I was thumbing through some photos this morning and came across this photo I took on Christmas Day 2014 in Notting Hill London.

It’s a Porsche 911 Carrera S Convertible, covered in bird droppings and with a flat rear tyre.

You’d have to wonder, with that much money invested in this car, why the owner didn’t seem to value the asset they owned enough to keep it in better condition?

And it can be the same with business owners….

Have you ever walked past the front of a business and wondered whether the people who worked inside there took pride in their business, or were they just turning up and going through the motions to pick up their pay cheques?

What the customer sees and what the employees see are often too different things.

And what about the business owner?

Does the business owner see what the customers see?

Sometimes the employees and the business owner enter and leave the place of business through a different doorway to the one used by customers.

Sometimes the front entrance to the building can look really inappropriate and the people inside the business may have absolutely no idea about what is going on outside their front door.

I drive past a dental office on a regular basis that is positioned directly opposite the carpark entrance to a local shopping centre.

It never ceases to amaze me how the lawns at this dental office are less than perfectly manicured and that the grounds there could really do with some nice plants and shrubs.

I often wonder whether the dentistry performed inside the building is as untidy as the exterior grounds of the business?

Surely it wouldn’t be too expensive to manicure the lawns rather than just mow them?

And more frequently?

And how much do a few shrubs cost to add greenery and colour and fragrance?

There’s nothing homely or welcoming about the look of this office whatsoever.

Another dental office I walked past recently had leaf litter, dirt, trash and significant bird droppings adorning it’s covered entrance.

The amount of bird droppings present was indicative of a long-term unsolved problem.

It certainly was a turn-off for me, and I imagine that more non-patients walking past would notice the aggregation of bird excrement in the doorway more than they would even notice that the place was a Dental Office.

But here’s the pièce de résistance….

If a customer was even to traverse the mat of droppings in the doorway they are greeted by a finger marked glass door with a large paper sign sticky taped to the door that reads:

PLEASE CLOSE DOOR

Now if that were my office I’d have a sign that reads:

Welcome to ABC Dental.
Please enter.

And I’d be installing one of those pneumatic automatic door closers on the door, and making sure that it operated seamlessly.

One of my rules is that a sign should never replace something that a person needs to do, or say, or fix.

And it’s obvious here that there’s a problem with the door not closing automatically.

And the sign makes it even more obvious that nobody wants to take ownership of solving the problem.

Will they be able to solve my dental problem once I have negotiated their filthy entrance way?

The problem with common sense is that it’s not that common.

To me the answer is simple in both these cases.

Pride.

And it’s the same with the Carrera owner…

Nobody inside these dental businesses is taking ownership of the external appearance of the premises.

And if that’s the case, who knows how many customers and potential customers are noticing this and choosing to go elsewhere for their dentistry?

*****

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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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