Many years ago a friend of mine was visiting Melbourne, where she saw a line of people waiting outside the Louis Vuitton store in Collins Street.
Intrigued, my friend phoned the store to enquire about the line, and to ask as to as to whether Louis Vuitton was having a sale?
The person from Louis Vuitton who took my friend’s call said this:
“Madam. Louis Vuitton doesn’t have sales.”
You see…
You see, the brand, the label Louis Vuitton is so in demand, is so sought after, that Louis Vuitton doesn’t need to have sales of any sort to help move their bags, and their apparel.
The stuff sells itself, and Louis Vuitton doesn’t need to be running a price-reduced or discount sale to try to beat up some extra business.
The merchandise is always great quality, and is sold in very limited amounts adding to its exclusive demand.
And visiting a Louis Vuitton store is an experience.
Louis is what Louis is.
And that’s about being sort after, and having a sort after product in the marketplace.
Your business…
Is your business that good that you can be like Louis Vuitton and set your own prices?
Can your business be competitive in the marketplace without having to have sales, or give discounts, to attract and keep customers?
Sometimes vendors are fearful that their prices are too high, and that they need to keep their prices low.
The price of goods and services in the market place is often related to the perception of the vendor, despite the fact that there are consumers who already believe that the good or service represents fair value.
There will always be people who would never buy from Louis Vuitton, because the price they need to pay to own a Louis Vuitton bag is way more than they believe any bag is worth.
And at the other end of the spectrum, there are consumers who collect multiple bags and apparel from Louis Vuitton and other luxury labels.
And in the middle, there are people who aspire to own a luxury brand bag.
And there are people who have one luxury brand bag, and it is their pride and joy.
And it makes them feel good, just owning it.
Is your business one of those businesses where your customers come to, knowing that the service and the experience and the goods that they receive are worth paying extra for?
And these customers do that, knowing that the peace of mind they gain, from doing business with you, is worth it?
Are the goods and services provided by your business strong enough to be traded without price dependence?
Is your business strong enough to be able to set its prices on cost and value, rather than on what the competition are charging?
*****
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 many things I did in my practice to increase customer retention and create a point of difference was to employ someone at the practice into the role of concierge.
Or really a role titled: HEAD SCHMOOZER.
The role of concierge was one that I knew was needed at my practice and is a role that is really needed at every dental practice..
But 99.9% of dental practices do not see the value of paying someone to schmooze.
And yet the money invested in paying a schmoozer is returned back to the dental practice in spades… if only dental practice owners could see past their own noses and blinkers to see the value.
Why does a dental practice need a concierge?
Most dental patients are greeted on arrival by a dental receptionist with the standard arrival greeting… and that greeting is [blandly]:
“Won’t be too long. Just take a seat.”
And then the arriving patient is parked.
And I didn’t realize how prolific this bland greeting was until I was at my hairdresser’s and I heard him greet an arriving client to his business with that exact same greeting, word for word, while still cutting my hair.
He said:
“Won’t be too long. Just take a seat.”
And they did.
But the language, and the phraseology used, is so dismissive of the arriving client.
The language shows no care.
It shows no concern.
It just tells them to sit themselves down and don’t move until they are called.
And I thought, and I knew, that there had to be something better to say than this.
And that’s because saying:
“Won’t be too long. Just take a seat”
is really a poor display by your business, showing that your business can’t even be bothered to come up with something more original, more connected, and more respectful of our arriving practice guest, and the day that this patient has had, and the effort that they have made to get to your dental practice on time….
I know that….
I know that if I were the patient, and if I’d been busy dropping everything that I’d been doing at work, and raced across town and through traffic and through school zones to be there on time for my dental appointment, and I was greeted with a thoughtless vanilla reception greeting [or lack of thought greeting] like:
“Won’t be too long. Just take a seat.”
and without a “welcome”, or a “thank you” in sight, I’d be pretty well ropable because to me it would feel as though I was being taken for granted, big time.
Every patient’s arrival should be celebrated. And not brushed aside as a “norm”.
Because at the dentist, everyone who is arriving has some degree of trepidation, no matter how small that trepidation is, and how big [or small] that person is.
Most importantly, a good concierge does more than greet patients.
