Last weekend Jayne and I dined out to celebrate my birthday.
As is our tradition, we dined at our favourite restaurant where the menu is always a degustation experience. It’s a great way to spend the afternoon, dining on fine food, enjoying fine wine, enjoying excellent customer service, and enjoying each other’s wonderful company. It’s a small indulgence that Jayne and I enjoy every year.
The degustation menu is an interesting experience. The restaurant always has a leaning toward seafood, which as many readers know is the dietary choice that Jayne and I made some twenty-eight years ago.
Being a pescatarian [and I hate labels] does have its challenges when dining out. And that’s simply because we believe that just because we choose not to eat meat and poultry, doesn’t mean that food outlets can substitute a vegetable alternative for us to replace beef or pork or chicken, when a seafood alternative is available. Which often happens.
In fact, restaurants and functions that serve up vegetables only as a non-meat alternative is a COPOUT big time.
And that’s what happened this time at our favourite dining place.
The final main course on the degustation menu this weekend was listed as a serving of Wagyu beef. However, for our experience, it was replaced with a mushroom and lentil dish.
This was quite the letdown.
In fact, it was so much of a letdown that Jayne voiced her disappointment in the dish to our waitress when she came to clear our plates from our table.
To their credit…
To their credit, the restaurant staff swung into SERVICE RECOVERY mode IMMEDIATELY.
An additional dish of delicate prawn was immediately delivered to us as a replacement dish.
And so, in true SERVICE RECOVERY mode, the disappointment of the error was quickly erased by the immediate act of service recovery.
As we have come to expect at this fine restaurant.
The lesson…
The DEEPER lesson here is to never take the customer and their expectations for granted.
In this case, the expectation of the restaurant that a low protein alternative [mushroom] would pass as an equal substitute and replacement for a choice cut of Wagyu beef was a gross over-presumption.
Mushroom replacing Wagyu beef is not a same:same substitution.
And I’m sure that the waitstaff who managed the situation were probably embarrassed by the decision [and whoever it was who made that decision] to substitute the mushroom for the beef.
In the worlds of service, and of business, many customers will change their service providers if they believe they are being taken for granted and are not being respected.
Taking customers for granted is a risk that all businesses face.
At your business, is it possible that you could be taking the patronage of some of your loyal customers for granted?
Because if you are, some of those customers will leave you…. and take their business elsewhere.
*****
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 phoned a dental practice yesterday and got a busy signal.
It had me wondering…
Did this dental practice not have enough foresight to estimate how many phone lines in the practice might be used all at one time?
I often tell the story about when Jayne phoned a friend of mine’s dental practice, and while on the phone, she could hear that another phone line to the practice was ringing.
Jayne asked the receptionist if she needed to take the other incoming call.
And the receptionist answered:
“No. They’ll call back.”
Yes. Really.
Yes. Really!!
Show me someone who believes that their business never misses an incoming phone call, and I’ll show you a fool.
All businesses have incoming calls that get missed.
These incoming calls get missed because:
The business does not have enough available phone lines to allow all incoming calls to be dealt with as they occur.
The business does not have enough employees available to answer all incoming phone calls.
The business has not trained the people answering the phones to manage more than one incoming call at a time.
The business has a voice message service for missed calls and the people answering the phone use that voice message service as a safety net.
The business has a call recording service that retrieves the phone numbers of all missed calls as they happen and supplies those numbers immediately to the dental practice.
The fact is, calls do get missed.
And all missed calls should be followed up immediately.
We know that people do not phone dental practices because they have a spare half hour.
They phone dental practices because they have a dental issue and they need to get that issue fixed.
And when they are phoning your practice, they have already chosen your dental office as being the one they want to solve their dental problem.
When the phone rings at your dental practice, answering the phone and scheduling an appointment for the caller should be a fait accompli.
If you want your dental practice to grow, you need to make sure that every incoming call to your dental practice is answered.
If you want your dental practice to grow then you need to make sure that your practice is actioning four of the five action steps above. [One of those action steps above is NOT a practice grower].
*****
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.
Last weekend Jayne and I ventured out to lunch at a gastro-pub I spotted in June wh xzile participating in a 35km charity fundraiser walk.
