Many years ago, when I was a dental practice owner, and a busy practicing dentist, I ran an advertisement in our local newspaper about a new piece of equipment that I had invested in.
[For those wondering, a newspaper was a means of disseminating news to the population before the internet was invented. Though I do believe that at the time that I ran this advertisement, the internet was in its infancy and access was dial-up…. if you’re still wondering, go and ask your parents].
The headline for the advertisement read:
“Do you have a broken tooth? A computer could help you fix it?”
And the advertisement promoted my [then new] CEREC machine…
The advertisement ran for many years and certainly attracted a lot of patients looking for a dentist with “cutting edge technology” in their dental practice.
The reason I raise this advertisement and this story here is that some seven or eight years after I stopped running this newspaper advertisement, I had a new patient present to the practice because he had been impressed with that very advertisement.
The patient said that at the time, when he had read the advertisement, he had cut out the advertisement from the newspaper and saved it and kept it inside the street directory in the glove compartment in his car. He felt that when the time came that he would need a dentist, then I would be the dentist that he chose to come and see.
[Young people, please ask your parents what a street directory is]
Sadly, this chap presented to me with a periodontally involved lower central incisor that was so mobile I was surprised that he had not inhaled it.
When I took a radiograph of the mobile tooth, there was no bone whatsoever around any of that tooth’s root, and the incisors on either side also looked to be severely compromised and hopeless.
The sad part about this story is that had this chap come to see me when he first saved the advertisement from the newspaper, we might have had a much better chance of saving his lower incisors.
The reality was, that for whatever reason, [probably FEAR OF DENTISTS], this chap had unknowingly signed the death sentence for these teeth…and that death sentence was unnecessary.
The reason I raise this story is this:
Nowadays, as a coach of dental practices, I hear the same sort of illogical reasoning being put forward by dentists about their dental practices…
These dentists say this:
“I can’t do any coaching now, because I just want to get the right team together. Once I get that team together, then I’ll get them coached.”
Well guess what happens?
One year, two years, three years, or whatever down the track, that dentist still hasn’t gotten the right team together, and the gains the dentist could have made by starting coaching way back when have been lost forever because TIME WAITS FOR NO MAN.
When I see dentists start coaching for their practice firstly, and then engage new team members, these dentists have phenomenal practices because new team members are being onboarded in to ALREADY ESTABLISHED SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES.
Whereas the dentist who waits to get the right team never does end up getting the right team.
And even if he did actually jag the right team, what he’s actually saying to that team is:
“Come and work for me for a month, and then we’re going to change everything we initially teach you.”
It’s just crazy…
The best time to plant an oak tree is….
The best time to plant an oak tree is twenty years ago.
The second-best time to plant an oak tree is today.
Not five years down the track…
It’s the same with coaching.
The best time to begin coaching is today.
It’s the same with investing and investment advice.
The best time to start investing is today, and getting investment advice from a qualified adviser gives you a much better return on your investment than trying to do it all yourself.
Larry Winget used to say that the reason most people are where they are is because they are OK with that place, because if they weren’t OK, they’d change things.
Even though they complain and moan they don’t like where they are, Winget says that they must like it, otherwise they’d have improved it.
Just like the patient I had who saved the newspaper ad… he must have known the tooth was getting looser, and in so allowing the loose tooth to go untreated, he must have known that he should have really been doing something about it…
The unplanted oak tree gives a lot less shade than the planted oak tree….
*****
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.
One of the dumbest things I hear when I phone a practice in 2023 is the dental office answering phone message.
Let me begin by saying this:
I believe that all dental offices should have enough staff available and enough phone lines available to ensure that every caller to a dental office gets a live person answering their call.
Sadly, this doesn’t always happen.
I will phone a dental office in the middle of the morning and hear this:
“Thank you for calling XYZ Dental. We’re either on another call, or we’re busy helping a patient, or you’ve phoned outside of our regular business hours. Our regular business hours are 8:30am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday. And 8:30am to 12:30pm on Saturdays. Please leave us a message, or alternatively, please call back during regular business hours and we will be more than happy to help you.”
