The thing about customer service is that when it’s good, it’s good.
And when it’s great, it’s so good…
But when it’s bad, it’s horrid.
Customer service, in reality, is like a bucket full of water.
When the bucket has a hole in it, or multiple holes and leakage points, it doesn’t matter how much you keep filling up the top of the bucket, water will keep leaking away through the holes until those holes are plugged.
Or the bucket is empty…
When the bucket has holes, some people don’t mind paying for more water to continually fill it up.
While others may choose to stop, and plug the leaks, realising that a bucket with no leaks is better than a bucket with uncontrolled leakage.
I couldn’t see the logic…
To me, attracting dental patients to a dental practice and not offering them complete care and follow up was totally illogical.
To me, dental patients with treatment not done, not diagnosed, and not presented to them represented a liability to those patients, while the necessity for that uncompleted treatment needing to be completed crescendoed into something more acute…
And for dental professionals to blatantly turn a blind eye to the leakage of patients with incomplete dental treatment from within their practices… well to me, that’s simply supervised neglect.
Even dental hygiene that is performed incompletely, and is not supervised in the long term, is neglect.
It’s definitely not showing a display of caring customer service.
To me…
To me, the general public out there do not have dental degrees, and so those who choose to go to the dentist do so for advice and care.
And dental practices that allow these people to leak out through the holes in their bucket, or to slip through the cracks in their systems, while they continue to go about attracting and paying for more “new patients”, well, that’s just garbage….
Our role as dental practice owners is to care for those who entrust us with their dental health, and to treat those who do come to us as well as we would treat a dear family member or a dear friend.
With care, and honour, and respect.
Customer service in dentistry is not a numbers game…
*****
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 many ways to increase business income or business sales or business production.
All three terms mean the same thing…
They all mean REVENUE.
Revenue is the money our business needs to have that allows our business to pay the bills, and to pay ourselves as owners, and allows us as owners to invest in our business, and in our future.
Very early on in my journey as a business owner I learned from Jay Abraham that there were three ways for a business to increase revenue.
These three ways were:
Increase the number of customers you have.
You can grow your revenue by selling the same products to more buyers.
Having a larger client base is an easy way to grow your revenue.
Increase your fees or your prices.
When you increase your fees to all clients you immediately increase your revenue with minimal increase in expenses.
Increase the amount of money each customer pays you.
This can be achieved by either:
Selling each customer more things each time they buy from you
Increasing the number of times that each customer transacts with you.
You can increase the number of times that each customer transacts with you by shortening the time interval between visits.
For example, a hairdresser may recommend a client comes every four weeks rather than every six weeks as there is less grey hair regrowth in four weeks and there is less cutting involved every four weeks.
In dentistry…
In dentistry, patients that do not complete treatment that is necessary and diagnosed fall into the category of being a customer who should have had more transactions with our practice.
A lot of dental practices have a considerable number of patients who for whatever reason fail to have necessary diagnosed dental treatment completed.
A recent look at one of our clients’ practices saw that the amount of outstanding treatment that had been diagnosed and presented but not scheduled and completed in the past year, was almost as much as the amount of dentistry done on patients during that same period of time.
Statistically, what this meant was that this dental office was only finishing just over half of the dentistry it had diagnosed.
What this means is…
What this means is that if this office had been able to do half of that uncompleted dentistry, there was another six months’ worth of dentistry that could have been done, and that should have been done, but was not done.
And because all of that dentistry was not completed, this dental office needed to advertise and market and attract six months’ worth of patients just to substitute into their schedule for half of those patients that really should have been in there in the first place…
And if 100% of all of that dentistry had been completed, this dental office would not have needed to advertise and market and attract a whole years’ worth of patients to substitute into their schedule for each those patients that really should have been in there…
That’s a lot of additional unnecessary marketing [money, time, and effort] needing to be done.
And having more patients completing their diagnosed and necessary dental treatment is also a WIN for those patients, as it reduces their liability and risk of having something blow up inside their mouth at an inconvenient time…
Having members of the dental team learning and mastering better case presentation skills would have been more responsible than ignoring the fact that treatment was not being accepted, and would have been easier to do than all of that marketing, with all of that extra money, time, and effort spent…
Ask me about learning better case presentation skills. Email me: david.moffet@theUPE.com and put “WIN” in the subject line.
