Time and time again I hear dental receptionists rescheduling appointments for patients at dental practices with no mention of what the appointment is for.
The appointment is for necessary dental treatment.
Yet dental receptionists are consistently allowing patients to delay, defer and postpone appointments that those patients have previously made and confirmed, without any reference at all back to the purpose of the appointment, and the necessary treatment that has been diagnosed.
The appointment is being discussed as if it is a bus.
“You can’t make this bus? That’s OK. There’s another bus coming in fifteen minutes.”
I never hear any mention to the treatment that will be being performed at the appointment the patient is moving.
I never hear any reference to the condition being treated at the appointment that the patient wants to defer, or delay, or postpone.
Often I hear this:
“That’s OK. Would you like to make another one?”
We all know that not getting dental treatment done when it should be done allows cavities to get bigger, pockets to get deeper, infections to get worse… the list goes on.
A dental appointment is not an appointment to “catch up for a coffee.”
It is a scheduled appointment to remove pathology that will not and does not fix itself.
Minimalising the reason and purpose for the appointment does not do your patient any favours.
When you say to your patient that their appointment is “only for a cleaning” what you are really saying is this:
“I’m allowing you to let pathological bacteria to infect your gums and continue to spread and proliferate and do damage inside your mouth…”
When you allow your patient to delay or postpone the appointment that is for “just a filling” you are really allowing them to:
“let dental decay eat away at sound tooth structure and advance closer to the dental nerve…”
Allowing patients to delay and cancel and defer necessary dental treatment doesn’t do the patients any favours.
Dental appointments are scheduled for a reason.
It is the duty of your practice to see that the appointment is kept and the necessary treatment is performed as diagnosed by the dentist.
And not delayed or deferred, allowing the pathological condition to deteriorate.
Your role as a dental professional is to help patients to prevent unnecessary permanent deterioration and destruction of bodily tissue.
Allowing patients to choose to delay necessary treatment is not optimal standard of care.
*****
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.
“Narcissists can be so lovely, charming, friendly, and downright accommodating with everyone else but so moody, dark, nasty and even cruel to you.”
Have you worked for a narcissist?
Have you ever been in a relationship with a narcissist?
The dictionary defines narcissism:
Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others
Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder:
A person with narcissistic personality disorder:
Has a grandiose sense of self importance
Lives in a fantasy world that supports their delusions of grandeur
Needs constant praise and admiration
Has a huge sense of entitlement
Exploits others without guilt or shame
Frequently demeans, intimidates, bullies, or belittles others
Other undesirable traits of a narcissist:
Shaming and blaming:
Narcissists use shaming and blaming to exert control. The narcissist achieves an elevated position of power by:
Being rude
Putting people down
Hiding behind cruel jokes
Criticising
Sabotaging
When a victim protests, the narcissist shames them into silence, sometimes saying that the victim is “too sensitive”.
By blaming others, the narcissist has no responsibility for their own lives and their own actions.
A narcissist monopolises conversations:
This is one of the most obvious signs of a narcissist. Narcissists talk over or interrupt other people during conversations to express their own opinions or talk about themselves. This behaviour can border on a compulsion, cowing others into silence. Narcissists tend to ignore others and steer conversations back to their own narratives.
Narcissists want to be the centre of attention:
A narcissist will disregard the need for others to be seen and heard because the narcissist always wants to be the centre of attention.
This is because the narcissist has:
An excessive need for praise
A huge sense of entitlement
A lack of empathy
Leaving a personal or business relationship with a narcissistic person
The best thing to do is to accept that a narcissist won’t ever change, and so, when you’re ready, simply END THE ASSOCIATION OR RELATIONSHIP with them.
Leave.
Walk away.
Making threats will only forewarn the narcissist and enable them to make your departure more difficult.
Don’t make threats hoping they will repent and reform.
They will not.
Be ready to retake control of your own life.
Just get out of there…
*****
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 I attended an AGM of a small community organisation that I belong to.
My attendance at this meeting was motivated by issues that I had heard about that I knew to be improper behaviours, and I thought that by nominating to stand for the board of the organisation I might have been able to make a difference.
On the one hand, I had thought that the organisation was so small, and the issues being raised were so petty that I was heading towards volunteering for something that would ultimately become a huge and massive TIME SUCK.