This message fails on so many levels:
Firstly, who at the practice assumes that a single recorded message can cover three or four service failures, and recover from those failures, without any collateral damage?
Firstly, the message says:
“Our dental staff are not skilled enough to answer two phone calls at once.”
Secondly, the message says:
“There aren’t enough staff working at this office, to be able to have someone available to answer the phone whenever it rings.”
Thirdly, the message says:
“At this dental practice, our staff don’t reset the answer service at the start and the end of the day, for people calling outside of working hours…we just have a three-in-one message that covers a bit of everything…”
And fourthly, the message says:
“If you do happen to phone our practice after hours, you get told to call our practice back during business hours, despite the fact that when you do phone during business hours, you could still receive this [first listed] message… [that doesn’t mean to offend, but it actually does a lot of damage]”
Here’s what needs to happen:
If you want callers to your dental practice to make appointments, you need to make sure that during business hours, their call is always answered by a real live person, who knows what they are doing, knows what they have been hired to do, and delivers an empathetic [live] message to the caller that solves the caller’s problem and gives the caller real hope of receiving that solution.
Everyone answering the phone at your dental practice should make the caller feel that the person answering has been looking forward to the caller’s call all day, and nothing will ever be a problem.
All recorded messages at a dental practice should only be played on after hours calls, and should provide solutions for the callers.
An answering phone or a message service is not a safety net.
So many times I hear dental practices [and other businesses] using their answering phone or a message service during business hours as a safety net.
And for some really stupid reason, the business owner is of the belief that all missed calls will go through to the answer service and will all leave a message and a number to phone.
When in reality, nearly every person who calls a dental practice and goes through to a service NEVER LEAVES A MESSAGE, and will become a lost lead even, to that business.
If they are a new patient enquiry, these callers just pick up the phone and dial another dental practice.
It’s a sad truth…
Customer service on your dental office phones is so easy.
If you work in a dental practice, you need to know that your practice NEEDS new patients that require restorative dentistry to replace existing patients of the practice who drift across into hygiene maintenance and who rarely need any more restorative treatment.
And so when the phone rings, we want to jump to attention and assist the caller on how to comfortably make an appointment and become a patient at our practice.
And the best way to do that is have every call answered by a live caring person.
And not let incoming phone calls be flick-passed to an answering machine with a long convoluted message trying to make three to four different excuses at the same 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.
There are some dangerous types of people that you need to avoid and keep away from in your life.
These types of people will be dangerous to your business.
And they will be dangerous to your personal life.
Never be tricked into believing that these people are displaying only transient traits of dangerous personality types.
If you witness any of the traits of these personas, you must run.
And run away.
Quickly.
These people never change….
The Narcissist
The narcissist thinks only of the end result, which is a win to them at all costs.
And is often coupled with a defeat to everybody else that they encounter along their way.
And because of their inherent desire to be victorious, the cost of winning for them, in terms of human capital that they destroy along their way, is simply the price they need to pay for their so called “success”.
They don’t care how much their victory costs them.
All they care about is winning by tearing down their competitors…
Martyr Syndrome
Martyr syndrome is often seen where these martyrs jump in and do other people’s tasks that are not being done, but will actually be done.
To the martyr, the delays, or the poor performances of others are things they cannot tolerate. But when the martyr goes about “rectifying” the unnecessary, they always want others to see and witness what they do because they have this inherent need to create some level of heroism for themselves.
Martyrs need to be coached to focus on the big picture, and on solutions, rather than on problems.
Allowing martyrs to continue their martyrdom in your business is a moral destroyer for your business.
The Onboard Terrorist
The onboard terrorist is always nice as pie when others are present and watching them.
But when an opportunity to be destructive to their environment without being caught presents itself to the terrorist, they choose the terrorism option over the option of being well behaved and being good.
Because they are terrorists.
They will always choose to destroy and pillage when they should really be acting in the best interests of their employer’s business.
And then they move on to their next target…
They rarely if ever show concern or empathy for those who stumble into their way.
There you have it…
Well, there you have it, three distinct people characteristics or traits that you really don’t want to be having to deal with.
