you’re doing for them today, to make their decision to stay with you as a loyal customer a slam dunk.
*****
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.
We hear some crazy stuff being said on dental office phones.
And it’s not just crazy stuff being said by callers who can’t speak dental lingo… its real crazy stuff being said by the dental office team members. It’s stuff that makes me wonder what the heck these people are doing answering the dental office phones?
After all, you wouldn’t want to go to a dentist who wasn’t educated and trained and registered in the necessary skills required to perform dental procedures on paying patients?
Would you?
And you wouldn’t want an unskilled person pretending to be a radiographer and dialling up the incorrect amount of radiation?
Would you?
Then why would any business owner allow someone unskilled and untrained in the art of phone communication to answer their business’s phones?
And if the telephone is the lifeblood of every business, supplying a never ending supply of new business enquiry calls, why would any business not employ the best and most highly skilled and trained people to answer those incoming enquiry calls, in the best, and most polite, and most productive manner?
And why would those business owners not keep those employees accountable for their performances, and have them coached and trained by highly skilled coaches?
It just makes no sense not to do that…
From what we hear…
We listen to incoming calls at the businesses we coach.
And let me tell you this… there are a lot of times during those calls where employees answering those calls DROP THE BALL and deviate from the ideal phone call structure, and turn off new customers making genuine enquiries.
And the worst part about this is that because the employees are not focused on the results they should be achieving, and are not focused on solving the callers’ problems, they are oblivious to how poorly they are performing.
And they are oblivious to the fact that their poor performance is dramatically affecting the income that their employer’s business should be making.
In dental…
In dental we often hear employees answering the phone who are so focussed on being SLOT FILLERS in an appointment book that they fail to remember that their role is to be a PROBLEM SOLVER for the caller first and foremost.
And they treat the appointment as being a time and day thing only. They fail to remember that the appointment is for treatment of disease and pathology for that person. There is a REASON for every appointment…
You can’t make this stuff up…
Recently we heard a call at a dental office where the caller was inquiring about a consultation appointment they needed to make to discuss ALL ON FOUR treatment, and was told no appointment was available for some two months or more.
Meanwhile, at the same practice, we heard a caller with a toothache being given an appointment the next day, and another caller with a broken tooth [not hurting] being scheduled for early in the next week…
Now, all of these three types of appointments would have been thirty minute appointments, but the ongoing treatment from each of these three initial appointments would have been significantly different.
The consultation for the ALL ON FOUR treatment could have resulted in an ongoing treatment plan of significant investment for that patient, and just to be clear, a caller enquiring about ALL ON FOUR treatment is usually at a point where treatment is imperative, and there are no other options, including delaying.
So for that caller to be told that they couldn’t have been seen at this practice for two months, well that’s certainly a MOOD KILLER of a move… the caller would most likely just hang up, jump on the web, and google search and phone another dental practice that could see them for that consultation sooner…
There’s nothing surer.
In this case, on this phone call, the caller wasn’t even offered any “hope” by the dental employee who took the call.
And fortunately for this practice, we heard the call and were able to talk with the employee, the team, and the owner of the practice about the call, and about making sure that this sort of gaffe did not happen again.
But in most practices, that don’t record their calls, and don’t have coaches, this sort of stuff just goes on and on and on… undetected, forever.
One ALL ON FOUR case not scheduled each week is equal to about $3M annually of treatment not being done in your practice but being done elsewhere…
And think about all the unscheduled restorative and orthodontic work that’s also leaking out of your dental office phones…
Nobody wakes up one morning…
Nobody EVER wakes up one morning and jumps on the piano for the first time in their life and plays Beethoven’s Fifth.
Nobody EVER wakes up one morning and picks up a Taylor Made Driver and wacks out a 300 yard drive.
These skills need to be learned.
And perfected.
By teaching, and coaching.
And they can be learned…
Just like how to answer the dental office phone well can be learned.
A well answered phone is a joy to listen to, just like a well-played piano.
A poorly answered phone is painful to the ears… because it’s opportunity wasted….
*****
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 long time ago when our children were little, Jayne and I rented a house in a new development in Castle Hill in western Sydney. The homes in this new part of Castle Hill had well-kept and well-manicured gardens and presented beautifully to those who drove through the suburb.
What surprised me when we lived in this newer development was the number of homes where two EXPENSIVE European cars were parked in the driveway overnight each night, when all these homes had double garages as part of their home floor plan.