A good concierge entertains patients who previously used to wait in the room that is for waiting, but is not a waiting room, and who previously were purposefully ignored by front office staff hiding behind oversized computer monitors hidden by upstand front desks repurposed from a bygone era….
A good concierge prevents an upbeat patient from falling into the chasm of mental despair while they wait unattended for a morsel of attention, before being called…
You see….
When you improve the way that you greet patients, and when you up your team’s attention to exactly what they are and are not doing, you’ll wonder why it took you so long to see the light…
The results that a great concierge and the incorporation of great concierge-style language and behaviour will bring to your dental practice are positively game changing.
*****
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.
We need to realise that there are numbers and there are lessons.
And usually the numbers are the lessons.
I learnt at a very early age that in life, the statistical fact that when people reach the age of 65, only 1% are truly wealthy, and 4% are well off.
What that means is that 95% of people reaching the age of 65 are either dead, or broke, or financially dependent on others.
That’s a terrible result for most people after a lifetime of work.
In another statistic, interestingly, when looking at the population, only 3% have made written plans and goals for their future.
Do you think there’s a correlation between these two sets of statistics?
Some people like to tell you what they’ll do when they win the lottery…
Have you ever heard someone say they’ll do something when they win the lottery?
Would it surprise you that a large percentage of people who want to win the lottery don’t even buy a lottery ticket?
I’d reckon that it would be 100% certain that it will be impossible for these people to ever win a lottery if they don’t buy a ticket.
One of my mentors Jim Rohn said this:
“All of the books that we will ever need to make us as rich, as healthy, as happy, as powerful, as sophisticated and as successful as we want to be, have already been written.
All of the insights that we might ever need have already been captured by others in books.
The important question is this: In the last ninety days, with this treasure of information that could change our lives, our fortunes, our relationships, our health, our children and our careers for the better, how many books have we read?”
For me, the interesting thing about a book is that it is available information, but it’s not the same as receiving tuition, and coaching.
I can buy a book about golf written by Tiger Woods, and I can read it, but if I had lessons from Tiger Woods, or any golf professional, that looked at how I was hitting the golf ball, and gave me advice and tuition about WHAT THEY SEE I COULD DO BETTER, then my golf game would definitely be better because of the tuition and the 1:1 accountability created, than it would be from me reading a book.
If self-help books worked, then we wouldn’t need self-help books, because by definition, we could work out the answers by ourselves.
Years ago…
Years ago I asked the guy who mowed my next door neighbour’s lawn how much it would cost for me to have him mow my front lawn while I was away overseas? [I was mowing my own lawn at that time]
He told me it would cost me $20 each time for him to do that.
And I then immediately asked him how much would it cost for me to have him mow my front lawn while I was at home?
You see, for $20 a time, I was able to secure the services of a professional person who knew what he was doing and who was able to do a great job for me in a quicker time than I could, while I could be doing something else…
A professional coach sees things from above and outside of your own little silo, and brings that breadth of knowledge and experience to the table in bite sized consumable pieces designed for you to achieve maximum sustainable growth.
Sure, you can buy a full set of Brian Tracy books and delve through them at your own pace…and see how far you get doing trial and error along the way..… or you can use a coach to help you and prevent you from making those mistakes in the first place…
A coach will give you:
A coach will give you:
A proven game plan that works, and has worked for others
A realistic time frame for achieving your goals
Much needed accountability to keep you on the road to success and prevent you from deviation and distraction
95% of people will choose not to have a coach:
They will choose:
1- No coach. Work it out for themselves
The trial and error method is long, and extensive, and usually expensive when you add up the costs of the errors and the costs of the wasted time…
2- Ask their friends.
See results for “No coach” above
3- Read books and google:
Results in confusion. And results are expensive. Because of time wasted.
Statistics will tell you…
You’ll probably find that the 95% of business owners who don’t choose to work with a coach pretty well matches up with the 95% of the population who end up dead, or dead broke, by age 65…
As Mike Michalowicz says:
“You don’t want to be that guy who one day ends up in a rusty old garden chair regretting a life of toil…”
Where we sit today is a direct result of the actions and commitments we have made over the past five years.
Where you sit in five years time will be a direct result of the actions and commitments you make in the next five years.