When you encounter people with these traits, it’s better to remove these people from your circles of movement, rather than attempt to change them.
Trying to change them, or rescuing them, is next to impossible.
Life is too short to tolerate nasty and destructive people….
*****
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.
Week in and week out, I’m calling in to dental offices on their phones.
And you should hear some of the “poor form” that I have to experience.
The good thing for these practices where I hear performances that would make the owners cringe and would make regular patients’ and potential patients’ blood boil, is that I am not a patient or potential patient….
But, just because I am not a potential patient, doesn’t mean that the behaviour that I experience on these dental practice phones is acceptable.
The number of times that I say to myself on one of these calls:
“Imagine if I was a REAL PATIENT experiencing this behaviour?”
is staggering.
In fact, it’s past frightening…. it’s TERRIFYING!
And the poor old dentist owner has no idea that callers to his practice are being treated so poorly.
Because the dentist doesn’t record incoming phone calls.
And the dentist doesn’t employ a skilled coach to work with the team on the behaviours that they hear on these phone calls.
But that’s a whole OTHER matter.
When I receive these “I don’t give a rat’s” receptions on my phone calls to dental practices, I just think to myself, that they are so fortunate that I am not a new patient calling to enquire about veneers, or Invisalign, or implants.
Because the way that these people answering the dental phone behave, if I was thinking about spending any money at all at that office…. once I experienced their rudeness, their apathy, and their indifference, I’d be hanging up immediately and calling another dental practice.
And I’m sure that’s exactly what happens….
And sometimes it’s not the team member’s fault…
Sometimes the team member puts the caller on hold, and the on-hold recorded message says this:
“If you need to make an appointment, please go to our website and use our online booking facility.”
Yes really.
Well, knock me down with a feather.
The reason that patients and new patients have phoned your dental practice in the first place is because they ACTUALLY WANT TO talk to a real live person and discuss their dental concerns.
Otherwise they would have stayed on your website in the first instance and made the online booking.
So having this redundant dumb-arsed message on your on-hold recording is really delivering a virtual insult to those people who call your office who actually want to speak to someone while they discuss their dental concerns.
Thirty-eight percent of calls to a dental practice don’t get answered…
Staggeringly, about two out of every five telephone calls to a dental practice do not even get answered.
Most of those calls get dumped across into a phone answering service, and guess what happens there?
Yes, most of those callers do not leave a message.
Imagine losing 38% of your telephone enquiries, simply because your team don’t know what to do when they need to juggle an incoming phone call?
It’s pathetic really.
So many times I hear of dental offices where team members have no idea of how to manage multiple incoming phone calls…
Or team members have no idea of what to do and say when the phone rings, while they have a real live patient or person in front of them at the dental office.
This is when patients and new patients leak out of the dental practice.
In fact it’s more than leaking.
It’s actually more than bleeding…
It’s when patients and new patients haemorrhage out of a dental practice….
And the dentist owner has no idea because they don’t record incoming phone calls and they don’t have anybody coaching their team on what to do…
[And when I talk about PHONE COACHING, you’re going to want a coach who has actually been a dental front office employee, and done what they coach. What you don’t want is someone who has NEVER answered a dental office phone for a living, or someone who just lectures you on what they think you should be saying, because they heard about it in their wife’s practice or in a client’s practice.]
And if you think that callers to your dental practice are going to leave messages and are going to magically go and book online after being flick passed to your message service, then you probably believe in the tooth fairy too.
The fact is that a significant number of patients leak out of a dental practice due to apathy displayed towards them by the front office staff.
And that apathy begins before the caller has even been greeted initially on their first phone call to the dental practice.
And if you’re not recording, and you’re not listening to recordings or working with a coach who does listen to your recordings, you really are pushing the proverbial up a hill with a stick.
And so when a dentist in your town does start working with a qualified phone coach, that dental office does increase their NP numbers, because callers to that dental office do notice a considerable point of difference.
A point of difference in the way those callers are greeted and treated.
It’s a fairly simple choice.
Remember, you only get one chance to make a great first impression….
Is it time to rethink what your dental practice is doing on your phones?
*****
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.
