A friend of mine is doing an extension on her home at the moment, and funnily enough, this involves renovating and replacing an old kitchen with a brand new kitchen.
And just this week my friend had to take delivery of the new oven and cooker that was going into the new kitchen space.
Now you’d expect that the retailer that sold my friend the cooker would be considerate when organising the delivery of the cooker so that the delivery “experience” matched the purchasing “experience” as well as the expectations of the customer.
And let me tell you this.
This was not some low priced stove that was being delivered.
This was a SERIOUS cooker she bought.
In fact, for the price that my friend paid for her cooker, anybody would expect that they were going to receive service personified with a capital “S”.
Sadly for my friend this was not the case.
So here’s what happened….
Firstly, when the delivery truck arrived, it did not have one of those fancy hydraulic up and down platforms on the back.
Secondly, there were not enough able bodied men inside this truck to be able to remove the cooker from the back of the truck and deliver it to the kitchen to be placed close by to where it needed to go [and be connected].
And so the delivery guys started swearing expletives to my friend about the “lack of assistance” that she, the buyer was providing.
Yes, you have read this correctly… when my friend told me this I was gobsmacked!
At the same time, the delivery guys were also swearing about having to carry the cooker up some wide timber steps, until my friend explained to the rude delivery guys that there was another wider and more accessible doorway [with no steps] that the cooker ACTUALLY needed to go through.
This extreme antisocial behaviour from these delivery guys was witnessed by some other well mannered delivery guys [from another retailer] who just happened to be COURTEOUSLY delivering some bathroom ware, as well as the cabinet maker who was installing the kitchen.
In the end the cooker was just “plonked down” in the hallway with some of its protective packaging being removed from the cooker, so that these unequipped delivery guys could actually get a hold on the cooker.
It was definitely not a “World Class” buying experience…
My friend was horrified.
She phoned the retailer to let them know of her disappointment, and to alert the retailer that delivery guys with this sort of arrogance were out there representing the retailer at the product delivery touchpoint…. and letting them down badly.
When my friend told the agent at the retailer how the delivery guys from the other company were so much more polite, the agent said:
“Oh they [the other company] are a much bigger company.”
Well, hello?
Does that mean that because the retailer who sold the cooker was a smaller company, that clients buying from them have to tolerate swearing, arrogance, and rudeness from their delivery people?
My friend is tempted to contact the cooker company directly to let them know that that the delivery experience from this purchase was not in keeping with the experience that this cooker company would be wanting its customers to have.
And as my friend said, she doesn’t want to think that that the horrid memory of these nasty delivery guys is going to come flooding back into her mind each and every time she uses that cooker. …
It certainly might take a while….
In your business…
In your business, are all the people and agents representing your brand, really representing your brand in the way that you would want them to be doing so?
Or are they sometimes taking the feelings of your clients and customers for granted?
*****
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 was doing an online training for some dentists last week and I was advising them about the three key points that need to be covered on every incoming phone call at their dental offices, if they want to increase their practice new patient conversion numbers.
That’s only if the dentists want to increase the number of new patient call conversions happening on their phones.
If they don’t want to increase new patient numbers, and they’re happy wasting money on marketing and wasting money on getting the phone to ring, but not converting those calls, then they can simply ignore this advice and keep on doing what they are doing.
But if they want to increase their practice new patient numbers, then consistently doing ALL OF THESE three key things will dramatically improve their telephone conversions.
The interesting thing is that also doing these three key things in every face to face communication with patients and customers will dramatically increase customer satisfaction and also customer retention.
These three key things that need to be the backbone of every conversation are what supports the fact that everybody that we interact with just wants to feel important, valued, and understood.
So what are these three key things?
Well, in all communications with customers you need to always cover and include these three important considerations:
1- Be a friend
In all communications, coming across as “less than friendly” is improper and inadequate.
Always be friendly, and behave, as a friend would.
That means caring, and showing that you care.
2- Solve their problem
Truly listen with the intent to help, and uplift.
If you can find the solution that your customer or caller is looking for, you’ll become their favourite person in the world.
Go into every interaction and conversation with the purpose of being a problem solver.
But that means that you need to be LISTENING on a visceral level.
Don’t listen just to reply or respond.
Listen intently so that you can SOLVE.
