One of the major frustrations that all customers experience when dealing with a business is having to bear the time delays, mistakes and errors created by unskilled and untrained team members of that business.
These team members may be unskilled and untrained for a number of reasons:
They may be untrained because they have yet to be trained in their roles.
They may be untrained because they are assuming a role “temporarily” in the business, or at short notice, that they have never been trained to perform, and are doing so only as an emergency “fill-in” person while someone else is inadvertently absent from their role.
It does seem inexcusable that untrained employees and new employees do get thrust into roles they have yet to be trained for, without adequate training and onboarding protocols being taught to them.
In dentistry this happens all the time.
Because dental practices run on small numbers of staff, when a staff member leaves, or is absent because of sickness, the practice often has to “make do” with anybody who might be remotely suitable. Sadly, that replacement person may happen to be only someone who draws a breath and has a pulse…. but may be totally unskilled at the role they have been catapulted into.
Sometimes the wrong person does more harm than good…
Sometimes “just having anybody” is not better than having nobody.
Sure, the replacement person can be better than nobody because they relieve the extra work load, and are able to do something…. but, sometimes the replacement person is so unskilled for the task required of them that they create extra work for the other employees [who have to redo the work of the replacement person].
And sometimes the unskilled replacement person actually “drives away” customers because of that lack of “expected” experience.
A substitute player on a sporting team who is inexperienced, is a player who may let the team and the fans down because of that inexperience.
A theatrical understudy who does not know their lines can let the other cast members, and the production, as well as the paying audience down because they weren’t yet “up to the task” that they were hurriedly required to do.
In a dental practice…
Just because someone owns and answers their own mobile phone doesn’t mean that they are sufficiently skilled and competent to professionally answer a dental office phone.
Or does it?
After all, as the general public think, how difficult can it be?
The general public think that anybody should be able to answer a dental office phone… they think it can’t be too difficult?
Well let me tell you this..
In a dental practice, the difference between an “average” person and a “professional” person answering the office phone, could be anywhere between $300,000 and $600,000 per year, per dentist, to that dental practice.
And it could be more..
I listen to recordings of so called “experienced” employees on the dental practice phones and I’m horrified that sometimes the receptionist has found out the caller’s address, and phone number, and insurance details, before they have even asked the caller their name…
Yes really!!
In a sporting event…
In any sporting event, a player dropping the ball can put the whole team under enormous pressure.
In a dental office, unskilled team members answering the dental office phone can metaphorically be dropping balls all day long putting the whole dental practice under unnecessary financial pressures.
At your dental practice, are you listening to actual recordings of real conversations that occur on your dental practice phones?
Anyone can lecture all day long until they’re blue in the face about the “best way” to answer the phones…. but unless you create real time accountability for your key team members, they will only improve at a glacial pace, if at all.
Sports teams review their games each week by watching recordings of the previous week’s game.
If your business isn’t having your phone calls recorded and reviewed, and your team trained by a professional coach, you’re really just flushing hundred dollar bills down the drain on a daily basis.
*****
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.
Some people who I know really well are doing some home renovations.
One of the things these people are finding out is that in the building game, there are a number of possibilities available when it comes to building and installing certain things.
When it comes to making choices, these people have found the following options:
There’s what’s physically possible to do
There’s what the client wants to happen
There’s what the builder or the installer wants to do
What usually happens is that the client wants what is possible to do, but the builder or the installer has a set “product” that they want to deliver that works for the tradesman, but delivers a less than best result for the client.
For example, these people wanted a large picture window to be installed in their house at the end of a wide hallway, so as to capture a sweeping rural view.
The window company that these people first approached said that this wide window was not possible, and that the couple would need to install two windows separated by a vertical divider.
The couple then approached another window company about the feature window, and low and behold, the answer from the second company was:
“Yes, we can make that window.”
Does this sort of thing happen in health care?
Many years ago when laser eye surgery was in its infancy, I sought an opinion from a local ophthalmic surgeon who I trusted, who recommended that I undergo PRK surgery. This surgeon told me that Lasik was a more risky procedure, and that PRK was the preferred choice for me to take.
