The best way to succeed with your customer service in your dental practice is to be a solver of problems that your dental patients have.
Sometimes your patients are aware of their problems, and sometimes there are problems they have that they are not aware of.
When you offer a solution to a patient’s problem then that patient will see you as their hero.
When you discover a problem that your patient is unaware of and you are able to offer up an immediate solution to that problem, then that patient will be in awe of you.
Here’s where dental practices are failing their patients:
I listen to recordings of incoming dental practice phone calls.
Caller:
“I’d like to make an appointment. I have a sore tooth and the gum around it is red and sore.”
Dental office phone answerer:
“I haven’t got any available appointments for two weeks.”
What should the dental employee have said?
Let’s start with a few basics:
“How bad is the pain?”
“Who am I speaking to?”
“When were you last in to see us?”
“Are you having to take any pain killers for this pain?”
“Is it a front tooth or a back tooth?”
In the above example, there was no question back to the caller about their well-being and their current situation. The dental receptionist went straight to PUTTING A NAME IN A SLOT, without even finding out ONE THING about the caller and their situation.
Don’t laugh.
Your phones could well be being answered this way, or worse!
Just because the caller has asked for an appointment doesn’t mean we have to depart from our protocols of finding out exactly what’s going on
Are they an existing patient?
Can we check their records while we are listening to them describe their situation in more detail?
Once we know more about their situation we can then determine the urgency of when we need to help them, but WE CANNOT PIDGEON HOLE THEM into an appointment slot in our schedule before we know who they are and how much pain they are in and how seriously they want to save their tooth.
Otherwise we’re just playing pin the tail on the donkey.
When our appointment scheduling policy [or lack of policy] is to put anybody in anywhere and hope for the best, then all we will end up with is a MISH-MASH of appointments in a schedule of repeated days of poor daily production.
When you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
Appointment schedules of no structure that are made up on a daily basis are a recipe for a life of poor production and financial failure.
To create a schedule of purpose, you need to be digging deep on your calls and extracting key information about the patient that will have them wanting to come and see you sooner rather than later.
And that key information is all about problem solving.
When the caller on the phone feels how much you care, they will be more committed to their appointment than if they feel as if you’ve just been “going through the motions” and giving them a spot that suits you.
Have a listen to the “message” that your people are sending to your patients when they call your dental practice.
Are people calling your practice being given First Class, World Class Service when they call?
Or are they being made to feel “less than wanted”?
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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 david@theupe.com