I talk to a lot of business owners and ask them how their business is going, and whether they’d like any help with their business.
And a lot of the time they answer my question with this statement:
“We’re going OK.”
What the heck does that mean?
If you were selling a car that you’ve owned for some time, and the prospective buyer asked you how the car performed, and you replied:
“It goes OK.”
How do you think that prospective buyer is going to respond?
Do you think the prospective buyer is going to think that this is a dearly loved, fine performance vehicle that would never let you down when you needed that necessary acceleration in overtaking, and will easily handle corners in the wet?
I’d think that the prospective buyer would simply say:
“Thank you for your time. I’ll be in touch if I’m interested.”
What if you asked your friend about his marriage?
Imagine if you phoned your friend up and asked him how things were at home, and he said:
“We’re going OK.”
Would you ask for a little bit more information?
Would you be thinking that because your friend didn’t offer the comment that things were “fantastic” at home, or that things were “never better”, then maybe your friend might be wanting someone to lend him an ear for a while?
Maybe your friend might need a friend to have a “deep and meaningful” with?
“Doing OK” is not in anybody’s best interests.
If your favourite sporting team announced that they were doing OK you’d know they were struggling, and they had room for improvement.
Both immediate improvement and long-term improvement.
Because it’s only with improvement that things can really get better than OK.
“OK” is not a position to be proud of.
“OK” is a place you should only pass through, either as your business is failing, or as your business is recovering.
Because while your business is stationary in “OK”, your competitors on the whole are moving in a whole different stratosphere.
“Doing OK” is the old black.
It’s a place you don’t want to be.
And it’s a place you need not be.
“Doing OK” is the new F minus.
“Doing OK” is not a badge of honour.
It’s nothing to be proud of.
~
I help businesses grow from being OK to being sensational.
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.
It is said that customers will leave your business and go elsewhere because of APATHY and PERCEIVED APATHY that they receive from the staff that they deal with or from the company itself.
When a customer feels ignored, the ignoring may not have been intentional.
Or it may well have been intentional….
However, the PERCEPTION of the customer that they have been ignored IS VERY REAL, and if a business has customers who are feeling that they are being ignored, and are going elsewhere, then it is up to the owners and the leaders in that business to ERADICATE that conveyed apathy, and conveyed ignorance.
Because the customer’s perception is indeed the reality.
The business’s intention, and the staff’s intention are both irrelevant if the customers are feeling ignored.
The business must train its staff to be alert for perceptions of apathy and ignorance being received by its customers.
Just last night I was lined up to be served at my local pub, and had reached the bar. There were two areas at that bar where patrons could be served at, and I had reached the front at one of those areas, while there were three patrons waiting at the other area.
A bar attendant was serving one of the patrons at the other area, when a second staff member arrived in the bar and immediately walked up to that same area and took an order from another patron over there, instead of surveying the bar and asking the simple question:
“Who’s next please?”
And although I was thirsty, I was not really in a hurry to be served.
But I wasn’t keen to stand around and be ignored either.
In fact I asked the second employee, while she was preparing that order that she had just taken, whether I was actually lined in the wrong place or not.
And I wasn’t.
It does take a certain skill to be able to sum up a busy workplace and try to serve the next person waiting, but SKILLS CAN BE LEARNED and in the service industry, a basic skill like this one needs to be learned and applied quickly by front line serving staff.
Last Sunday…
Last Sunday Jayne and I had cause to travel across to the other side of the district where we live and in so doing thought that it might be nice to grab a bite of lunch at a restaurant that we had not visited for some time.
It was good to be there, and coincidentally, a few of the fellow diners there were friends of ours and people that we know.
The meal was good but the service had a few moments that left us disappointed.
Jayne has a rule that if the service falls short of our expectations then we don’t “reward” the restaurant and order dessert, no matter how appetising the dessert menu looks.
So, what happened was that at the conclusion of our meal, our dirty plates were not cleared from the table in what would be considered a reasonable time to do so. In fact we sat for ten or fifteen minutes with these dishes still on our table, and with nobody coming to ask us whether we’d like desserts or coffees. And the restaurant appeared to be well staffed with competent staff.
What’s even worse was that the three elderly ladies sitting at the table beside us had experienced an even longer wait to have their table cleared. So much so that they had even scraped their own plates and stacked them in a pile because they were sick of looking at them.
When a waiter finally came to clear our table, Jayne politely said to him:
“I think those ladies next to us have been waiting quite a while to have their table cleared…”
To which the waiter replied:
“I’m sure there’s plenty of people waiting who’d like to have their tables cleared.”
