I talk to a lot of dentists.
And the number one thing I see from dentists is they don’t train their staff properly on the duties and tasks that those staff members need to perform.
This is what happens:
- They Never Train Their Staff:
These dentists rely on the staff bringing skills and experiences they learned elsewhere into the practice, with the “hope” that those skills will be ok in their new place of employment.
Sometimes this works.
Sometimes those skills can be adapted and altered to what the new practice needs.
And sometimes those skills are of no use.
And sometimes the new team member doesn’t have any skills specific to what the new practice is looking for, despite having many years of “experience”.
- They “Under-Train” Their Staff:
These dentists either do not have the time to properly train their team members, or do not allocate the time to properly train their team members.
Sometimes these dentists aren’t knowledgeable about the requirements needed for the team members performing the roles they are trying to train for
And sometimes these dentists don’t know how to teach, and don’t have any teaching credibility to create an authorative learning environment.
- They “Hope” Their Staff Will Pick Things Up Over Time:
These dentists believe that the roles they are hiring for are not that difficult, and so the staff can learn what to do “on the run”… usually at the expense of customer time [and tolerance].
This is a very arrogant stance to take, and to present to your customers.
Your customers want to feel SAFE in the knowledge that the employees they are dealing with know what they are doing.
Here’s What Should Happen:
The dentist [practice owning dentist] should outsource the training of staff so that those staff are given the skills they need and all the resources, as well as allowing those team members the greatest opportunity of adapting quickly into their new role/position.
It also makes more sense for the dentist to be performing high production dentistry on his patients rather than PAUSING that high production duty to perform a training duty that they are unskilled at, that they could outsource to someone more skilled, and pay that someone at a rate far lower than the hourly dentist production rate.
And the outsourced trainer, being a specialist at what they do, would be regarded with more credibility and held in higher esteem by the team members than they would regard the dentist trying to perform a role that the dentist was unskilled at and not trained to do.
When my wife took up golf:
When Jayne decided [twenty five years ago] that she wanted to play golf, I told her the best thing for her to do was to have regular lessons one-on-one with a local golf professional.
Jayne had six months of golf lessons from the golf pro at our local golf driving range before venturing out onto a golf course to play golf proper.
Those six months of lessons provided Jayne with the fundamentals of a great golf swing that have given Jayne the able to hit a golf ball consistently.
Even with the amount of golf that I’ve played, I am not in a position to diagnose and instruct on the intricacies of golf because I’m not trained in the abilities to diagnose errors and then coach techniques that create permanent improvements and solutions.
That’s what a golf professional is trained to do and is skilled at.
You’re trained as a dentist:
You don’t listen to recordings of incoming phone calls.
You don’t answer phones all day long and have to juggle other front office tasks at the same time as answering ringing phones.
You don’t know what’s really going on on your phones.
How can you even pretend to think that you can be an authority on the subject?
Stick to what you know… and do that well.
And delegate the tasks that you don’t know and you don’t do well to others who can do them well.
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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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.
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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.
Email me at david@theupe.com
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