The hotel had only recently re-opened after sitting derelict for some twenty years, and the refurbishment did not disappoint.
When we arrived at 1:15pm on the Sunday afternoon, I dropped Jayne off outside the hotel while I drove on to park the car some 600m down the road. By the time I joined Jayne back at the pub I was surprised that the line was still of a reasonable length, and that Jayne was still the last person at the end of the line.
While we waited for the line to advance, and we chatted with a lovely couple from Oxford UK, we were updated regularly by waitress Haydee about the status of tables available for dining.
Haydee let everyone in the line know that the pub dining was “chockers” [Australian vernacular for “chock-a-block” or for “full”] and that as soon as tables were cleared and available the hotel staff would be admitting people from the line into the restaurant…. Haydee also let everyone know that the hotel staff were moving as quickly as they could to accommodate those in the line.
Haydee was a breath of fresh air.
Her enthusiasm for her role, and for her immediate task of placating hungry diners was indeed palpable.
Jayne just wanted to take Haydee home with us… she wanted to see whether Haydee might want to come and work for us…
When a table soon became available for us we were excited to have Haydee escort us to that table and seat us, with a full explanation of processes and what we could expect from our afternoon dining experience.
What has this got to do with dentistry?
During my career as a dental practice owner, there were a couple of instances where waiting patients were LET DOWN SIGNIFICANTLY because front office staff did not keep them informed as to why their dentist was not running to time…
And maybe this failure to inform waiting patients was due to those staff having unclear understandings of their roles and responsibilities… this would have been due to the poor training and procedures that my dental practice had implemented [or failed to implement] with those staff members.
Or maybe it was simply due to a lack of awareness [in my dental team] for the feelings of disappointment growing in those patients who had been kept waiting because their dentist had failed to run to time.
In both those instances in my dental practice, if my front office staff had gone and spoken to the waiting patients and explained the situation [as Haydee had] instead of IGNORING THOSE PATIENTS, then maybe those patients may not have left upset and feeling taken for granted.
What we saw here at the gastro-pub…
What we saw here from Haydee at the gastro-pub was a classic diffusion of potentially damaging incidents, that could have impacted negatively towards the business.
And that’s what should have happened at my dental practice in those two instances, back in the day…
Your customers will feel disappointed if they feel that they are being taken for granted and are unappreciated.
Haydee’s actions that Sunday made everybody in that line feel that she was talking specifically to them.
And none of them minded that they had to wait a little bit longer before they were seated and indeed were eating in this amazing gastro-pub…
*****
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 Oxford Dictionary defines the verb micromanage:
“control every part, however small, of (an enterprise or activity)”.
In an article published last year on www.breathehr.com Nick Hardy wrote that there are seven signs of micromanagement:
Not seeing the wood for the trees
He says that micromanagers have a tendency to become bogged down in the minutiae of each and every individual project strand, and that they regularly lose the ability to see the bigger picture.
Every task needs approval
He wrote that many micromanagers believe that they are the only ones capable of effective decision-making, and for them the idea of giving their team members control is unthinkable.
In these situations, employees find themselves having to request approval about almost everything, which rapidly diminishes their self-confidence.
Micromanagers have an obsession with constant updates
This usually results in employees spending more time producing detailed updates than focusing on what they are employed to do. When we have employees feeling the constant need to continually justify themselves, they often end up feeling that they are not trusted to do their jobs.
Micromanagers have difficulty delegating
This creates a couple of significant issues:
Firstly, a micromanager’s team members wonder whether they are actually allowed to do to the work that they were originally employed to be doing.
Consequently, the micromanager becomes so overloaded with doing everyone else’s work that they fail to actually do their own work.
Over complicates instructions
A micromanager’s obsession with every minor detail means that even straight-forward projects become ridiculously over-complicated.
The belief that no one is else is capable
Micromanagers often believe that only nobody else can be trusted to do the work and the tasks as effectively as they can. Micromanagers believe that everybody that they employ are less talented and generally incapable.
