I listen to a lot of dental practice front office phone calls.
We record these calls for our clients, because it’s the only way that we know exactly what’s going on, on each client’s phones.
And it’s the only way that we can keep each team member at each client accountable for their words and for their actions.
IF WE DON’T LISTEN TO RECORDINGS, WE’RE ONLY GUESSING WHAT’S BEING SAID ON THE PHONES.
And guessing is inaccurate.
Guessing cannot be anything but inaccurate.
When we start talking to dental practice owners about how their phones are being answered, the answer we get is this:
“I THINK our phones are being answered ok…”
That’s kind of like your doctor telling you he thinks your blood pressure is OK, but he’s not bothered to ever put a sphygmomanometer on you…
Saying “I THINK” is admitting to guessing.
And when you’re guessing about such an important area of your dental practice, without knowing the true data and the TRUTH about what EXACTLY is being said on your phones and who is calling and making appointments and what’s being said to them, and what should be being said to them, well, the ensuing results are all far from concrete.
Actually, the results are just mushy quicksand…
Without knowing the start of the story, the ending can only be rubbery and soft, at best.
So let’s look at that three point phone greeting:
And the importance of part three.
Here it is:
“Thank you for calling Active Dental. This is Jayne. How may I help you?”
Part One:
Thank them for calling YOUR PRACTICE NAME.
Back when I started working in dentistry as an associate, the phone at the practice was answered:
“Dental Surgery”
And nothing else.
We’ve come a long way since those days.
Part Two:
Identify yourself so the caller knows who they are speaking to.
“This is Jayne.”
I’ve heard dental receptionists say:
“You’re speaking with Suzie” and nothing else, as if it’s the caller’s lucky day…
This part two needs to be simple and understated, because part three is the power part…
Part three:
“How may I help you?”
I’ve recently heard this shortened to “How may I help?” which has a totally different meaning, and is WRONG.
This is because the inclusion of the word “you” is so important because it directs our intention of what we are saying back towards the caller.
Saying “How may I help?” only, actually ignores the caller [“you”] and their need to be helped, and focuses attention towards the receptionist as the saviour there to rescue the caller.
We need to be focussing on the caller’s reason for calling.
The purpose of answering the dental office phone…
The three purposes we must always uphold when answering the dental office phone are to be a friend to the person calling, solve the caller’s problem, and give the caller hope.
There is no purpose to do with the receptionist themselves.
It’s all about the caller.
So don’t get sloppy.
Don’t de-emphasise the caller’s importance.
When the dental office phone rings, it always has to be one hundred percent about the caller.
When you focus on the caller, you will inherently make them feel important.
That is our primary goal.
Our primary goal whenever the phone rings at our dental office is to make the caller feel as though we’ve been waiting for them to ring our practice all day, just so we can help them with their dental concern.
*****
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 an interesting email last week from my good friend Dr. Richard Madow… that was very thought provoking.
In part it read:
“Dear David Moffet,
Let’s say you owned a pizza parlour, and you thought it wasn’t quite reaching its potential. So…. you want to hire a pizza parlour consultant to help you get a bigger slice of the pie.
The first candidate is “The Pizza Guy.” He claims to have a business degree, and used to own a marketing company that did really well. When looking for a new business one day, he heard that many pizza parlours were poorly managed and could use his expertise. So he read up on the business, visited many pizza shops (yum!!), took out a great website URL, and boom….”The Pizza Guy” was born!
The second candidate was Sabatino Covollo, owner of Sabatino Consulting. Sabatino grew up in The Bronx and started working in a pizza shop at age sixteen. He trained under two renowned pizza chefs, and managed a top NYC shop for eight years. Then he moved to Charleston, SC where he turned a bankrupt pizzeria into a “cash cow” that became a landmark. Finally, with twenty-four years of experience in the pizza industry, he became a consultant and has successfully helped pizza shops all over the world. (Yes – this is actually all true!)
What’s the point? Whether it’s growing your dental practice or Googling something that will help your personal life, you’ll find that there are all kinds of experts out there. And due to social media, the amount of “self-proclaimed experts” is larger than ever.
So put it this way. If you were on the front lines of a war, who would you rather have in charge? Someone with twenty years of experience in the military who has been through several battles, or someone who has read a lot of Tom Clancy books? Getting advice is great – just make sure you get it from the right source!”
Dr. Richard then went on to sound this warning:
“If your dental practice is not EXACTLY where you want it to be, and you’re looking for some guidance, please be warned. The dental coaching and consulting business is full of landmines. People who think “a business is a business – a dental practice is no different!” Consultants who have never held a handpiece telling you how to diagnose periodontal disease. Non-dentists trying to pass themselves off as dentists by using confusing and misleading statements. And “revenue experts” who advise putting a crown on any tooth that has a three-surface restoration.”
