Templating Your Appointment Book For Customer Service Success

Franklin Field said:

“The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in five words: ‘I do not have time’.”

Lee Iacocca said:

“If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s important and give it all you’ve got.”

And Charles Darwin said:

“A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.”

We are all given twenty-four hours each day.

It is how each of us put those hours to use that determines our effectiveness and success.

Because once those hours are gone, they are gone forever.

Time cannot be saved or banked.

Time can only be used wisely.

The optimal organisation of a dental appointment book is not to squeeze every last possible penny out of each hour of dental treatment.

The aim of the well-structured and well-templated appointment book is for the patient to feel that they have received maximum attention during their visit to your dental office.

Paramount to this feeling being achieved is the practice’s ability to create true value for the dental patient during their regular dental hygiene appointment.

Here are some sure fire ways to reduce and eliminate the feeling of value for your patients in the dental hygiene room

Begin the appointment after time
End the appointment ahead of time
Leave the patient unattended during the appointment
Have the dentist come in to do the hygiene exam when the dentist feels like it, rather than at a specific repeatable and pre-calculated time. This includes the dentist entering the hygiene room before the patient has been seen by the hygienist, as well as mid-cleaning, when the patient has a half-dirty and half-cleaned dentition, and a mouth full of blood and prophy paste. This also includes allowing the dentist to come in late after the hygienist has cleaned the patient’s teeth and then abandoned the patient because the dentist is taking too long to get in there.
Hygienist fails to take adequate and appropriate and necessary photographic and radiographic records of the patient AHEAD of the dentist arriving for the oral examination.

Can you imagine the feelings going through the minds of your regular patients?

“Last time he came in at the end, this time he’s come in and looked before my teeth were even started, and the time before that he came in when my mouth was half dirty? How can things be so different?”

All our valued patients want is consistency.

When they visit their hairdressers they want the same people cutting [and COLOURING] their hair each time.

When they get their nails done they want the same person doing their nails each time.

They should deserve the same sort of consistency with their dental hygiene appointments.

And dental hygiene appointments are usually more expensive…

Other dental practice time management failures:

Why can’t dental practices organise the departure times [and arrival times] of their patients to allow for less congestion at the front desk area?

Why can’t dental practices reduce obvious bottlenecks.

I worked with a dental practice in the USA that employed six dental hygienists each day.

But the practice had only three front office people to greet and farewell those hygiene patients, as well as the restorative patients seeing the two dentists of the practice.

Can you see the bottleneck?

Every hour eight patients were departing and eight patients were arriving but only three employees were available to interact with those patients.

And to heighten the frustration, the practice had just moved in to a brand-new facility. What a major office design failure!

The best solution we were able to arrive at for this practice was for the six hygiene patients each hour to be arriving and departing individually every ten minutes and not all at once on the hour, so that their transactions could be staggered and shared across the three front office employees.

If you run a structured appointment schedule this tip is golden.

When a dental practice employs more than one hygienist it is imperative that the hygiene examinations are all scheduled at the same time of the appointment for each and every patient.

This creates a consistency of visit for each hygiene patient.

What this also does is that it also allows the dental practice to reconstruct the practice appointment book so that the dentist is doing their own correct procedures at the correct times in the dentist’s treatment rooms that then allows the dentist to easily be available at the best time for hygiene.

And if there are two hygienists operating on the same day in the practice then their appointment schedules need to be diametrically opposed so that the dentist DOES NOT ever have to be in two hygiene rooms at the same time.

Better still, the hygiene schedules need to be organised so that when the dentist is needed in one room he is not required in the other room.

This requires some concentrated thinking.

It also requires a concentrated effort to maintain changed appointments using like with like.

The beauty of all this.

When a dental appointment schedule is constructed correctly, and MAINTAINED correctly it then becomes a very profitable appointment schedule.

Appointment schedules that are slapped together or not even put together at all create physical and mental and financial frustrations.

And that doesn’t benefit anyone at all.

It doesn’t benefit the patient.

It doesn’t benefit the dental team.

It doesn’t benefit the dental practice.

And it fails to provide for the dental practice owners.

And what’s the point then of all that?

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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.