Don’t Allow Complacency To Steal Away Your Hard-Earned…

Economic swings and roundabouts can cause and create some amazing feelings.

And can also create some amazing lessons.

During difficult times, we tend to “tighten our belts” and become more frugal, trying to squeeze every last piece of value out of every penny that we have to spend.

And that’s a very good habit to get into, and one worth maintaining during “sweeter” economic times.

But during those sweeter times, what we find is that when our businesses are travelling well, we tend to relax our “economic guard” a little…

One of the things I’m seeing during this pandemic is the relaxation of our core principles of scheduling patients and dental treatments.

Because of regional restrictions imposed on the profession as to procedures that can and cannot be performed during different phases of the pandemic, I’m hearing some really poor customer service stories that are literally causing my toes to curl up.

For example:

The dental office phone rings:

Dental Receptionist: “Thank you for calling ABC Dental”

Caller: “Hi. I haven’t been to you before, and I was wondering how much you charge for a scale and clean?”

Dental Receptionist: “Because of COVID-19 we aren’t booking cleans in until mid-late October.”

Caller: “Oh. Why is that?”

Dental Receptionist: “Well, it’s because of aerosols. We’re not allowed to do procedures that generate aerosols.”

……and down the rabbit hole we go….

So what went wrong?

Well, all that the dental receptionist heard when the phone rang was “scale and clean”, and so she immediately launched in to a lecture about what she wanted to say which was:

“We are so overbooked with cleans that we really don’t need your business, so go away.”

The caller hadn’t even asked for an appointment.

But the receptionist got up on her high horse and immediately delivered a sermon….

At no point did the receptionist ask the caller who they were, or when they were last in.

The receptionist had no idea as to when the caller wanted to have their teeth cleaned and how long it had been since their last cleaning.

Nor did she find out whether the caller wanted her teeth to look whiter, or whether the caller might have been a candidate for a smile makeover…

All this receptionist did was to push a prospective appointment of unknown value away to another dental practice.

And the poor schmuck employing this receptionist thinks that business is good because he can’t get anyone in for a scale and clean for four months….

While his business is turning away callers that he has no idea what those callers actually really need.

And before you say to yourself:

“Oh that would never happen in my practice”

believe you me, it’s happening in EVERY practice.

And it’s happening a lot more than you would want to think it is…

But if your appointment book is poorly structured and your front office team are poorly trained [or untrained] on the best ways to answer the phone and the best ways to schedule EFFECTIVELY’ then your practice is really just letting money go disappearing down the drain.

Money that you could use towards new equipment, or new fixtures in your office…

Money that you could pay bonuses with….

Or money you could use to send your kids to a better school, or take your wife away on a vacation….

Sometimes, the not knowing what you don’t know, and being awakened to those facts, is the most painful realisation of them all…

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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.

Email me at [email protected]