Personally, for me, as a dental practice owner for twenty-eight years, and then in my second career as a dental coach for twelve years and growing, I’ve seen both sides of what Dr. Richard is saying here. [Actually, I’d still be a dentist and not a coach if arthritis in my hands had not cut short my clinical career]
Here’s my tip:
When you look for a coach, you do need to have someone who knows what they are doing, and knows that what they are doing works, and will work for you.
But even stuff that works for you, could be replaced by stuff that works better for you.
If I was a dental practice owner in Australia, and I wanted to improve my front office employee’s phone skills, and improve their New Patient numbers, and reduce their cancellations, I certainly would be looking to hire someone local who has worked in and performed that same role for a long time.
Not some theorist from overseas.
Dr. Richard is correct. Hiring a dentist who has run a successful dental practice to help you with your own practice is a perfect place to start.
However, looking outside of the industry for advice that can be used in the dental industry can also be prudent.
Some of the great Customer Service skills that I teach to dentists were things that I learned from observing travel and hospitality businesses, and then applying AND TESTING those ideas in my own dental practice to make sure they did indeed work.
You have three choices:
If you want to improve your dental business, there are three things that you could do…
You could do nothing and HOPE that things change…
You could try and figure things out on your own [I see a lot of dentists do this]… and from experience I know that that is the SLOW, PAINFUL WAY, and quite frankly, it is also WAY MORE EXPENSIVE…. or
You can work with someone who’s already done what you’re wanting to do, and has been getting results for other dentists just like you for the past eleven years….
BUT… Since you are still reading this article NOW, my guess is that you want to avoid the PAIN of trial and error, and the PAIN of doing NOTHING…
And QUICKLY get results that you can see in your BANK ACCOUNT right away…
I can help. Email me drdavid@theUPE.com with the subject line: “Help me grow” and I’ll organise a time for a short chat.
*****
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.
A married couple I know well were staying out of town for a weekend [away from their home] and decided it might be nice to savour some pizza for dinner.
They chose a pizza restaurant nearby to their accommodation that was housed in a very large and grand historic stand-alone warehouse building….
What could possibly go wrong with pizza, they thought?
When they entered the building there were plenty of staff serving along with many occupied tables of eat-in diners.
The couple were after some take-home pizza. They planned to walk the short eight minutes back to their accommodation with the pizzas and watch a movie.
The order was simple. One garlic and cheese pizza, and one seafood pizza.
The couple sat down inside the restaurant to wait for their pizza.
While seated, they couldn’t help to notice that the inside fit-out of the restaurant did not seem to take up 20% of the ground floor footprint of the rather large building they had admired from the outside. In fact, the kitchen and bathrooms were permanently positioned in such a manner that any future possible expansion of the restaurant into the unused rear part of the building was never going to be an option.
When the couple collected their hot pizzas and got them back to where they were staying, they were sadly underwhelmed because the finished pizza products failed to live up to their expectations.
Both pizzas appeared to be made using a very bland “supermarket style” pre-prepared pizza base, rather than using an authentic Italian pizza dough recipe.
The garlic and cheese pizza definitely lacked cheese, and was made using bottled garlic purée rather than fresh garlic cloves.
The seafood pizza had very few pieces of seafood, and if the couple had not requested anchovies, they believed that the pizza would have had less flavour than the cardboard pizza box it came in.
Have you ever been into a business where the product delivered failed to live up to your expectations?
These bland pizzas were a metaphor really for how easy it is to live down to expectations below those of the average customer.
How difficult is it to provide sumptuous mouth-watering pizzas?
In business, the best thing you can do to WOW your customers is OVERDELIVER a level of quality and service that CONSISTENTLY EXCEEDS your clients’ expectations.
Customers will leave a business in droves and take themselves and their patronage elsewhere IN AN INSTANT if they perceive that business is purposefully short-suiting them.
On service, and on quality.
In business, it doesn’t cost much more to go that little bit extra.
But it will cost you a lot if you’re perceived to be being “tight”…
And it’s not just what your business sells.
It’s also HOW your business sells that is also important to your customers.
If your clients are always kept waiting because you don’t employ enough staff to provide good and friendly service, your clients will walk away from your business.
And it will cost your business a lot to try to replace those lost customers….
*****
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 question regarding staff lunches arose on two US based dental chat forums earlier this month.
Now I know that things can be different in the USA compared to in other parts of the western world, but primarily, what this dentist was asking for was a consensus from his peers as to what was going on out there in the land of practicing dentistry.
A wide variety of answers came back from various practice owners.
Some dentists don’t take a lunch break.
Other dentists have staff who choose not to take a lunch break, as lunch is unpaid time and these team members would prefer to work and earn rather than break and go unpaid. That’s interesting…
Other dentists stagger their team members’ lunches so that the phone and front desk are manned at all times.