*****
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 large number of dental offices are moving away from manually contacting their existing patients when it is time for those patients to attend for their hygiene maintenance and review appointments.
These practices are moving towards a more automated electronic approach of contacting their valued patients.
And I get that thought.
If you’ve got a large practice, it can take a lot of time to phone your patients and make contact with them, and see whether they have any issues with the appointment time they had previously booked when they were last in your practice.
The trouble with automation is…
The trouble with automation is that most of the time, it reeks of automation.
And automation reeks of a reduction in caring.
On the flip side, manually making contact with patients usually indicates a greater commitment to the relationship than simply pressing a button and using an electronic alternative.
In the olden days…
In the olden days there was a thing called a “Dear John” letter.
When a girl wanted to break up with her boyfriend, the most impersonal thing she could do was send him a “Dear John” letter:
“Dear John. I don’t think it’s working out anymore, and I think we should stop seeing each other. It’s not you, its me. Don’t try to contact me. It’s for the best. Signed: Your now ex-girlfriend.”
About as impersonal as you can get…
Often when I receive automated SMS messages, they read just as impersonally as a “Dear John” letter….
Dentistry is a grudge buy….
Ask anybody out there how they would like to spend a spare hour of their time, and going to the dentist would not appear in the top five things they’d like to do.
Nobody likes going to the dentist.
Just like buying new tyres, going to the dentist is a “grudge buy”.
And reducing contact with your valued existing patients to a sequence of automated emails and SMSs is not the best way to build solid long-term relationships.
This is because…
The number one reason that existing patients leave their dentist and go find a new dentist is because of apathy, or perceived apathy shown towards them by their existing dental office and its team members.
Nobody ever likes feeling as if they are being taken for granted, or worse still, being ignored.
But when your patients do feel like they are being taken for granted, they will leave, and take their patronage elsewhere.
And that’s never a nice feeling for anyone.
And it’s never a great result.
And it is so preventable….
So when it comes to…
So when it comes to contacting your existing patients about their upcoming hygiene and maintenance appointments, the best thing to do is employ a combination of SMS, email, and phone contact messages, just so that your patients do really know and remember that your office does care, and that your office is always there for them, and that their dentist and their hygienist are really looking forward to seeing them….
The more personable you are, and the more personable your means of contact are, the stronger your relationships will be with your patients.
And the less likely they will be to feel taken 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.
At the beginning of October last month, my family and I attended the Grand Final match of the NRL [National Rugby League (of Australia)] season.
The game was a played between the Penrith Panthers and the Brisbane Broncos. These two teams finished first and second during the regular season and were the best two teams of the seventeen teams that competed throughout this season.
The Penrith Panthers, the team that finished first, were also the season Premiers for 2021 and 2022, and were chasing a third straight Premiership title. This was a feat not seen in the NRL for some forty years, and a feat made very difficult to achieve because of salary-cap restrictions [spending restrictions] placed on each team in an effort to help spread the talent [of players] more evenly throughout the competition.
The team that the Panthers were to play was the Brisbane Broncos, who had finished equal first, but second on points differentials. The Broncos had been a very successful team some twenty and thirty years ago but had not won a premiership now for sixteen years.
The Broncos team was very talented, and the game was expected to be a cracker of a contest.
And it was.
After leading the Broncos 8-6 at half-time, the Panthers fell behind 24-8 during the second half, but with 18 minutes to play they turned on the afterburners to win the match 26-24.
This was the biggest comeback ever seen in the history of Rugby League Grand Finals.
The result left all spectators, commentators and journalists amazed at what they had just witnessed.
With eighteen minutes to play, nobody in the ground believed that the tide could turn against the Broncos who had taken the half-time score from 6-8 to 24-8.
At 24-8, the whole crowd believed that the Broncos would just go on with the slaughter of the Panthers and show no mercy.
Everybody in the ground believed that at that point, with eighteen minutes to go, it was “game over” for the Panthers.
Things did not look good for the Panthers…
The trouble was, nobody told the Panthers players that the game over script had been written for them…
For those at the ground… and those watching on TV…
For those at the ground, and for those fans watching on TV, the game seemed to have slipped from the Panthers’ grasp, and a win seemed unachievable.
The Panthers looked like they were out of gas.
