A Journey Built On Smoke And Mirrors Will Always End Badly…

“A Journey Built On Smoke And Mirrors Will Always End Badly…”

Every procedure and protocol in your office needs to operate with 100% crystal clear clarity.

When your dental practice skips essential steps, you create liabilities and time bombs that come back to haunt you at a significant multiple of devastation that massively outweighs the cost or imposition of simply doing things correctly in the first instance.

Recently one of my clients found this out the hard way.

Let me explain…

I’ve always said:

I’ve always said, both as a dental practice owner, and also as a dental practice coach, that when a new patient phones your office for an appointment for a check-up examination and a dental cleaning, the dental office needs to clarify politely to the caller, that there may be a possibility that their teeth may need two [or sometimes more] appointments to completely clean their teeth properly.

This is because if we do not frame this “variation” up from the get-go, then we can end up with a very irate customer inside our practice who says:

“Why can’t you clean my teeth in one visit?”

“Do I have to pay for another visit so you can finish the job?”

“You mean I have to come back? Why can’t you finish it all now?”

It is unreasonable…

It is unreasonable for any logical or sane person to believe that a dirty mouth and a cleaner mouth having a professional dental cleaning should take the same amount of time, and also should incur the same fee.

Why would that be so?

Would an unruly tenant expect to pay a house cleaner a fee for an end of lease clean of the property that they have rented for two years [and trashed] that was equal to what a homeowner pays their weekly cleaning lady who visits every week?

Of course not… so why should mouths be different to houses?

You’re absolutely correct…

You’re right.

They should not be charged the same fee.

Because one requires far more work than the other.

We developed a perfect script…

At Active Dental, we developed a perfect script for our receptionists to use to inform every patient [new or existing] who was well and truly overdue for a dental cleaning, that there may be a chance that a second visit could possibly be required.

This script worked well every time with no exceptions.

And that’s what your dental practice needs.

Imagine telling a new patient on the phone that the fee for their cleaning was $150.00 and then finding out when you meet them that they are a chronic smoker with advanced periodontitis in a mouth that hasn’t seen the inside of a dental office for forty years…

As my client said today:

When we don’t pre-qualify the patient [on the phone] that because it has been a while between visits for them, that they may need extra visits to complete their cleaning, then one of the following three scenarios will occur:

We rush the cleaning and fail to complete it properly
We only do a superficial cleaning and so the patient receives incomplete treatment.
We defer necessary treatment to a later date and the patient carries on without knowing that they have active periodontitis inside their mouth.

And all of these scenarios are unsatisfactory and unprofessional results for our valued patients.

It is our role and duty…

It is our role and duty as healthcare professionals first and foremost to be looking after the health of our patients thoroughly and completely.

Cutting corners now as an attempt to build unearned popularity is a sham and a house of cards.

Your patients will respect you more for your honesty.

Any deception displayed towards your patients will return ten-fold and bite you where it hurts.

A reputation built on smoke and mirrors will always end badly…

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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….

Convert more calls into appointments…Click the link: http://www.calltrackingexcellence.com

Call Jayne on 1300 378 044 or email Jayne@theDPE.com for more details.

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Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.

You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order

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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.