I was taken to task last week when I wrote about a friend of mine who travels up the front of the plane and who says that he is subsidising those who travel down the back of the plane.
It was interesting because the person who took me to task about this was a dentist.
The reason I found it interesting is because dentists notoriously subsidise and cross-subsidise different treatments and different patients and different insurances.
An hour that a dentist spends doing crown and bridge, or implants, certainly pays better than an hour spent doing a new patient examination.
Isn’t the crown and bridge appointment therefore subsidising the time spent doing the new patient examination?
With this fact in mind, it makes sense to know which of your patients are the low payers and which of your patients are the high payers so that you can allocate resources of your practice accordingly.
It makes no sense to offend the higher value patients by avoiding or ignoring them.
Spending too much of your time and resources with lower value patients could see higher value patients leave your practice and seek treatment elsewhere where they will feel more valued.
The number one reason that our valued patients do leave our practices and go elsewhere is apathy and perceived apathy from us and our team members towards those valued patients.
It makes sense then that it is important for our team members and ourselves to know who those higher valued patients are so they can receive more attention whenever they come in or contact our dental office.
With reference to flying, I recently questioned a flight attendant about whether or not the flight crew knew exactly who was flying in their cabin.
And I was surprised at the fact that they did not.
I asked while I was travelling on a Qantas domestic flight as to whether or not the flight crew were informed about who was in the business class cabin.
Did they know which of the twelve passengers up there had paid full fare, or which of those passengers had redeemed frequent flyer miles for their ticket?
Did they know whether or not passengers in the forward cabin had been promoted, or upgraded on the day, from a regular economy class [or coach] ticket?
Sadly, the answer was in the negative.
To me this made no sense, because the airline computer should be able to provide that information easily.
The reason I questioned whether this information was being accessed was because I regularly find that food choices for meals on these flights often run out, and as a traveller with specific dietary choices and exclusions, I regularly find myself left with no food choice because the one selection I could only eat had already been fully exhausted.
And it seemed very nonsensical to be offering up all food selections to travellers who may not have paid full fare for their seats, while those who had paid full fare ended up with the pretzel pack, purely because of where they sat, rather than how much they paid for their seat.
And after all, in a cabin of twelve, it would not have taken long at all for the cabin crew to quickly ask around before the flight departed as to which meal selection each passenger would prefer to be served.
Now I know what I’m describing here can easily be classified as a “First World Problem” but if you are paying to be flying up the pointy end of an aeroplane and you are not being looked after, then you’ve got to be questioning whether the extra dollars for that front of plane experience are really worth spending.
How Does This Relate To Dental?
Now that’s easy.
Are you giving your valued patients an Ultimate Patient Experience?
Do your valued patients receive above and beyond attention from your team members each and every time that they are in your Dental Office?
Are your patients having high valued treatments being attended to and fussed over when they visit your practice? Or are they being left alone sometimes for excruciatingly long periods of time?
How is the environment in your client lounge when you are about to see a full mouth rehab patient or an implant case?
Are you putting your high paying patients in the same environment as a tribe of screaming wall-climbing children?
Are your well-to-do patients being asked to share your client lounge with patients who may have come straight from working outdoors all day with farm animals?
At the front counter, are your better patients having to wait too long while you sort out insurance complications and code and item number issues on the phone?
Are your team members ready to take the time to discuss treatments and appointments with patients, or are these patients rushed through and out of the practice with only the hope that maybe they’ll “hopefully” be keeping their appointments in the future?
It’s time to dig deeper into who exactly your customers are, and how you can serve your best customers better.
Whether you’re a dentist, or an airline.
You need to address this simple area of improvement.
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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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