Even the Panthers’ die-hard fans were wondering what was going on?
But the Panthers players dug deep.
And in that moment of soul searching, the thing that the Panthers players knew, was that the Panthers were the best team all season, they were always the team to beat, all season, and that they were deserving of the [rare] chance that stood before them of winning three Premierships in a row…
And, and, they knew that there was still time to turn the scoreboard around in their favour…
Because they were the Penrith Panthers.
And they had come to show the people of the world what was right, and what those people knew all along….
That when the chips are down, a champion team will always rise to the occasion to take what is rightfully theirs, and to stand tall, and stand victorious….
Because they deserved the reward for effort.
Because they were indeed the best team in the NRL.
And they deserved their rightful recognition, as the greatest NRL team of the modern day era.
Nobody should ever bet against a true champion…
In business…
In business, there will always be a number one.
The best business in town.
The best business in the area, of its type….
And there will always be those other businesses who will want to take that title from them, but without justification or back up or runs on the board.
To be number one, you’ve got to be the best.
Calling yourself the best, without the credentials, is simply lip service.
In business, are you truly number one?
Based on performance, is your business number one really?
Or are you just pretending…..
*****
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 things I hear often when I listen to and analyse phone calls is the LIES that people say on the phone, as if the act of telling lies is somehow OK or acceptable…..
I hear people say:
“I’ll get him to call you back.”
when we know full well, that the person they are talking about has NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER of ever returning the phone call…
I hear patients say to dentists:
“I need to think it over…”
when they are presented with a complicated treatment schedule to restore their mouth back to true health.
And we know full well that when that patient leaves that dental office, they’ll be cheering for themselves “on the inside” because they will feel as though they’ve dodged a bullet and avoided getting booked in for what they [the patient] believes to be painful treatment.
When we all know that having the dental treatment completed is in that patient’s best interests…. their mouth will be healthier and they will also look more attractive.
And of course, we all know that when the patient says they “need to think it over” they have no intention of spending even one minute thinking ANYTHING AT ALL over whatsoever…
I wish I’d been given a dollar for every time I’ve heard a phone call where a patient has phoned a dental practice to cancel an appointment for treatment, or they’ve phoned to postpone a scheduled appointment for necessary treatment, and the dental receptionist has said:
“That’s OK.”
How in heck is it ever OK for patients to cancel an appointment for necessary dental treatment?
How is it OK for patients to delay needed treatment and allow caries to advance closer to the nerve of their tooth, or let periodontal infections permanently destroy healthy necessary alveolar bone…
When a patient fails to go ahead with treatment…
When a patient fails to go ahead with diagnosed treatment as presented, it is because we as health care professionals have failed to educate them about the downsides of their choice of inaction…
When a patient says they want to think it over and we let them, it is our failure to emphasise the importance of taking action over inactivity, and it is OUR FAILURE in helping them understand that inactivity is not a status quo, but rather, is an active state of continuing destruction and damage.
When we allow someone to give us the flick pass of passing on our message and supposedly asking someone to phone us back, when we know they never will, we have let that person down, because we have failed to emphasise the importance of our intended conversation…
I’ve had many a friend chastise me over the years for failing to chase them down and share important messages with them. Yet it was those same friends who for whatever reason decided to not return my call and investigate the reason for me calling them in the first place…
I know it’s their loss, but on the flip side, maybe I should have been more passionate about informing them about the benefits of my advice….
The trouble is…
The trouble is that a lot of people out there would rather slide under the water into a swamp of their own mediocrity, and accept average as the new excellent…
The problem is that lying about “average” doesn’t cut it and won’t cut it in 2024, moving forwards.
Society needs to take responsibility for the levels of acceptance and tolerance that we now all have to endure.
Do not allow unacceptable behaviours to become the new black.
*****
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.
At the start of last month, my family and I attended the Grand Final match of the NRL [National Rugby League (of Australia)] season.
The game was a hard fought game played between the Penrith Panthers and the Brisbane Broncos. These two teams finished first and second during the regular season and were the best two teams of the seventeen teams that competed throughout this season.
The Penrith Panthers, the that finished first, were also the season Premiers for 2021 and 2022, and were chasing a third straight Premiership title. This was a feat not seen for forty years, and a feat made very difficult to achieve because of salary-cap restrictions [spending restrictions] placed on each team in an effort to help spread the talent [of players] more evenly throughout the competition.