Often when I walked past some of these homes and the owners were home and the garage doors were up and open, I would see that the garages were full of boxes and “junk”.
It made me wonder why people would put their expensive cars out in the wind and the rain and the sun and the heat, while the protective space meant for those cars was occupied by boxes and boxes of “stuff”  that wasn’t worthy of a place inside these people’s homes?
It’s a metaphor…
It’s as if these people have their values confused…. these two expensive European cars are often their second and third most valuable assets, after their family home.
And the “stuff” that’s in the boxes that is not worthy of a place in the home, but that people have an “emotional attachment” to, is somehow perceived as being of more value, when in reality, it is of little or no value.
Sometimes I see….
Sometimes in my travels I see businesses that have rooms filled with “junk” or with six month’s supply of unperishable stock. These rooms are costing a premium rent and could be better used by the business for income generating purposes, while the junk could be thrown away and the stock could be moved to an offsite storage location [with a much lower rental] that allows access when needed.
For example, I see dental practices where another dental chair and treatment room is being sacrificed for a junk room or a storeroom housing a six month’s supply of dental bibs and gloves.
Sometimes we do it mentally….
Sometimes we allow junk to enter our minds and occupy valuable space that our minds could be using for productive purposes, like business thoughts or thoughts of the heart.
Are there items in your head that you need to dispose of so that those thoughts of value can be restored to “front of mind”?
Sometimes we just need to step back and take a good look at exactly what we are prioritising… in our homes, and in our heads.
*****
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.
I’m writing this article while on a return flight from Queensland to NSW, having worked in Brisbane earlier this week presenting to a group of savvy dentists about the importance of providing great customer service in their dental business.
You see, it doesn’t matter how good your dentistry is, how narrow your crown margins are, and what tensile strength your composite bond has…. if your patients perceive you as being arrogant, rude, obnoxious, and not caring, they will gladly take their business to another dentist who doesn’t take them for granted.
Interestingly, this theory applies to all businesses… the airline we are flying with on this flight has taken an eon to start serving an afternoon snack and beverages, such that thirty minutes following take-off one of the passengers in business class had to ding the attendant’s bell to ask for a beverage, worried that the crew may not get to serving him before the plane was due to land.
When the flight crew finally got their trolleys out of the galley, the head steward remarked that two of the ovens in the galley were not working and this had delayed the meal service…
I’m really not sure what the ovens on this airline have to do with serving the passengers a drink BEFORE the food service comes around…. on other airlines they have no difficulty serving their business and first class passengers ONE OR TWO  beverages before the flight has pushed back from the gate, as well as once the plane is in the air. Sadly this airline, Qantas, seems to happily engage in service stalling tactics as a diversion to serving a handful of pointy-end customers the drinks service that their expensive ticket should be receiving.
To me it’s pretty obvious that Qantas’s policies regarding the service of alcohol is a PENNY PINCHING directive from above…. a POLICY  of sorts… Qantas don’t serve alcohol in their lounges before midday, and they seriously delay serving alcohol to their business and first class customers for as long as possible on their flights.
And when you fly internally on other overseas airlines, you really see that Qantas is “fisting” its customers with regards to premium service as much as it possibly can…
It’s pretty obvious that the “leaders” at Qantas don’t seem to care that they are starving their customers of amenities and services, and that the employees of Qantas are also of the opinion that their salaries come from Qantas, and not from the fares paid by customers.
In dentistry there’s a similar naivety….
In dentistry there’s a failure from the top to educate the team about who the employer is, and who is actually paying the team wages.
A lot of dental staff believe that they work for the dentist, or the practice owner.
When in reality, it is the patients of the practice who invariably are the ones who pay the wages of the team.
Because without an income from paying patients, it doesn’t matter how great your margins are, how clean your instruments are and how good the dentist is at giving needles…. no patients means no practice income.
When the team realise that acquiring patients, and KEEPING patients is the name of the game, then and only then does the penny truly drop.
Because, for the disgruntled patient who wants to change dentists, there’s literally a dental practice on every street corner these days.
And if dentists and dental teams take their patients for granted and don’t make them feel welcomed, valued and understood, those patients will simply leave the dental practice and take their business to the next dentist down the street.
Just as disgruntled flyers will switch airlines…
*****
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.