PRK surgery involved treating one eye at a time, three months apart.
What I wasn’t told was that there was a significant post-operative recovery time following PRK surgery.
I had PRK surgery on one eye, and what I found was that the post-operative PRK surgery period was excruciatingly long [four weeks] and extremely painful.
The surgery was so painful that I decided to investigate and go ahead with Lasik surgery as the treatment of choice for my untreated other eye.
After the Lasik surgery I found that the post-operative recovery following surgery was PAIN FREE and uneventful from the very next day.
Seems like I was sold a flick pass by the first surgeon….
In dentistry…
In dentistry some dentists tend to treat what they are comfortable doing.
What seems to happen is that patients’ treatment needs are diagnosed according to the skill level of the dentist and that dentist’s ability to perform certain procedures, as opposed to the treating of the actual condition of the patient.
Ultimately…
Ultimately, the consumer needs to be given the option of best possible scenario, even if it’s a treatment that that health care professional cannot perform, or an installation that that particular tradesman is not able to do.
If someone else can perform the necessary procedure, the customer needs to be informed of that option and needs to be given the opportunity of exploring that path.
The client, customer, or patient should not be corralled into a less than optimal pathway just because that pathway is the preferred option of that supplier.
Any supplier who manoeuvres a patient or customer into that supplier’s preferred method of treatment or method of doing business is really letting their client down.
*****
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.
Sometimes the problems we think we have when owning a business are not the real problem.
Sometimes it’s like life… and therapy.
You’ve got to listen to the problem, then ask a question.
The question should allow the person with the problem to start “unpacking” their problem, and peeling back the layers.
As the layers get peeled back, what we tend to find is that the initial problem is not the real problem.
What we discover is that what was thought to be the initial problem, or the only problem is actually a SUBSEQUENT problem that has arisen as a consequence of one or more prior causative problems.
For example:
A patient goes to the doctor complaining of a sore foot.
The doctor can examine the blister on the patient’s foot and prescribe a cream as treatment for that blister.
The doctor can notice that the patient is walking with a limp and refer the patient to a physiotherapist or to an orthopaedic surgeon for correction of the limp.
Or the doctor can remove the patient’s shoe and see that a small stone in the shoe is causing the patient to limp, and the stone is rubbing the foot and creating a blister.
I know that this is a very simplistic example, but you can see the error of not looking at the big picture in this situation, and digging deeper.
I recently was chatting with a dentist who was having some staffing issues, and having difficulties finding the right team members and also was having difficulties creating a good team culture.
When we peeled back the layers to his problem, we found that one of the reasons for these difficulties was that the business lacked a MISSION STATEMENT as well as a SERVICE VISION STATEMENT.
These statements serve as CORE VALUES that the business needs to refer to and stand by when hiring new employees.
Only those applicants whose attitudes and commitments are aligned with these statements should be invited to become team members and join the organisation.
Without these statements, what we often see is that businesses often hire people “with a pulse”, although those people’s values may not be aligned with the values that the business is trying to uphold, and with the CULTURE that the business is trying to create.
In the case of this dentist, his big mistake was that he was hiring too many employees on a casual basis rather than offering them a more stable, permanent employee position.
Applicants and employees were then being given a message of “less commitment” from the business, and with that, the efforts of the employees reflected that same level of “less commitment” back at the business.
“You will get back what you give out”
As business owners, we must give out more to our team in order to receive more from them.
Every decision we make in our business needs to be aligned with those core values.
Any decision that we make that is not in alignment with our core values is destined to fail because of that absence of alignment.
*****
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 core principle of customer service is to do things for others that provides pleasure for them, and in so doing, becomes an act of pleasure for the doer.
The pleasure of giving great customer service to someone should be just as great as the pleasure received by the recipient of that service.
Giving great customer service should never be a chore.
It should always be an inherent act of kindness by the giver.
When thanked for providing great service, the giver should always respond automatically with:
“That’s my pleasure.”
Because it actually is, and because they do indeed feel that pleasure of giving.