Other dentists simply close the doors, put on a message on their phone, and HOPE TO HECK that any person wanting them during that time leaves a message, or phones back at the appropriate time… and that’s even more interesting…
The facts are these…
Unless you are Nostradamus and have superhuman or supernatural powers of perception and prediction, nobody out there can tell who is going to phone a dental office at any particular time and request an appointment for veneers, implants, full mouth rehab, etc….
So if that’s the case, it makes no economic sense whatsoever to close the doors, and turn off the phones and HOPE TO HECK that people wanting to schedule an appointment to discuss a need or perceived need for complex treatment will happily phone back when it suits the dental office.
The best thing that having the phones answered all day does is create the perception for callers that your office does have some sense of customer service value.
Any dental practice that has calls going to a message during business hours is simply “advertising” the fact that they [the dental practice] don’t understand the facts about service and supply and demand.
Back to the topic of lunches and lunch breaks…
The dentist wrote this:
“I have had a lot of turnover and staffing issues so the rules for lunches are getting more blurred. I take full responsibility for not clearly defining this in our handbook and I am looking to correct this. My fear is that if I cut their [staff] time for lunch, they will quit and that would be detrimental to my practice”
My thoughts:
A little bit of chicken and egg theory here… I think the handbook protocols for lunches need to be clearly defined and understood in the first instance to prevent any blurring occurring.
Secondly, staff need time that they can rely on receiving to be able to do errands, such as shopping or banking, or buy lunch. And these times need to be independent of practice “disruptions”.
So there needs to be purpose to the dental schedule to allow for staff to receive their entitled time. And an hour each is best for them.
Secondly, don’t jam your emergency time in immediately before lunch break. Never do that. Emergency time must be allocated to end at least one hour before lunch time.
My answer to the question was this:
“Stagger lunches so everybody can get an hour. End the morning with one hour appointments [not emergencies] so some team members can go early to lunch. Not all team members need to be present during that final hour of treatment.
Allow the late lunchers to take a full hour and return after the first afternoon patients have begun treatment. Again, with patients immediately after lunch only requiring a check-in at the beginning of their appointment, the workload for team is less at that time.
Short lunches are one of the biggest gripes team members will have and hold against you and your practice… staff won’t mind working hard during their shift, so long as they can get an hour to go do what they need to do…”
Don’t be seen to be mean…
As an owner, making sure that your team all get a full hour each for lunch goes a long way to creating harmony and an enjoyable work environment.
Sure, staggered lunches do mean that some team members do not get to go to lunch together, but that’s a very small price to pay in a small business work environment.
*****
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.
On Christmas Eve I jumped on the phone and called a couple of friends in the USA that I had not spoken with for a while.
I phoned to wish them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
One of those calls lasted for a good hour, with my friend [let’s call him Ron] asking me at the end of the call if I could send him my updated [current] contact details… you know… email address, phone number, house address, postal address etc.
A couple of weeks after sending Ron my new details I received a surprise comment on Facebook from him saying that he had not received the updated details.
This surprised me, as I had indeed sent them, and promptly, but I knew that Ron had updated his email address recently, so I made a point of resending my details again, via SMS and also via email.
Another couple of weeks went by and then another cryptic comment from Ron appeared on another one of my Facebook posts.
Ron’s comment was that he had sent me a Christmas card and he wanted to see how long it took for me to receive it.
I replied to Ron immediately that I had not received his email in my inbox nor could I see it in my junk mail.
I asked Ron if he could try sending it again.
To which he replied:
“David, I’ve sent you a real physical card by snail mail. One that I touched with my own hands.”
Silly me. How quickly we forget, or should I say, we assume things.
This reminded me…
When I had my own practice, every month I would post out to patients a personally hand-signed and written physical card wishing them a Happy Birthday, if they were having a birthday in that month, of course.
At Christmas time, every team member would each hand-sign Christmas cards to be sent to our valued regular patients.
One time, one of our patients joked with me that in her household, she and her husband used to “wager” with each other to see who in their house would be first to receive their Christmas Card from the dentist.
This was because they had different surnames, and because of this fact, different cards were posted by our practice on different days.
In fact this patient went on to say that one year her husband Graeme did not receive a Christmas card at all from us.
I was horrified.
It was now July, so I said to her, that I would fix this once and for all.
So I posted Graeme his Christmas card for that year right then and there in July.
That year Graeme was the first of our patients to receive his Christmas card!!
Interestingly, another patient once thanked us for sending him a Christmas card each year, and said that we were the only people who sent him a Christmas card.
Don’t ever underestimate….
Don’t ever underestimate the impact that you can have on someone’s life by taking the time to send them a hand-written card, or by taking the time to pick up the phone and call them, rather than just SMS them or email them.
Sometimes in the 21st Century we get so bogged down with the pace of things that we need to just stop for a short time, and smell the roses.
And see what happens when we do take the time…
When was the last time that you sent someone a hand-written card?
And when was the last time you picked up the phone and called someone to ask them:
“How’s things?”
*****
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.
