Some people I know really well recently had the opportunity of staying away from home for a night at a luxury hotel.
The couple very much enjoyed their stay. The hotel was well located, with great rooms, a great restaurant and great facilities. It was well known for its intimacy for guests.
The hotel rooms were well appointed and the rooms all commanded spectacular views.
The hotel employees were all very friendly, and treated each other and guests professionally and were courteous and polite with their guests. All interactions were warm and personable.
The only “fault” that my friends discovered was what I would call a great example of a BROKEN WINDOW.
A broken window would be defined as a glaring oversight that would be seen by someone visiting that business that would have that person remark to themselves:
“I wonder why nobody here is attending to that?”
An example of a broken window in a dental practice would be:
Crooked pictures or degree certificates hanging on the walls
Glass doors and windows that need dirt and fingerprints cleaned off them
Magazines that are worn and dog-eared that need retiring from use.
Shelves that need dusting
Carpets and flooring that needs vacuuming or sweeping
Desks and surfaces that need decluttering and tidying
Scuff marks on floors and skirting boards that need cleaning
Lawns and gardens that need attending and manicuring.
Building entrances that need sweeping and tidying
Bathrooms that need cleaning and updating
The list goes on…
At this hotel, my friend noticed one of the most common BROKEN WINDOWS that is overlooked by all kinds of businesses.
When seen and noticed by the public, this broken window immediately has visitors who spot it wondering:
“I wonder what else they’re not cleaning here?”
And that broken window my friend noticed was an air conditioning return grill layered in thick dust.
Other times businesses have air conditioning outlets that need dark marks to be cleaned off their louvres and grills.
Anywhere where dust can be seen to be accumulating because of lack of cleaning, will have visitors and guests and patrons of that business wondering what other levels of hygiene and cleanliness are not being attended to by this business.
And if this business happens to be in the food preparation business, or the medical services business, or the cleaning business for instance, patrons who notice this lack of attention to cleanliness detail will also be wondering what else is this business failing to see properly.
In your dental practice, the lack of cleanliness in your client lounge, your entrance way, and on your air conditioning grills could be acting as GAME CHANGER when new patients, and existing patients, are failing to schedule ongoing appointments.
And the dental team, and the dentist believe that the patient was probably a price conscious shopper.
When in fact all they wanted was a clean dental office to be treated in.
And price was never a deciding variable.
Attention to detail was a deciding variable.
In our coaching of The Ultimate Patient Experience, we spend a lot of time during Building Blocks II and III helping dental practices realise that there is so much opportunity lost by the practice before the patient has ever even sat down in the dental chair, and that if a BROKEN WINDOW is missed in these two building blocks, well that patient will be gone for ever, never to return…. and they’ve made that decision before they’ve even met the dentist….
And the dental team, and the dentist believe that the patient that fails to rebook was probably a price conscious shopper?
Sadly, no….
*****
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.
It costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer….
Yet when I talk to dentists about how slow business is at their practice, they all bleat out the same monologue…
“I just need more new patients.”
Often when I see a practice…
Often when I see a practice, the practice has a healthy number of new patients booking in each month. But at the rear end of the practice, that same practice has a continual number of patients leaving the practice without an appointment, or has patients calling back later to cancel, but not to reschedule appointments for necessary diagnosed treatment.
Which kind of seems quite dumb really.
Why would a practice not nurture their existing patient base until those valued customers were ready to bring their teeth and gums treatment up to date… rather these practices seem to be ignoring those loyal patients and start chasing down new patients to join the dental practice?
To me that doesn’t make good business sense.
The existing patients already love and respect you for all that you do for them. So much so, that an existing patient is more likely to accept their treatment and get the work done, when compared to a new patient, who has yet to establish true trust and rapport with their new dentist…
Building a dental practice with a large base of loyal patients who stayed, and paid, and referred was my goal in dental practice ownership.
It just made no sense to be paying for advertising and marketing to bring in new patients, only to see those patients leave through holes in our customer service systems that could easily be addressed.
Choosing a dentist is an emotional decision for the public to make.
Giving all patients an exceptional experience at your dental practice will go a long way towards helping those patients stay with you.
When the dental treatment you provide to your patients is bland, and vanilla, those patients will eventually tire of your dental practice and look elsewhere for a better experience.
Providing an exceptional experience to your patients goes a long way towards differentiating your dental practice from being just a commodity.
Patients want to feel respected and valued, and understood.
And helping them to feel that way is a lot less expensive than having to spend more money on marketing and advertising…
*****
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.
Jayne and I celebrated her birthday this past weekend with our usual Saturday lunch out at our favourite Sydney restaurant.
When we lived in Sydney we used to make a day of it and have a driver take us to lunch and then bring us home, so that we could relax and enjoy the food and the wine we were being served.