*****
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 few years ago I wrote about rude abrasive “service” that I received from a shop that I had done business with for many years. [and I use the word “service” here very loosely]
As a result of that incident of rude service, I decided to take my business elsewhere. This was despite the fact that going elsewhere was going to be less convenient for me. I just couldn’t continue to patronise a business that went out of its way to be disagreeable.
Sadly, this weekend, another display of complete arrogant disagreeability presented itself to me.
Let me frame this up.
Over the past five years, Jayne and I have needed to move home a couple of times.
In 2018, we decided to sell our family home in Sydney and relocate to our smaller country home. This involved moving contents from the Sydney home to a number of different locations.
Firstly, some contents from Sydney was moved into storage in Sydney as we prepared the Sydney home for sale.
Other contents from Sydney needed to be moved to our country home following the sale of Sydney, and some contents was moved to an apartment in Sydney where my children decided to relocate to.
Lastly, some of the contents from Sydney needed to be stored in storage in the country for dissemination into our country home, and rationalisation, at a later date.
Moving can be complicated.
Fortunately, during all of this selling and moving, we’ve had great service and relationships with the people of Kennards Storage in Pymble and in Mittagong, where we’ve hired storage space and we’ve purchased storage boxes.
Once we settled into our country home on a full-time basis, we decided that some renovation work to the home was required to make the home truly comfortable for our work-from-home needs.
So again, while we lived “offsite” during building and renovation works, storing things became a priority. More storage boxes were needed.
The cost of storage boxes can mount up.
One of the good things about storage boxes is that the removalists, and Kennards do offer to buy back storage boxes and recycle them. These repurposed boxes are made available for purchase to other movers looking for the recycled boxes as a way of saving on packaging.
Anyway, finally, over the last two weeks, after months of unpacking and settling in, I have finally gotten around to returning the accumulating used storage boxes that were in good condition. And of course, collecting my repayment for their return.
The reason it took me a couple of weeks to return these boxes was because there were so many of them…. there was more than one ute-load of boxes to return.
I felt like a child again… it reminded me of what it was like when I was a schoolboy collecting drink bottles and returning them to the local milk-bar for the 5c refund…
Anyhow….
Last week, when I rang the Kennards Self Storage at Mittagong about returning boxes to them, they directed me to their Moss Vale facility, which was conveniently located closer to my home.
The first drop off and refund payment was uneventful. The man who handled my returns did so professionally and we spent time in pleasant conversation.
There was only one small hiccup… my refund due was an amount larger than the outlet’s EFTPOS terminal would allow, and needed to be split into two lesser amounts to be finalised.
No big deal.
The total amount paid to me was smaller than I’d imagined, and I remarked to the nice man working there that rather than returning the remainder of my boxes next week, I might consider burning them as a more rewarding and better use of my time.
He was alarmed, and suggested that this might not be the “greenest” solution to their repurposing…
So here’s what happened with the second load of boxes that needed to be returned..
When I arrived at Kennards Moss Vale this weekend with the second load of boxes, the man working there seemed to be in a very unhappy mood.
Firstly, when I told him I had some boxes to return, he grumbled that he didn’t have the room to accept them, and then grumbled begrudgingly, that he would take them.
It was almost as if he had been pre-warned and was pre-judging me… he asked me how many more loads of boxes did I have?
I wasn’t sure about him.. I was confused…and I asked him whether he was the person who I had dealt with on my previous visit, because he certainly seemed to know [in advance] who I was….
When he came out to help me unload the boxes from my ute, he complained that the boxes were “all mixed up” when in fact only one box was out of place with the respect to the others.
He brought some of my boxes inside the store. Last week the nice chap who had attended to me, and I, had sorted all the boxes outside of the store… so I asked the grumpy chap whether he wanted me to bring my boxes inside or leave them outside?
Mr Grumpy replied curtly that if we left them outside then they would not be able to be accepted as they would have been “outside boxes” and they needed to be kept as “inside boxes”, or something along those lines….
Lastly, as I unpacked the 5 porta-robe boxes that I had brought back, Mr Grumpy refused to accept three of them as they were not Kennard boxes. This was despite the fact that a sign to the contrary was prominently displayed inside his store.
When I pointed this out to Mr Grumpy, that his sign inside his store said that they did accept competitors’ boxes, he said that the sign should have been taken down six weeks ago, but it hadn’t, and that this was now their new policy..