3- Give them hope
At the end of your conversation, your client or patient will feel uplifted if they believe you have given them hope, and pointed them in the right direction, and helped them to progress to a solution.
In a friendly and courteous manner.
And that’s all great customer service is really. It’s about adding value, adding hope, and being truly on the other person’s page.
Always.
*****
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.
Recently I was asked to look at a surgery design being proposed for a new dental practice.
The proposed practice had seven treatment rooms, a large patient waiting room, and a large staff room, including a staff bathroom and shower area.
On paper the proposed office looked very impressive.
But on closer analysis, the design had some major flaws.
It reminded me of that scene in the movie “Heartburn” starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep where they are doing some home renovations, and Jack Nicholson’s character points out to the builder [in a heated manner] that there is no internal doorway between the new kitchen and the living room, and so to move between those rooms, people need to walk out of the kitchen and outside the house and then re-enter the living room from the outside of the house!
A few years ago I coached a dental practice in upstate Pennsylvania that was moving into a newly designed and newly built stand-alone building with nine dental operatories.
On any day this practice had six hygienists and three dentists seeing patients.
But the dental front desk area, only had space for three dental receptionists.
And so, every hour, on the hour, in this brand new facility, the practice had nine patients leaving and nine patients arriving, and they had only three team members and three small places at a reception counter to conduct appointment making, to process patient payments, and to discuss big case matters of financial arrangements and treatment scheduling… the new facility had created a perfect patient logjam area.
And sadly, within this new up and running facility, there was no space whatsoever available for expansion of the necessary front office areas, without creating a separate area away from everything in the dental office’s basement.
The immediate solution in this new office when it opened and realised its dilemma, was to equip each hygiene room with an EFTPOS terminal, so that the hygienists could perform payment processing and ongoing appointment scheduling in their rooms, to reduce the front desk logjam effect that the new design had inadvertently and successfully created.
Hardly an ideal solution…
Prior to the build, the dental office design looked all nice and pretty on paper, but patient flow and office functionality seemed to have been brushed over by the designers and seemed to have been forgotten as a necessity by the owners.
For those of us who have ever built a home from scratch, these “design issues” can be real and relevant when we look at room placements and doorway positions, and people movements, and bathrooms and hallways and bedrooms and television placements… When building a home to live in… where families and visitors often spend a lot of their time stationary, sometimes “inconveniences” can be excused…
And I know patients spend a lot of time in the stationary position at the dental office… while being treated, while waiting for treatment in the “waiting room” [what a horrid term that is!!] and while waiting to check out at the front desk, but not having sufficient facility at the front office to be able to conduct all financial and scheduling matters in a relaxed and comfortable environment, let alone being able to conduct any private and personal social interactions with our patients, is akin to creating a supermarket or department store cash register area where large numbers of customers with trolleys full of shopping wait frustratingly in a chicane that funnels them all down to an area where maybe eight registers are unmanned and only two registers are actually operating…. we’ve all been in that shopping situation and it ain’t that much fun for the shopper…
So much so, that in the retail situation, sometimes the shopper can’t be bothered to wait to have their payments processed, and so they just abandon their trolleys and run away…. you get the picture?
And in a dental environment, where dentistry is the ULTIMATE GRUDGE BUY, why wouldn’t a surgery designer and a surgery owner be looking at creating the most comfortable and relaxed areas possible for patients to schedule their necessary appointments for ongoing treatment and to attend to their financial arrangements?
And just to touch on another missing area in this proposed Taj Mahal design of a dental practice that I saw, there was no staff training room area proposed, and nor was there a private office area for the practice owners.
There was also no private area for dental front office team members to be phoning patients and discussing private patient matters, that wasn’t within earshot of a “waiting room” full of anxious waiting patients…
The design really looked like a “cut and paste” proposal… no wonder it needed a large “waiting area” because that’s what I envisaged the clients of that practice would be doing each and every time that they visited this practice…. and maybe that might only be once or twice, until they got fed up with having to be waiting, waiting, waiting…. and they took their business elsewhere.
Ultimately, the new design was far from perfect. And far from really being functional. But it did look pretty on paper….