Now I don’t know whether the waiter was trying to be funny, or thought that he actually was funny, or was an unemployed comedian, but no matter what he thought about Jayne’s comment his reply should have been:
“Thank you for letting me know. I’ll get on to it right away.”
The reply the waiter gave to Jayne was incorrect because it was taken or perceived by both me and Jayne as being ARROGANT and offensive, when all that Jayne was trying to do was to point out something to the waiter that had obviously been overlooked.
I learned a while ago that intended humour goes down like a lead balloon if the recipient of that intended humour is not looking for “funny”.
And in the same way that perceived apathy may not be intentionally conveyed, PERCEIVED ARROGANCE that is conveyed also needs to be eliminated.
A business’s intention, and the staff’s intention are both irrelevant if the customers are perceiving arrogance from the staff.
Businesses must train their staff to be alert for perceptions of arrogance being received by its customers.
Employees displaying arrogance or apathy towards people spending money in their place of employment need to understand that that arrogance and apathy will cause some of those customers to leave that business and take their patronage elsewhere.
Some businesses are OK with that.
But some customers are not….
In dental practice…
In a dental practice, just like in most businesses, the owner of the dental office is not present at the frontline where most of the customer service experiences take place… the dentist is like the auto-mechanic who is under the car , doing the grease-work, not answering phones or dealing with arriving and departing customers.
In a dental office, it’s really important to ensure that the attitudes and behaviours displayed by all employees are congruous with the mission and vision of the practice.
Otherwise our missions and visions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Your dental practice needs to ensure consistency of delivery. That’s done with systems.
Otherwise, you’re a rabble.
~
P.S. Both the pub and the restaurant are currently advertising for staff. Maybe this is because unemployment in Australia is so low at the moment, and good staff is difficult to find…
PPS. These tales mentioned here are both but one example of apathy and arrogance perceived. In each example, both businesses did display more than one other action that should also have been performed better….
*****
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 received a very interesting email from Dan Kennedy last week, that sums up many of the reasons as to why I was able to build a very successful and profitable dental practice over a 28 year period that included some seriously difficult economic times, such as the 1987 stock market crash, the bursting of the Dot.Com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis, and the post-2000 Sydney Olympic Games hiatus.
During that 28 year time period I was able to increase the turnover of my dental practice some 28X from the original $120K per annum it was doing in 1987.
What is truly remarkable about that sort of growth is that dentistry is a GRUDGE BUY. It’s not a purchase made based on pleasure or passion.
Nobody WANTS TO go to the dentist.
Nobody ever looks in their wallet and says:
“You know what? I’ve got a few hundred dollars to spare… I might just pop down to the dentist and see what they’ve got for me to buy..”
In his email last week Kennedy began by saying:
“My premise from day one was – I tell the customer the rules.”
And that’s what I did.
When I purchased my dental practice, the previous owner Dr John Martin told me to start the practice exactly the way that I wanted it to run, and to not be chopping and changing it.
He said:
“After all, it’s your business. You run it how you want it.”
Kennedy, in his email, went on to say this:
“Part of the reason … is that people want to be told the rules.”
It’s been said that most people are walking around [figuratively] with their umbilical cord in their hand, looking for a new place to plug it in.
The truth is that customers are looking for the stern, but loving parent.
Customers want somebody to tell them:
“Here’s the deal, here’s the way this works.”
As Kennedy went on to say:
“The same applies to dealing with clients and with customers. I don’t care whether you’re installing carpets in their home or training their bird. What they’re looking for is an authority figure to take charge.”
Kennedy stated:
“People want to deal with successful people, and what successful people do is they dictate the terms of how you do business with them. They don’t negotiate.”
That’s what I did at Active Dental Parramatta. My practice was known for telling people what they needed, and not what I thought they MIGHT HAVE WANTED TO HEAR to make them feel happy.
Because guessing what they wanted to hear and telling them that was never going to make them happy.
Being given what they needed was going to make them happy.
Being given what they needed was going to make them a lot happier than being given some patch-up or band-aid procedure that was never going to last.
Kennedy concluded by saying:
“People prefer to deal with successful people and generally speaking, the more successful you are, the more people want to deal with you”.
This is what I found.
As I became more proficient at what I did and focussed my business on providing that proficiency to our customers and patients, the dental practice actually became more sought after.
And as Dan Kennedy points out, that’s really quite logical.
But if it’s logical, why are only 5% of dental practices working this way, and talking this way?
Why are the rest of them just fluffing around?
*****
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.
