I wrote last week about how a tree had damaged our home during violent weather conditions, and that I’d had to spend hours of my time on a virtual message chat with my insurer, that didn’t leave me satisfied that I’d be getting the correct answers.
All I wanted to do was talk to a human being on the first contact to get a clear set of instructions as to what I needed to do.
And as you remember, I was told by my local shopfront for the insurer to call the main number. And that main number told me to complete an application for notification online.
Anyway, after completing the application online on Monday, I was contacted by phone by a builder [working for the insurer] that they would come and inspect the damage to the home on the Friday.
I was also contacted by a roofer [via SMS] that he would come out on the Tuesday to inspect the damage to the roof. But on the Tuesday morning, an hour before he was due to show, he SMS’d me saying he was unwell, and that he would be in touch to reschedule.
It’s Sunday night now and I still haven’t heard BOO from the roofer.
The insurer phoned me on the Tuesday in the late morning, and left a message [I was on a work phone call and unable to pick up].
And then the insurer immediately phoned my wife on her phone, and gave her instructions. [Jayne is a co-policy owner, but did not lodge anything with the insurer…that was all done by me].
And this is where it started to unravel…
I know I should have replayed the message from the insurer that was left on my phone, but I thought we had a clear set of instructions going, until I met with the builder on the Friday morning, who asked me why the tree was still in the driveway, and whether anyone had been out to sure up the roof.
I let the builder know that the roofer had let us down, and the builder said he’d be in contact with the roofer because he needed the roofer’s report to complete his own building report, and that this delay from the roofer was going to probably delay the builder lodging his own report.
After the builder left on the Friday, I had a missed call from a tree guy who wanted pics of my tree sent to him by SMS so he could organise to come and clear the tree… I sent the pictures, but the tree guy failed to return my calls.
It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that I replayed the Tuesday message left by the insurer.
It was also on Friday afternoon that Jayne forwarded me an email sent by Erin from the Insurer to Jayne on the Tuesday, with instructions as to what to do next… but at no point did Erin copy me in as well, despite the fact that it was me who had lodged the original claim, and not Jayne.
At 5:15pm on the Friday I tried to call the insurer on the phone. A message told me they only work between 8:30am and 5:00pm Monday to Friday. Apparently storms and natural disasters only occur during working hours.
The thing is…
The thing is that with communication, it needs to be same-same to work best.
One of the dumbest things I see in 2024 is the thought that some people have that the person they are trying to contact is sitting in front of their email inbox waiting for someone to send them an email….
How crazy is that thought?
Most people only check their emails sporadically these days, and if you really need to contact someone urgently, then SMS and phone are usually best.
But for the insurer to switch from communication from the lodger of the claim to then to the spouse of the claim, and to cut out the lodger, well that’s just downright stupid.
I’ve always been amazed…
I’ve always been amazed that when I phone a dental practice and leave a message for the dentist to phone me back that I receive SMS messages or emails from the dentist or the receptionist asking me to type a reply to them, when all I need to do is have a brief conversation on the phone…
and that’s because a conversation is fluid, but a typed message is at best a monologue presentation and a guess.
In this instant, with the insurer, I am feeling like a lemming on my way to the slaughterhouse with no option for discussion or persuasion…
In your dental office…
In your dental office, are you allowing your patients to ask questions to gain greater clarity, or are you simply cutting them off [at the pass] and corralling them into where you want them to go, without allowing them to believe that they’ve been a part of the decision process.
The customer only feels satisfied if they feel that their voice has been heard.
Anything less than that, is dictatorship.
And in business we can laugh at the “soup nazi”, but that sort of business model is fantasy, and nothing else.
If you keep behaving as if you are the soup Nazi, then pretty quickly, your clients and patients will wear thin of your arrogance and narcissism, and will drop you to earth quicker than a lead zeppelin…
And that creates a number of undue pressures…
And that doesn’t make good business sense…
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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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