*****
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 spent a couple of nights in Sydney town. The reason for this was because I had a 40th Year reunion of my graduating class of 1982 to attend.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been forty years since we all graduated as dentists from Sydney University…. but time waits for nobody…
Anyhow, on that Saturday morning in Sydney, Jayne and I had a few retail errands to perform. You see, living in the country now does have its [slight] disadvantages when it comes to some specific retail purchases.
So off we went shopping…
One of those stores that we did need to visit was MECCA on the corner of George Street and Market Street, right smack bang in the heart of the Sydney CBD.
MECCA is a cosmetic label retailed through department stores. However, this store is the MECCA flagship store.
It’s very popular.
We arrived early in the day, and the store was well populated with customers, but not overcrowded, which it does tend to become in the afternoons.
In the store, Jayne was having difficulty finding the two things that she needed to purchase. The first item we were looking for was a makeup shade which didn’t appear to be in stock.
The second item that Jayne needed was a specific brand of eyeline pencil, and for this particular item, Jayne approached a sales assistant at a register to ask her where that item might be.
The young lady replied with a smile:
“It’s over there [and she motioned in a specific direction]. Let me take you there.”
Jayne replied to her:
“It’s OK. I’ll find it. You’re busy. Just tell me where abouts it is.”
And the sales assistant replied:
“No, it’s OK. It’s kind of in a weird place, and can be difficult to find. Everything’s all over the place at the moment. I’ll take you there.”
And she did.
And once we were there, and Jayne had been shown the specific pencil that she was looking for, the sales assistant asked if there was anything else that Jayne needed.
And Jayne told her about the makeup shade that she [Jayne] had not been able to locate.
The sales assistant replied:
“Let me go and check all my stock, and see if I can find one for you.”
And off she went.
Sadly, the sales assistant returned to tell Jayne that the store was out of that specific shade, but she did say that the Myer department store across the road may have one.
What a breath of fresh air this young lady was.
Her nature and enthusiasm and understanding were contagious.
As was her “need to please”.
In this day and age…
In this day and age, sometimes receiving great customer service in stores can be a bit of a “hit and miss” experience.
And the reason we know that, is because when we do experience great customer service, it really does stand out as being an exceptional experience.
Why can’t customer service be a WORLD CLASS EXPERIENCE every time for the customer?
Why can’t we strive to deliver an ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE to each and every one of our clients, customers and patients, each and every time that they interact and make contact with and attend our businesses?
The answer is that we can.
And we should.
But sadly sometimes we do not…
And so our customers notice when their experience with us is not up to their expectations.
And conversely, our customers notice and appreciate those times when the service experience we deliver to them exceeds their expectation dramatically…
And that’s the type of experience we should always be striving to deliver to each and every one of our customers.
Each and every time they interact with us.
It needs to be that Five Star World Class Experience.
It needs to be that Above and Beyond experience that WOWs them each and every time….
*****
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 big difference between a profitable business and a business that just gets by, is that the profitable business has systems, and processes, and accountability.
Whereas the business that just gets by, simply gets by by winging it, and by making things up as it goes along.
Have you ever noticed that some people live their lives in this exact same way?
Some people are methodical in their routine of life…
They have:
Exercise routines. They exercise regularly.
Saving routines. They put money away in a savings plan on a weekly basis.
Relationship routines. As couples, they have a regular weekly “date night”.
They become creatures of habit, for their own good.
And they keep themselves accountable.
Other people tend to stumble from one disaster to the next.
These people have no accountability.
They:
Never check their tyres, and their engine oil.
They run low on, or run out of milk, and bread, and essential groceries.
They have a washing basket full of unironed clothes.
They rarely make their bed.
They live from pay check to pay check…. They have no savings.
If you want to be successful, all you need to do is find someone else who has been successful, or is successful, and do what that person did, or does.
Life is that simple.
You don’t need to reinvent success. There’s plenty of success out there to duplicate and make your own.
In life, and in business, there are clues.
And there is evidence.
Find these people. And talk to them.
Buy their books. And read them.
It’s not difficult.
Successful people are always happy to be acknowledged and recognised for what they’ve done, and achieved.
Learn from them. Laud them. Thank them.
Be grateful for the lessons.
And take action.
Don’t just only read it. Don’t just only listen.
Success is yours for the taking.
Do it.
Live it.
Accomplish it.
Achieve it.
Own it.
*****
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.