Since we’ve moved out of Sydney, we still travel to the same restaurant, but we overnight it at a Sydney hotel to make sure that we get to the restaurant on time and we have no difficulties after our lunch.
On this weekend just gone, I wasn’t able to secure a room where we usually stay. The hotel was fully booked.
So I booked another hotel nearby, where we had stayed before several times.
The hotel that I booked this time is a larger hotel at the luxury end of the market.
Here are some interesting observations:
When it was time for us to leave the hotel after our stay, I phoned the concierge to organise to have our car brought up from valet parking. As we were travelling home, we had no deadline, so time was not an important factor.
Sadly, when I phoned internally to concierge, it seemed to me that my call had been directed to a service for incoming calls from outside the hotel. This is because my call went through to an on-hold service with a recorded message specifically addressing a caller who may not as yet ever stayed at this hotel.
I felt as though I was listening to this message for a very long time, as the loop repeated itself twice before my call was eventually answered.
When my call was answered, the young lady answering the phone sounded very exhausted, as if she had been answering the phones continuously for a very long period of time.
I felt so sorry for her.
I politely told her that I was checking out from the hotel, and I asked if she could organise for my car to be brought up from Valet parking.
The young lady very politely replied that she would do that for me. Her voice sounded so tired.
I thought to myself that this hotel obviously needed to have more people answering the internal phone calls during this busy time, so that hotel guests felt valued, and felt important.
The long delay that occurred before my call was answered sadly sent me a negative signal that my business with this hotel was not valued.
Secondly, in another unrelated observation, Jayne and I both remarked that for a luxury hotel, the toilet tissue provided was very thin and not of a luxury standard that you would expect from a luxury hotel.
You would assume that all hotel guests would be using the hotel room toilets, and therefore you would think that making that “visit” for the hotel guest as good as “visiting”  at home or better? How difficult would it be for this hotel to lux up the toilet paper to a thick and very soft and comfortable ply? Wouldn’t that be an easy win in for the hotel to WOW their customers on their stay?
I’m not sure who decided that cheaper toilet tissue was OK for this hotel, but certainly, every guest would notice the lack of quality…
In your dental practice:
When the phone rings at your dental practice, are your phones being answered promptly?
When a caller phones your dental practice, you want that caller to believe that the person answering the phone has been looking forward to that caller’s call all day.
And when that caller phones, they need to be made to feel like the most important person on the planet.
Secondly, at your dental office, are you using top quality personal products to exude a level of luxury and excellence in your establishment?
Are your tissues of a fine standard that feel comfortable against your patients’ skins?
Are your dental bibs eight ply and large so that the patient feels protected by them, as well as feeling impressed by their thickness?
And are your soaps and personal care products of a high class standard?
Are your magazines and reading material in your client lounge of a high standard?
If you use “cheap” you will attract more “cheap”, and you will have patients who want more and expect more from you go looking elsewhere for the “more” that you’re not giving, that you could easily be giving.
The thing is, that working in a more luxurious pool is much more pleasant than working in a less luxurious pool.
Believe me, because I was able to do this.
I was able to build a dental practice for patients who wanted and expected more, in terms of service, and who were very grateful for the levels of service I was able to provide them.
Working with those patients was such a pleasure…
*****
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.
Despite the fact that interest rates in Australia have risen for ten consecutive months now, I’m seeing that some businesses are still growing and growing significantly, even during these difficult economic times.
The rise in interest rates has been made to try to stem high inflationary situations in the economy, in an effort to have consumers be more frugal with their expenditure.
Managing an economy is a delicate juggling act, that’s for sure.
Yet, despite all this economic negativity and media based “doom and gloom”, there are businesses out there powering ahead and growing during these supposedly restrictive times.
No matter what the economic climate, there will always be businesses that succeed during hard times, and there will always be businesses that fail to grow during good economic times.
Sometimes it’s really all about what you tend to want to believe…
Sometimes if you believe that times will get tough, then when times do get tough, you batten down the hatches and get through it…. and after all that you congratulate yourself on your foresight, because you had forecast these tough times were coming.
But by the same token, sometimes there are businesses that know only one direction and one speed, and so when times are tough for other businesses, these businesses are oblivious to the tough times and just motor on through, as if nothing bad ever even happened.
Sometimes some people can become a victim of their own unnecessary pessimism.
As a dentist, patients will always need dental treatment during good economic times as well as during bad economic times.
It is our duty to help these patients receive the treatment they should be receiving, no matter what is supposedly going on externally in the economy.
Other businesses succeed despite what the media is telling them about the economy at large out there.
You can control your own destiny.
Recently I met a dental practice owner who had tripled the practice production and collections since purchasing that business only three years ago, while all around his community , people were tightening their belts.
