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I’ve touched on this before in a previous blog, but it’s a point I feel needs to be mentioned again on its own.

I don’t know about you, but I always enjoy visiting a business where employees and team members show enjoyment for their position and their roles. Along with this, it’s great to see employees interacting in a positive manner amongst themselves. Those of you who, like me, have visited and experienced the office tour at Zappos shoes will know exactly what I mean.

One way to make your dental office different and stand out from every other dental office in your area is to work on and cultivate positive inter-staff interactions. Your patients and customers will immediately know and recognise that your people are different just by watching and observing how your team members treat each other with way more courtesy than anywhere else they ever go. And I don’t just mean in other dental offices they visit. I mean other businesses out there that your patients visit through the course of their week.

You see, nobody likes to be ignored. As a customer we like to be recognised…. well, usually, most of the time.

And we like to see happy employees at the businesses we visit and frequent, don’t’ we?

One of the best ways to show your customers that your business is different is to make sure that whenever two employees pass in your office that they smile and pleasantly greet each other, especially when a patient or customer is in view.

Here’s what I mean.

For example, imagine in your mind when one team member is escorting a patient down your hallway. Another team member is approaching in the opposite direction. What happens next?

Make it a policy in your dental office that this passing of staff is always seen as a friendly encounter with a smile and a “Hello”, so that the patient sees a friendly exchange.

What would the patient think if there was no exchange? I know I’d be horrified if I saw two staff members fail to acknowledge each other in passing.

I’d think “How rude?”

To me a silent passing is equivalent to a passing grunt. It’s just wrong!

Same thing often happens at the front desk. A team member returns to the office from a break, and walks past a client lounge full of patients, with a front office receptionist there, and they to acknowledge the each other at all. (Actually, on the flip side, it is very impressive, if the returning team member can enter and greet and converse with the patients seated in the client lounge…. but again, there’s another blog in the making)

You see, to me it comes naturally, but it is a throwback from my exercising days. When I was a cyclist I would always waive and acknowledged my fellow cyclists whether we passed in opposite or same directions. It was like a cyclists’ *code*. As a walker, it’s the same. There’s a general code of respect to acknowledge, with a hand raise/wave and a brief short “Hello” or “Good Morning”. It’s just common courtesy.

A smile received makes the receiver feel good, and it also makes the sender feel good.

And think about it. To do the contrary, to purposefully look the other way, to consciously ignore someone, takes a heck of a lot of effort and is really downright rude.

Now on the street, walking for exercise, there’s a good chance that the person you pass lives nearby, and also exercises as well so there is some commonality. The same is said about dog walkers, who also have some commonality there.

So in the office the commonality should be there as well, shouldn’t it?

It’s funny, because I recently attended a weekend conference where the whole Hotel was booked out by our Dental Office Corporation Owner. What this meant was that every hotel guest was either a dentist who had sold their practice to the Corporation, or were in the dental industry selling to those dentists.

I was surprised when walking between venue facilities and also my room [and there was a fair bit of walking], in passing other attendees, how many people turned the other cheek, rather than smile and say “hi”. It was a high enough percentage to notice that, out there, there is still a problem, I believe.

It heartened me, as a Dental Coach, to see that this is the attitude of such a noticeable number of the Practice Principal Dentists. Because if this is their attitude away from their practice among people with commonality, then it’s probably a non-existent policy that exists within their dental office as well.

And that gives me, as a Dental Coach, opportunity to teach dentists how to spread the love… and believe me, spreading the love is easy.

This is just one of the many straight forward protocols and procedures that make up The Ultimate Patient Experience, a simple easy to implement system I developed that allowed me to build 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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