I had breakfast last week in Manhattan with a very dear dentist friend and as you would imagine, the conversation turned towards the dental team, and we began to share some horror stories.

I always try to meet up with my friends in New York as much as I can whenever I am in town here.

This memory jogger event yesterday triggered a bad memory from the vault for me when I was in Manhattan maybe six or so years ago.

My wife and I had been on a short ten-day trip attending meetings, and we had left two newly recruited front office people at our main practice to be supervised and overseen by a senior office manager from our branch practice. Our hygienists were seeing patients during this time, so all was supposedly meant to be good during our absence.

What we found upon our return was an appointment book with massive spaces and gaps in my schedule.

On questioning why this had happened, the two new recruits simply responded:

“Oh, we didn’t know that it was our job to make people KEEP their appointments?”

What had occurred in our absence was this:

Our two newly recruited front office people were providing great customer service to our patients by allowing them to cancel and reschedule their appointments whenever they chose to phone in.

And as such, appointments for treatment, necessary treatment, were being allowed to be put onto the patients’ “Someday I’ll…” list, if such a list even existed for those patients.

And of course, our manager from the other office who was supposed to be supervising and overseeing the activities of these two new recruits was happily playing Queen Bee and watching these two employees self-destruct.

It was as if my wife and I had entered the set of a truly bad movie…

What we did find that these two had accomplished during our absence was that they had taken upon themselves to clean out and tidy all of our cupboards and storage in the front office area, and to also label everything that could possibly be labelled with a Dymo label describing what each item was.

And I mean everything….

Even staplers were labelled…

Now, truth be told, our cupboards were in need of some reorganisation, but this was a task not to be performed at the expense of keeping a solid and productive appointment schedule for me upon my return.

That was a big no-no, and it was also something that the Queen Bee from the branch practice who was supervising should have squashed on the head as being an inappropriate task.

After all, has a new patient, or an existing patient for that matter ever asked to inspect the inside of your office cupboards?

Photos of neatly stacked stationery are rarely seen on dental websites..

Overall, it was simply the wrong thing to be doing.

And it was very poorly supervised.

As my mentor Jim Rohn said:

“Are you majoring in minor things?”

In your business, in your life, are you stacking the stationery instead of calling your valued customers and clients and patients and scheduling appointments with them?

The only thing that pays the salaries in dental offices is patients sitting in dental chairs.

Not neatly tidied cupboards.

In our business, and in all businesses, we do need to prioritise the activities that are going to keep the business open and put food on the table first and foremost.

Are you doing what is best for your business?

*****

My next public speaking presentation showing Dentists how to grow their Dental practices will be with Jayne Bandy in Manchester, England on Saturday 2nd September 2017.

For more information and to secure your seat click this link here.

*****

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

*****

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

Did you like this blog article? If you did then hit the share buttons below and share it with your friends and colleagues. Share it via email, Facebook and twitter!!