In your organisation…
In your organisation, if you feel there is an employee who struggles with the emotion of being able to inherently give pleasure to customers when it is needed, then this employee’s ability to focus on service needs to be nurtured and developed.
The ability to provide consistently AMAZING World Class Customer Service is a learned skill.
It is not something that some are born with and some are not.
Everybody can learn to become a great servant to others.
And the beautiful thing is, that once you become attuned to the art and the provision of World Class Customer Service, you can never undo that education.
It stays with you forever.
And becomes your obsession.
And for the recipients of your service, that becomes their pleasure.
Recipients of your World Class Customer Service will become so appreciative and so grateful for that service and for what you do for them that they will seek you out, and return, and return again, to repeatedly receive the great service you provide to them.
It becomes their drug of pleasure.
And that’s simply because not many people out there are truly focused on always providing a CONSISTENT World Class Customer Service EXPERIENCE for their customers, each and every time they interact with them.
And that’s where the gold lies….
*****
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.
Back when I was at University studying dentistry it was simply EXPECTED that following graduation, dentists would be employed as associate dentists in somebody else’s practice for a handful of years before taking the plunge and purchasing and OWNING their own dental practice.
Ownership of a dental practice came in two forms.
You either bought an existing practice from another dentist, or you set up and opened a new location as a dental practice.
So as a student, I was quite shocked to find out that one of our part-time instructors was a “career associate dentist” and had worked full-time as an associate for a long time in the dental practice owned by the father of one of my fellow students.
I’m not sure why this instructor had chosen this career path.
One of my fellow university student colleagues has worked his entire dental career as an associate dentist, never ever owning a dental practice. For nearly his entire career, he has been a long term associate dentist for two long [individual] terms at two very well established dental practices.
This colleague freely admits that the pressures of being a business owner were never for him. It just wasn’t in his nature to want to wrestle with the hassles of staff management, business forecasting, and financial risk taking.
And fair enough.
As an associate dentist he was more than happy to exchange sixty percent of his daily billings for the peace of mind that somebody else would handle all the day-to-day pressures of running the dental practice.
And that’s how he chose to run his career and his life.
One of my dentist coaching clients has a very high-producing associate dentist working in her practice who has been there as an associate for eight or nine years now.
As an associate, he’s very happy to turn up, drill teeth, and go home, knowing that at the end of each day he’s free of the shackles of running a dental practice.
It’s a great working relationship for him, and also for my client. She knows that having a hard working longer-term associate is a gift to her.
This is because primarily, productive associates often get “itchy feet” and want to move on to practice ownership, feeling that as owners, some of that sixty precent of their billings that they previously were paying their employer will stay with them in their new role as business owners.
The sad thing is…
The sad thing is that university fails to prepare graduates for practice ownership.
In fact, most university courses fail to prepare dental graduates for the day to day grind of working in dental practices.
One of my clients recently bemoaned to me that her undergraduate experience seemed to tailor students towards a lifetime career working as dental officers in a state government run public health system.
For this dentist there was no undergraduate guidance in any of the following:
Good human resources management and people management
Mastering time management and efficiency
How to create great systems and protocols
Becoming a great leader
Creating a clear and concise service vision for your business
Knowing the purpose of the service vision
Creating a clear mission statement and what to do with it
How to write a business plan
How to write a business plan for a bank
Managing and creating exceptional dental office phone protocols and systems
How to create watertight World Class Customer Service Systems
To me…
To me, that seems to be a fairly unacceptable result for an undergraduate to receive after having invested four, or five or seven years of their time in a training process for a chosen career.
Along with the years invested, there’s also a significant financial investment involved in acquiring a dental degree.
For the time, and for the money invested, you’d think that dental undergraduates would be receiving something more.
Recently, I presented a series of information evenings to final year students at an Australian University.
And almost to a man [or to a woman], every one of them wanted to become a dental practice owner, and not become a career employee.
Is anybody listening?
Are the universities listening to their “customers”?
The product delivered does not seem to be an adequate solution.
*****
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.
