One of the Golden Rules of Customer Service is to NEVER be performing duties or tasks in your business that have the immediate effect of ignoring or neglecting your real live customers.
Years ago, while I was on a dental practice visit, I sat in the client lounge at a practice [some people still call them WAITING ROOMS] and watched as the receptionist continued with a phone call and TOTALLY IGNORED a real live female patient who had walked into the practice and stood in front of the receptionist.
FOR FOUR MINUTES!!
Without even a nod or a wave of recognition.
Let alone excusing herself from the phone caller [for a moment] to acknowledge this lady who had just entered the practice.
It was painful to watch.
Can you picture it?
A receptionist talking on the phone, with a woman standing right there in front of her, and failing to even acknowledge the presence of the arriving woman.
Not a nod.
Not a gesture.
Nothing.
It was as if the arriving woman was INVISIBLE.
A similar thing happened to my wife and me in December.
Jayne and I had just arrived in Paris and were eating at a very popular eatery near our apartment.
And we had been positioned to eat our meals at the bar.
Which we didn’t mind.
And we kind of preferred.
But as we sat there, eating and conversing, not one, but two of the restaurant waitstaff proceeded to restock several of the wine fridges in the bar with full bottles of Riesling.
While ignoring the diners right there behind her who wanted and needed wait staff service right then and there.
Which was just totally wrong.
Because in no business should living and breathing customers be left unattended by a team member supposedly needing to perform NHIs [non-human-interactive] duties.
If NHIs need to be performed, then employ extra staff.
But don’t ignore your customers.
In dental practices I see dental staff on the phone doing stock ordering while arriving patients are ignored.
And even while client lounges are teeming with patients, I’ll see front office team members doing paperwork instead of actually talking with the waiting patients.
In treatment rooms, when the dentist is called away to another room, I often see patients left alone and abandoned by the dental assistants who DISAPPEAR from the room, when they should be there attending to the patient during those times.
Because, for patients, a visit to the dentist is a traumatic and nerve racking event…. And attention, and conversation, can be the perfect remedy used as a mental distraction for the patient who is experiencing those nervous negative emotions.
Patients leave dental practices and go to find another dentist if they feel ignored, or taken for granted.
It is apathy, and perceived apathy from our dental team members towards our patients, that is the number one reason that causes those valued patients to leave us.
Recognition.
Babies cry for it.
And grown men die for it.
Don’t fail to recognise that your patients are there, right in front of you.
And all they want is your attention….
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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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