Mr Grumpy told me begrudgingly that he would only accept the three non-Kennard porta-robes, but he would have to charge me a dumping fee.
I told him that I would take the three porta-robes with me. Begrudgingly, Mr Grumpy carried the porta-robes outside and leant them against my ute.
After my refund had been processed, I told Mr Grumpy that in my business, I advise my clients that if an offer is still displayed on their website, and a customer calls about that offer, then my client needs to honour that offer, even if the offer has expired…. and if they don’t want to have to keep honouring the offer then they need to remove it from display.
When he told me that this was “now their policy” regarding the non-acceptance of competitors’ boxes, I told him politely that policies were things used by governments, and the military, but in business, the reference to “our policies” were invalid and inappropriate in the world of customer service.
I told him there was no winner when a business makes excuses about its own incomplete processes.
I told him that based on the number of boxes I’d returned, that he should have been able to profile me in his data base and seen that I was a very loyal and long-term Kennards client. Over decades.
Through his behaviours and his opinionated arrogance this day, Mr Grumpy had wiped the slate clean of all respect and loyalty that I had built up with Kennards over the many years that I had used their services.
Now, I don’t know whether Mr Grumpy was an employee at Moss Vale Kennards, or whether he was actually the franchise location owner, but through his actions and behaviours this weekend, I’ll never be sending any business to him at that location or any other location he is ever associated with.
Because his behaviour was so judgemental, and so inappropriate. And without reason….
One of the things that every employee and every business owner needs to know is that when the curtain comes up for “Show Time”, the customers and the audience are paying for 100% effort, without backstory, and without opinion.
*****
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.
Many years ago, while I was running my own dental practice, my receptionist came to me to tell me that patients were complaining that my fees were high.
Which confused me, because, at that time, our nation was still dealing with the post Hawke/Keating government aftermath, where that government had allowed double digit inflation to run continually like a runaway train, year in and year out, for many years.
And while our economy was running amuck, small businesses like mine were meant to behave “responsibly” to help that government with its feeble attempt to try and rein the economy in.
Sadly for Hawke and Keating, that plan wasn’t working, and finally the Australian people woke up to them and voted them out.
Enough was enough.
Anyway, when my receptionist [let’s call her Annette] came to me and told me that patients were complaining that my fees were high, I was horrified, because I’d not raised my fees for over two years, and in my mind, I was due to raise them.
In fact, I was overdue to be raising my fees.
And that’s because, during periods of high inflation, when a business fails to raise its fees and prices to at least the same amount as the Consumer Price Index [CPI] cost of living, then that business is effectively giving itself a pay decrease by the difference between the CPI and whatever they choose to increase their fees by.
So what was I to do?
I thought long and hard about this.
How could this be?
How could patients be complaining that my fees were high, when in reality, my fees were in need of an increase just in order to catch up with the high inflation rate and the high cost of living?
What should I do?
Should I reduce my fees?
Or should I continue on and delay given my fees their much overdue rise?
Here’s what I decided to do…
Here’s what I thought:
If patients thought my fees were high, and I thought my fees were low, and I hadn’t put my fees up for over two years, then what I actually really needed to go and do was to PUT MY FEES UP BY AN AMOUNT THAT THEY WERE OVERDUE TO GO UP BY, and see how the patients responded, and should have responded, to that needed increase.
And so that’s what I did.
In 1997 I raised my fees by 10% across the board… and guess how many patients objected to that?
Not a one.
Zero.
Nil.
Nicks.
Nought….
Nobody…..
Nobody complained.
In fact, nobody at all complained that my fees were high, particularly and specifically after I had raised those fees just then because a fee increase was overdue.
Sadly…
Sadly, Annette had looked at the situation about the fees in terms of her “present” being her reality, when in fact the situation was only HER PERCEPTION of a false reality, created by her not looking at the situation openly and objectively.
In reality…
In reality, we went on to put the practice fees up 8% every year for the next three years. And then as the new government took control of the economy, and the CPI began to fall, we then chose to only raise our fees by 6% annually for the subsequent three years.
Following that time, we then decided to increase our restorative fees by 3% every six months for two years.
The decision to know the market, and to follow the data rather than follow “feelings and emotions”, was probably one of the most critical business decisions I ever made…
*****
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.