On the other hand, the opportunity of doing some good was actually quite appealing.
I have in the past been on committees and body corporates where great amounts of time and energy have been unnecessarily expended discussing petty things in organisations whose annual budgets were less than the salary that a dental nurse earns for evacuating saliva from patients’ mouths.
One might think that in these smaller situations, an appropriate perspective should have been applied …in gambling the phrase often used is:
“We’re not betting on sheep stations.”
Sadly when I entered the meeting room, the president approached me to tell me that he was unable to accept my nomination because although my seconder was a member of the organisation [actually a long term member], he was not classified as an “active member” and as such, had no nominating rights. [My seconder had reached an age category where he was not required to pay subscriptions]
My point is…
It probably would have been nice if the president had reached out to me by phone when he received my nomination and prior to the meeting, to inform me of the status of my nomination, and save me the travel time and the fuel cost of attending the meeting.
Anyway, because I had driven for over an hour, I decided to stay and listen to the information.
After the meeting was over, I left the meeting with two major realisations:
1. The first realisation was that there had just passed half an hour of my life that I would never get back.
I asked one question during the meeting and received nothing but hostility and insult for asking the question.
2. The second realisation was that the universe was confirming to me that this was not the sandpit I needed to be playing in, which I kind of knew anyway, and had made that decision a couple of years ago when I took a less active role.
It was nice to have that previous decision reconfirmed as being correct.
Don’t you hate that….
Don’t you hate it when people get so petty about being right, that they hang onto grievances like a rabid dog hangs onto a bone?
Outside of this situation of mine, don’t you just hate it to see people arguing over who is right and who is wrong… sometimes we hear it at the dental office.
We hear patients being corrected for saying medical terms incorrectly.
We hear patients and staff arguing over what time a dental appointment was actually made for.
The list goes on…
The best thing you can do…
When you find yourself being drawn into a time sucking pointless discussion where there will be no winner, the best thing to do is drop the rope, and walk away.
There can be no tug-of-war when one side drops the rope.
And the side left holding the rope gets really upset that there has been no tug-of-war.
Let them think they’ve won. They will think that.
But you know better… you’ve won your time back. And sometimes you’ve won your life back… and that’s priceless.
*****
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 recently heard about a practice that was having [a current] difficulty with its front office staff, who needed phone training.
The interesting thing about this practice was that a couple of years ago I spoke with the owner about organising coaching for the practice, including front office training, but the dentist did not want to go ahead because some staff were “concerned” about having their dental practice phone calls recorded.
The interesting thing is that I can guarantee that if this dentist had begun coaching two years ago he would now be two years closer to his financial and career goals.
Whereas because the dentist bowed to his staff request, his practice is definitely not as successful as it should be and is more than likely in a WORSE PLACE because it has done nothing.
The reason the dentist reached out to me two years ago was because everything that his practice had done in the past before that time had led his practice to a place of SERIAL UNDERPERFORMANCE.
And seriously, you’ve really got to ask yourself who was employing whom in that practice, when the staff who took on the position of dental receptionist did not want to have their phone conversations with patients recorded?
I once hear Kerri-Anne Kennelly tell Ray Hadley, when talking about golf:
“No matter how bad you play, you can always play worse.”
And when it comes to dental office phones, I say:
“No matter how bad you think they are, they’re always worse.”
And I add:
“No matter how good you think they are, they’re always worse.”
And this is what we find when we listen to actual dental practice phone call recordings, no matter how “experienced” the dental receptionists actually are.
The interesting thing with this dentist that I just mentioned and his practice is that this dentist needs more than just front office training.
This dentist needs coaching for himself, to improve his ability to manage people and his ability to be a good leader.
Have you noticed that those three things [leadership, people management, and front office phone training] are not taught in dental school?
Successful dental practices have:
Great systems and protocols
Great leadership
Good people management
Their dental office phones are managed exceptionally
World Class Customer Service Systems
Great time management
Have you noticed that these six things are not taught in dental school?
These are six things that I teach my coaching clients….
When my coaching clients implement the things that I teach them, they experience significant practice growth along with significant personal growth as well.
I’d call that a WIN-WIN relationship….
*****
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.
