The Ultimate Patient Experience

Sometimes the things that are common sense aren’t common thoughts, and don’t become logical thought processes sadly, until after things go wrong. And after you have to fix the errors. Training your pet dog in obedience training is a good example of this sort of process. I started doing some research on the web about dog trainings, and the various types and ways of dog training, and the various results achieved by those different ways. The thing about dog training, or obedience training is…

I GET customer service. But some people do not. And I understand that in every business, despite the very best intentions of owners and employees, mistakes and errors get made, and things go wrong. The aim in service businesses is simple. You need to make sure that errors are as infrequent as possible. And you need to make sure that on those occasions when your business does happen to drop the ball, that you have the SERVICE RECOVERY PROCESSES ready and easily implementable so that your…

I had an interesting morning one day this week… I was interviewed for a non-dental podcast. Here are some of the questions that I was asked, and my recollection of my answers to those questions. What is the one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to become a high achiever? The one piece of advice that I would offer someone looking to become a high achiever is to COMMIT to continued learning. As a very good friend of mine always says: “None of us is smarter than all of us.” We…

I phoned a dental practice today where I had difficulty hearing what the receptionist was saying. There was obviously a fault in the line, because I was unable to catch her name, and needed to ask her to tell me her name again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name? What did you say your name was?” The receptionist told me her name again. I thanked her and said: “Thank you. I must have a bad connection here on my end.” She replied: “No, it’s our end. People keep telling me all the time that…

A few discussions that I’ve had this week have all led back to a similar theme… and that theme is the theme of generosity. In discussions with coaching clients, we’ve broached the subject of employees having immediate permission to be able to MAKE THINGS RIGHT when service defects occur in your business [as they do from time to time] without having to go running to the boss to double check on what is needed to be done. When things go wrong [occasionally] the best thing that a business can do…

People often ask me what is the point of providing Above and Beyond Customer Experiences in your dental practice. These people say that your customers really don’t expect great customer service and so their argument, or point of view is that if it’s not expected, then delivering great customer service is really just a waste of time or an exercise in futility. These same people say that if people don’t value it then what’s the point of offering great service? And my point would be: If what…

Have you ever met someone who thinks that they’re doing everything well, when in reality, they are so out of touch with reality, that you think to yourself:| “What the heck?” Or, have you ever been that person yourself, thinking to yourself: “I’m doing alright….” only to find out that your version of alright is really all wrong. Have you? Well, I have… In 1996, I thought that my dental practice was doing alright. After all, I was collecting double what the average dental practice in…

One of the things I learnt very early on in my career as a dental practice owner was that to grow a practice, I needed to have enough phone lines available for those moments each and every day when multiple callers wanted to contact my office all at the same time. And these moments do indeed happen… And when those moments happened, I needed to be able to put some of these callers on hold, while my office team served each and every one of those valuable telephone enquiries. And here’s the…

Do you know your hourly rate as a dentist? What is an hour of clinical dentistry worth to you? The calculation is simple: Work out how much dentistry you produced personally in a certain time frame [usually three or six months], then divide that dollar amount by the number of days you worked and there’s your daily rate. Divide your daily rate by the number of hours you work each day to calculate your hourly rate. Knowing your hourly rate is very powerful: When you know your hourly rate for…

I remember a conversation I had forty years ago with a work colleague. It was when I was working in a licenced club at nights, while attending Sydney University during the day. The colleague was re-telling me a story of in “intimate moment” he had enjoyed with a young woman in the back seat of his car. While my colleague was telling me that he thought at the time that he was going ok, when he looked up at his partner during this “moment” he found that she was doodling in the mist forming on…

In the 1992 Movie A FEW GOOD MEN, there’s this now infamous courtroom scene, with a heated exchange: The Colonel, in the stand, played by Jack Nicholson says: “You want answers?” The corporal interrogating, him, played by Tom Cruise says: “I want the truth!” Jack Nicholson replies: “You can’t handle the truth!” I know it’s only a couple of lines from a movie, but …. It is very true. A lot of dentists have no idea what’s going on in their dental practices… And that’s the truth. Think about…

Every now and then the age-old chestnut of cell phones in the dental practice rears its head. It’s an interesting discussion, and its usually raised by a dental practice where staff use of their mobile phones during work time has reached epidemic proportions. So, when considering what we need to do, as is the case with most business decisions, we need to have a good look at the numbers, because the numbers will tell the story. But before we do that, let’s understand the reasoning from both…

Following on from last week’s article on self-imposed glass ceilings, I believe the major driver behind all achievement needs to be the establishment of a clearly defined set of goals to focus and re-focus on. Our goals are our destination. They are our end point. Our goals are our DESIRED end point. In the same way that people regularly plan their holidays and vacations in detail, we need to plan dxz0= our life destinations with exactly the same clarity. When we plan our vacations, we know…

From time to time I have the need to phone dental practices and talk to the people working there. Here’s what I do. In this order: Firstly, I listen to see how many times the phone rings before my call is answered. Secondly, I sometimes have my call answered by an automatic voice message, that more often than not, tells me something that I don’t need to hear [i.e. it’s not that urgent] before I speak to another human being. Thirdly, I hear a significant number of calls answered by someone…

I meet a lot of dentists who hit a glass ceiling. Their dental practices stop growing. Their monthly production plateaus. And let me tell you this: When it happens, this is scary. It’s scary because when your business’s monthly production levels off, three things happen. Firstly, when your collections start to level off, it means that in reality, your business is going backwards. This is because with inflation, [even at low levels], the cost of living is increasing on a daily basis and over…

Sometimes people don’t look happy. They scowl. They don’t smile. They look, dare I say it, down in the mouth. And when we talk to them, they sound unhappy. They speak and sound as if they don’t want to be where they are. And more often than not these people look as though the action of transporting them bodily from where they are to another place will not make them any happier. These people look and act and speak so miserably that they look as though nothing is ever going to change their…