The need to have visibility of every strand of communication
Micromanagers often need to have visibility of every strand of communication at all times, including appointment scheduling. . This indicates a fear of being left out of the loop and an obsession that people are discussing details and making decisions outside of their control. Often micromanagers will oversee inboxes and want to be copied in on all email correspondences.
Managing a micromanager
Hardy writes that once a business-leader has been identified as a micromanager, immediate steps need to be taken to deal with them and to mitigate the damage they are doing to other employees, their productivity, and ultimately to the business.
He says that managing micromanagers takes tact and careful thought.
It would appear that there is no upside to having a micromanager working in your business…
*****
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.
When the phone rings at a dental practice, there’s a one hundred percent chance that the caller is not phoning up to get a pizza.
They are calling the dental practice because they have a dental problem.
And most of the times, callers to a dental practice are phoning because they want their dental problem solved.
Dental receptionists who understand this concept clearly are golden.
These golden receptionists realise that the caller phoning their office has a dental problem and are looking for someone to help them, and give them a solution to that problem.
And that solution for the caller is more often than not a scheduled appointment to see a dental practitioner, with the implication to the caller that there will be a solution, and that the caller has indeed phoned the right place.
Too many times….
Mental As Anything had a hit song many years ago titled: “Too Many Times”
And when I listen to ACTUAL recorded calls of people phoning into dental offices, the thing that gets me is that most people answering the phone in a dental practice DO NOT KNOW what they are meant to be doing on that phone call.
It happens over and over again. And it’s a sure sign of an untrained or poorly coached dental receptionist.
Dental receptionists are not meant to be giving out free information to strangers.
However, that’s what I hear a lot of dental receptionists doing.
I hear a lot of dental receptionists having long conversations on the phone with callers without first finding out the name of the caller, without finding out whether or not the caller is a new or existing patient of the practice, and without finding out who referred the caller to the practice.
Over and over and over….
Too many times….
Just this week I listened to a call where the caller was not asked their name until the ninth minute of the phone call, but the receptionist did find out the caller’s employer and the caller’s dental insurance provider before they asked the caller for their name…
I’ll let you in on a secret…
I’ll let you in on a secret… the scenario I just described is LOUSY CUSTOMER SERVICE.
The receptionist has not followed a checklist and has drifted through a conversation with the caller without having direction and purpose.
In fact, during this call, the caller was asked when their last dental appointment was and what that appointment was for, but when told the answers by the caller, that information was ignored by the receptionist. The answers provided by the caller should have been used by the dental receptionist to CONNECT WITH THE CALLER and create URGENCY and CONCERN.
The caller told the receptionist that her last dental appointment three years ago had been for a periodontal cleaning, but she had not been to the dentist since then because of COVID and other reasons.
Well knock me down with a feather…
If that scenario described by that caller isn’t like raising a red flag to a bull for that dental receptionist, it’s time to get a rocket up that dental receptionist.
Does periodontal cleaning create an instant cure for periodontal disease, that means the patient doesn’t need any treatment for three years?
I don’t think so…
This receptionist should have been alert to the information she was being told by the caller.
This receptionist should have replied with something like this:
“Mrs Caller, COVID has caused a lot of people to delay and put off some necessary treatments, and three years is a long time to leave between dental visits… It’s good that you’ve called… are you having any issues at the moment?”
Then, whether the caller is having issues or not… say:
“Sometimes some things can be going on in patients’ mouths that they’re often unaware of… let’s do this… Let’s organise a time for you to come in and see Dr Smith and she’ll let you know exactly what’s going on in there. And then we can work out exactly what you need… how does that sound?”
Instead, I’ll bet that all that receptionist really wanted to do was fill a blank spot in the appointment schedule with a name, and congratulate herself on a job well done, when all she had done was simply put a name in a slot.
And in this case the receptionist didn’t even succeed at doing that.
If your receptionist believes that all she needs to do is put names in slots, rather than SOLVE PROBLEMS and find viable solutions for callers, then she’s not in the problem solving business at all.
Nor is she in the Customer Service business.
She’s simply in the slot filling business.
And that’s not what any doctor wants.
And nor is it what any prospective patient wants.
Prospective patients want to talk to someone who truly listens, and truly cares, and truly wants to help them.
*****
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.
