Yesterday Jayne and I were driving home from Sydney when we had a “choice” of route to take…
The reason we had a choice was because this time, unlike other times, we’d been to Sydney on a weekday for a specific event. This was very different for us because on the rare occasions we do drive up to Sydney, it’s usually on a weekend day and not on a weekday.
And on this particular weekday, we had chosen to return home during daylight hours rather than after sunset. And this decision in itself presented us with a couple of obstacles to negotiate.
The first obstacle was that we wanted to avoid passing through school zones when traffic must obey school zone speed limits.
The second obstacle was because we were travelling in the early afternoon, we also had roadworks to contend with.
So here’s what happened:
Heavy rainfall that our local area received last year had resulted in serious pothole damage to a number of roads. As a result, a couple of arterial country roads were still being repaired.
In fact, part of one major arterial road had been closed for a reasonable amount of time while road repairs were being carried out.
So yesterday, when we chose to join this road at an access point that last week was operational, we found that the road was closed in both directions and we were unable to join the road.
This left us with two choices.
We could either return to the town where we had come from along the road we had travelled, or we could take the crossroad that had been restricted to local traffic only for quite some time due to pothole damage, and had been undergoing pothole reparation and maintenance.
We chose the latter…
I decided to chance the crossroad, figuring that the repairs along there would have been long finished by now…
I should have known better…
About three miles down this road, we encountered traffic controllers in action.
Road barriers. Traffic cones. And a lady in high vis.
I asked her politely, in a joking manner, if there was any way she would allow us to drive through the roadworks zone.
With a smile on her face she said there was no way.
She said that the only people allowed to drive through were people who were residents along the road.
She explained that if she let me through, she would also have to let the two cars behind me through as well. [These two cars had followed me along this road as I drove past a “Road Closed” sign.]
I told her that I wouldn’t tell the drivers behind that I was not a resident.
She told me “No” again.
And then she said this:
She told us that today drivers had sworn at her, and that one driver had even told her to “go and kill herself”.
Can you believe that?
And all this lady was doing was she was doing the job she’d been employed to do.
That was all.
It’s pretty embarrassing to believe that someone doing their job can be abused and harassed by another member of the human race, simply because they are doing their job.
It makes you wonder…
Are people out there really so insensitive and that abusive that they would swear at a total stranger and suggest self-harm?
As the lady said to us, this week she was dealing with the fact that on a personal level she was going to be attending two funerals.
And it got me thinking… we never know what sort of stuff is going on behind the scenes in the heads of the people we encounter each day…
Everybody has their own story, and their own backstory, and you can’t imagine what some of those stories are doing to the minds that they are occupying?
So before you speak, maybe, you should hold that thought, and wait for the second thought.
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.
Last week I had the opportunity of phoning some dental offices.
I decided to phone these practices in a time period between 9:00am and 10:15am on a weekday.
During this time I phoned twenty-three practices.
Of those twenty-three practices, six of the practices failed to answer their phone, and my call went through to an answering service, that asked me to leave a message.
I decided not to leave a message.
I wanted to see whether someone from these dental practices would call me back. All good businesses should be able to know or find out the phone number of everyone who has phoned to their office…
That’s a whopping 26% of calls to dental practices that were not answered.
Of those 6 calls that went unanswered, only two of those dental practices decided to ring me back to see why I rang.
Which means that for 67% of those missed calls where I did not leave a return message, those practices had no actionable plan in place to follow up the missed call.
I could have been a new patient enquiry… the practice decided not to bother to phone me back to see why I called.
That’s an opportunity lost right there… a BIG OPPORTUNITY lost.
Should those practices have looked up their missed call register and rung me back to see why I called their office?
Or should those practices just simply have left my missed call as being just that, and that the caller would phone back when they’re ready to?
What does this mean?
Nobody EVER calls a dental office for the fun of it.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks:
“I’ve got a couple of hours to kill this morning… I think I’ll go to the dentist and see what I can get done?
And similarly, nobody ever wakes up in the morning and says:
“I’ve got a few hundred dollars just sitting there burning a hole in my wallet… I think I’ll phone the dentist and see what I can buy with it.”
Do they?
Of course they don’t ever…
You see, one thing is for sure and certain:
There is only one reason why people phone a dental office…
People phone a dental office because they have a dental problem, and they want the dentist to fix their problem.
And people who don’t have a dental problem will never spend their valuable time phoning dental practices just for the fun of it.
Nobody phones a dental practice because they have a spare thirty minutes to kill….
Everybody who phones a dental practice has a problem, that they want fixed….
And if they didn’t have a problem, they’d definitely be finding something else to do…. [for sure and certain].
The trouble is…
The trouble is that sometimes the people put in charge of answering our dental office phones fail to remember that they are in the PROBLEM SOLVING BUSINESS.
Instead, these employees think that their role is to assist patients to make appointments when those patients FEEL LIKE IT.
These employees also feel it is OK to allow patients to choose inactivity when these patients need to be making appointments for actual treatment.
And some of these employees even believe that it is OK to allow the caller to believe that avoiding treatment is totally acceptable…
We know that displaying acceptance to these patients for their random acts of inactivity is really and truly UNACCEPTABLE.
Dental treatment is important
Dental treatment is important and it is inappropriate for patients to “leave it” and do it later.
The mouth is a hostile environment.
Yet patients often believe that dentistry inside the mouth is not changing or deteriorating.
These patients believe that delaying dental treatment is like putting back the act of cleaning up the garage. These patients believe that what happens inside the mouth is static and will not worsen, when in actual fact the mouth is an active and hostile environment where things that go untreated do tend to deteriorate quite quickly.
Inaction is in reality an action of neglect.
Inaction is an unacceptable treatment plan, and allowing and accepting inaction is a definite failure to act in the best interests of the patient.
When our dental patient fails to schedule and complete any diagnosed treatment, we have let them down, because we have failed to create a compelling enough reason for them to return and complete their necessary treatment.
When we truly understand that dental pathology does not auto-correct and fix itself, and that as physicians we need to be guiding our patients into complete total care, then and only then can we truly say that we are doing the job we are meant to be doing.
Allowing patients to delay treatment is really overseeing a process of supervised neglect.
*****
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.
When you’re in the business of customer service, every minute of every working day needs to be SHOWTIME.
[isn’t every business in the business of Customer Service?]
You cannot drop your guard.
You need to be ready at every moment for every possible interaction with customers that could happen at any time in your business.
Because if you’re not ready, and you should have been ready, being ready would have helped your business achieve something.
Clearly, being ready and being prepared for that moment IS KING.
My colleague Dr Robert Pick, says at his dental practice, it’s always SHOWTIME.
What he means is that we must always be leading with excellence, with our best effort.
Always.
At all times.
A coach I had a long time ago said that at our dental practice, there must never be a “backstage” area.
What he meant was that in business, every aspect of our business needs to be on show.
And at its best. Always.
Displaying excellence. Always.
And not just for some of the time.
Because part time customer service, on its own, is very hit and miss.
When your business provides only part time excellence, what that means is that your business is choosing not to be its best for part of the time.
And doing that can be very costly for your business.
When team members choose to not be at their best 100% of the time, what they are subliminally doing is sending a message to customers that average behaviour can be considered OK some of the time.
And clearly, it’s not OK to be OK.
OK is average.
And more than ever, our customers and patients are screaming out for above average levels of service.
*****
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, 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.
