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Are you respecting your customers’ time?

It’s the age-old question…from time immemorial.

Are you showing your customers that you value their time?

In a dental office there are several time bottlenecks where your patients will feel that they are not being appreciated.

But most dental offices do nothing to address these failures.

Most dental offices believe that it is more important to clean and sterilize dental instruments than it is to sit with a patient who is not being treated.

Well I’m telling you that the dental offices that are the most popular are those where patients are kept constantly engaged and are never left to wait alone.

In the hygiene room.

A lot of dental offices do hygiene exams the wrong way around.

They do them when the dentist has time, rather than waiting until the hygienist has cleaned all the teeth and completed the charting and record taking.

When the dentist does the examination at HIS own convenience and the patient’s mouth is only partly cleaned he will create less value and less connection with the patient than if the patient has completed their cleaning and then the dentist is summonsed.

Don’t believe me? Try it and see. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the “connection” you make with the hygiene-completed patient.

Upon arrival.

Patients arriving at the dental office are often apprehensive and need to be greeted immediately by a warm smiling concierge. When your valued patients are greeted and recognised as soon as they arrive they immediately bond with the office more compared to those dental offices where the patient is left alone waiting unattended for a period of time while the dental office staff are either on the phone, or assisting down the back or are spending time with a departing patient.

If you find that your arriving patients are being ignored then it might be the time to look at the allocation of manpower in your dental office and whether there is a better use of that manpower.

Upon departure.

I had a client in Pennsylvania who built a wonderful brand new facility for his dental office. Nine operatories. Five hygienists. Two dentists. Three front office employees.

Can you see the problem?

At the end of each hour there was seven patients trying to leave the office but they were being serviced by only three employees.

Do you see the bottleneck?

It’s like when you go to Nordstrom Rack and you’re laden up with shoe boxes and when you reach the check-out there’s a line and only two registers open out of eight possible.

Can that scenario ever make any sense?

So my client needed to solve his bottleneck issue and solve it quickly.

How can it be acceptable behaviour to make your valued patients wait around to settle up bills worth several hundred and maybe thousands of dollars?

In the dental treatment room.

I see it regularly.

A patient seated in a dental operatory, in the dental chair, with a bib on, and about to have expensive restorative treatment done.

And they are in the room alone.

Because the Dental Assistant does not know the value of engagement.

She thinks that if the dentist is not there yet then her time is better spent away from the patient.

She thinks that her time is better spent scrubbing instruments, or stocking cupboards, or even better still, talking to another staff member about nothing in particular.

And that is so wrong.

What should we do then?

Small children spell “LOVE” as T.I.M.E..

And patients will spell it exactly the same way.

Make sure you are not neglecting your patients.

Make sure that you are always engaging each of your patients.

Make sure your patients are never left unattended or alone at all.

It makes a heck of a difference to them.

*****

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

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