It seemed that nobody had explained to him that the economy was teetering on a precipice.
Another dentist I know has increased her hourly rate 38% in a six month period during the height of the COVID pandemic.
It certainly appears that both these dentists didn’t get the memo that the economy was tanking.
So you have a choice.
You can let the news dictate your outcomes.
Or you can make your own news.
Back in the 1990s, while the Australian Prime Minister and Treasurer were keen to tell us how difficult things were, I grew a dental practice by tripling its collections over a six year period.
I did this by matching my efforts in my practice to what my clients were wanting us to deliver.
And not by listening to all of the doom and gloom about high inflation and high interest rates being pushed by the media and by the press.
Sometimes the pack that people choose to follow is a bunch of mindless fools displaying herd mentality.
There’s a reason…
There’s a reason why 95% of people reaching the age of 65 are either dead, or broke, or dead broke…
And only one person in twenty has become successful.
The 5% who are independently wealthy at age 65 usually have done so by thinking outside of the narrow channels perpetrated by the media..
Who’s adversely influencing how your thinking?
And who’s adversely influencing your outcomes?
*****
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.
Today I drove ninety minutes each way to my nearest Apple store.
You see, last Friday morning, my Macbook Pro track pad decided that the CLICK FUNCTION wasn’t going to function any more.
And somehow, my remote wireless trackpad also decided that it was not going to CLICK FUNCTION function either.
Which rendered my MacBook rather useless, at that point in time.
Luckily for me, I had a busy day planned away from my MacBook, and was able to attend to emails and other incoming messages on my phone.
Which is not OK.
I mean, having to do a long session of email or LinkedIn on your phone screen is kind of like having to walk around your home all day looking through your loupes.
It’s migraine inducing… you really need a big screen for a big session on the computer.
Anyway, I was able to set up a mouse into the MacBook and re-engage with it over the weekend.
But as a long term solution, the mouse is not going to cut it for me.
So I booked a session at the Genius Bar
In my mind, I imagined I’d be turning up at the Apple Store, they’d take my MacBook for a couple of hours, and replace any expired parts that were causing the track pad to malfunction.
Sadly, my imagination was not my reality.
Firstly, the technician who attended to me told me that depending upon the part or parts that were needed, the Apple Store might need my MacBook for three days, as they would probably have to order the parts in.
The technician also told me that she felt that the issue with my trackpad was related to my user account, and maybe was due to some dust in the guts of the MacBook. And so she took the MacBook away to clean out the dust. [My MacBook had never had this operation performed upon it before].
And then the technician told me this:
She said:
“Let’s see how that goes.”
And she added:
“I’ve documented all that we’ve done today so that if the problem is still there, then we will know just what to do…”
And so off I went home….
And when I got home, guess what happened?
I fired up my MacBook, and within a couple of minutes, the trackpad CLICK FUNCTION had decided to stop functioning.
And so…
The only thing that I achieved today was to get the guts of my MacBook cleaned.
But apart from that, all that the Apple Store did for me was flick pass me a GIANT “stall”….
There was no solution for my problem.
All I received was a giant push out of the way.
When I was a young associate dentist…
When I worked as a recent graduate as a young associate dentist, I had an employer who I felt had a default function whenever he was unable to find a reason [or cause] for a patient who was experiencing intermittent dental pain that was far from specific.
Whenever my boss was unable to clearly diagnose the reason why there was someone in his dental chair, he would diagnose the patient as having “a sinus condition” and then he would prescribe the patient amoxycillin.
Now, I don’t know whether these patients were cured by this course of treatment, or they decided to go elsewhere because he didn’t appear to be able to nail the diagnosis?
The end result was that these patients presenting for this reason [indiscriminate pain] never seemed to return to our dental practice.
Maybe my old boss was a miracle worker?
I’m not convinced he was…
But as I drove home from the Apple Store, I kind of had a suspicious feeling that the result I envisaged was not going to eventuate.
And it didn’t.
And so now I have to return to that Apple Store, and surrender my MacBook for a few days.
I think those patients who saw my old boss and were told they had “sinus” probably also left his practice concerned that their reason for attending was still “up in the air”?
And I thought, surely there must be an Apple Store in our fair city where my MacBook’s dilemma might be solved rather than be deferred.
Just as I thought, all those years ago, that the diagnosis of “sinus” to describe non-specific dental pain, was really a flick pass from my old boss.
Patients don’t go to the dentist because they’ve got a couple of spare hours to kill.
Nobody does that.
Ever.
Patients go to the dentist because they have a dental problem that they don’t want to have, and they want that dentist to fix it.
And so dentists, doing nothing for your patients, is rarely the answer.
In the meantime, for me, I’m reacquainting myself with a mouse.
How interesting?!?!
And how frustrating!!!
*****
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.