The team that the Panthers were to play was the Brisbane Broncos, who had finished equal first, but second on points differentials. The Broncos had been a very successful team twenty and thirty years ago, but had not won a premiership for some sixteen years.
The Broncos team was very talented, and the game was expected to be a cracker of a contest.
And it was.
After leading the Broncos 8-6 at half-time, the Panthers came back from a deficit of 24-8 with 18 minutes to play to win the match 26-24 in the final three minutes.
This was the biggest comeback ever seen in the history of Rugby League Grand Finals.
The result left all spectators, commentators and journalists wondering what exactly they had just witnessed.
With eighteen minutes to play, nobody in the ground believed that in a game of this intensity, the tide could turn against the Broncos who had taken the half-time score from 6-8 to 24-8.
At 24-8, the whole crowd believed that the Broncos would just go on with the slaughter of the Panthers and show no mercy.
Everybody in the ground believed that at that point, with eighteen minutes to go, it was “game over” for the Panthers.
Especially because at eighteen minutes to go, three key Panthers players were off the field… their star playmaker Jarome Luai had succumbed to severe pain of playing with a previously dislocated shoulder that required immediate surgery [which he had chosen to delay] ….and two star forwards were off the field for concussion assessments.
Things did not look good for the Panthers…
The trouble was, nobody told the Panthers players that the game over script had been written for them…
Here’s what happened…
With eighteen minutes to play, the Broncos changed their game plan and
Instead of continuing on with the plays that had stunned the Panthers players, the Broncos started to chance their arms. Instead of tightening things up and playing like a team in control of the ball with a sixteen point lead to protect, they started playing like a team that was sixteen points behind.
They gave control of the ball back to the Panthers for the majority of the last eighteen minutes.
Because of the Panthers’ high completion rate during the first half, the Broncos had needed to defend more than the Panthers, and so as the final eighteen minutes approached, the Broncos’ stamina began to be tested, and tested heavily.
They made rash decisions, with the boot, and with the ball.
And their defence tired, and was stretched, by the relentless Panthers.
And the Panthers wore the Broncos down.
In the wash up…
Statistics will show you that the Broncos took the lead in the Grand Final at the 44th minute, and extended that lead again at the 52nd minute and also at the 54th minute.
And then, for some reason, at around the 59th minute, the Broncos started to toss the ball around, and the Panthers seized their opportunity.
When the Panthers scored in the 62nd minute to reduce the Broncos lead to ten points, not many people in the ground believed that the Panthers could still score twice more, to regain the lead.
But history will show that they did.
There’s a reason they put the winning post for a horse race at the end of the straight…
There’s a reason they put the winning post for a horse race at the end of the straight, and not at the start of the straight.
And that’s because the final run down the straight is where the true champions are made.
It’s the same in track and field running.
Everybody knows where the finish line is.
And it’s up to every horse, and every athlete to do everything in their power to get to the finish line before their competitors.
In the NRL Grand Final, the finish line, the end of the game, is at the eighty minute mark.
It’s not at the sixty minute mark.
It’s not at the seventy minute mark.
It’s at the eighty minute mark.
And the team leading at the eightieth minute is crowned the winner.
In 1986…
In 1986, Australian golfer Greg Norman led all four majors after three rounds.
In all but one, the British Open, he was beaten on the final day and finished runner-up.
[The four Majors are the four most significant golf tournaments played each calendar year. A golf tournament is played over four rounds, and the winner is the golfer who has had the least number of strokes after four rounds. Not three rounds].
In your dental practice…
Are you and your team delivering one hundred percent consistently across the entire week?
Or are there members of your team who have that “Thank God Its Friday” attitude?
Are there members of your team who celebrate Wednesday as “Hump Day”, and coast the last three days to the weekend?
Is it fair to disappoint your patients who have a Friday afternoon appointment, but they don’t receive the same attention as those patients who attend your practice earlier in the week?
The quality of the care and the service that your office delivers to your patients should not be affected by the time of day, nor by the day of the week that it is delivered.
It’s up to you and your team to always deliver above and beyond consistency of performance.
That’s what truly determines and defines a champion team…
*****
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.
You can order your copy here:Â 
