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Raising Dental Office Standards
Master practices, when trying to excel in customer service, spend many hours communicating with each other how they can always be the best. The master team realizes that every interaction with a patient is either going to be a positive experience or a negative experience that affects patient loyalty, retention and referrals. What we should do is develop service standards and protocol to ensure we are absolutely superior in our customer service strategies.
Schedule a team meeting of three hours in which your goal is to identify all of the employee-customer potential points of interaction, and define by committing to paper the ideal actions and verbiage to ensure the interaction is a memorable experience.
Start by identifying all of the moments of patient and team interaction in your practice. Typically these would include: answering the phone, scheduling an appointment, interviewing new patients, and greeting new patients when they arrive. The team should brainstorm and list all of the interactions you could possibly think of that would be positive and have a proactive result on the relationship.
Next define and commit to paper the ideal memorable experience which would be the kind of interaction that would cause the patient to respond favorably to another person about you, the team and the practice, and will help refer others to you.
What follows is a list of the interactions in a typical dental office setting and the memorable experiences that would be associated with them. Please feel free to use all of these positive actions in your everyday dental office experiences with patients.
- Calling the practice. "Good morning, Dr. Smith's office, this is Cindy. How may I help you?
- Greeting patients upon arrival. “Good morning, Mrs. Smith. I'm Cindy, Dr. Smith's practice coordinator. We are so excited to meet you. Let's take a few minutes to review all of the paperwork."
- Patient waiting in the reception room. Patients should never wait in the reception room. If periodically the Doctor is behind or off schedule, say, "Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones is finishing a very difficult procedure that is putting him behind by approximately 10 minutes. Perhaps you would like a soda or a cup of coffee?"
- New patient welcome letter. A nice touch is to always include a personal note on the bottom of the letter from the team member who took the call.
- Exiting any patient to the front. Two to three business cards are handed to the patient and the team member says, “Mrs. Smith, if you have any problems or a question as to what was done for you today, here are some cards. Please call me personally and I will take care of you. Also, if you would also be so kind to share a few of these cards with your friends. We want a practice filled with patients just like you."
- Receiving a bill. The bill includes the name and telephone number of the person who can answer questions. The bill also includes a due date of 10 days later.
- Patients who wait for a long time or have a negative experience. Have a gift basket filled with little tokens of appreciation. When there is a negative experience, give a token to the patient and say, "Mrs. Smith, we value you as a patient and we always want you to be happy with us. Here is a little gift so you know we really care, and we are sincerely sorry for today's schedule delay. This will never happen again. Make sure to make a note in the patient's file so it doesn't.
- Patient arrives late. Say, “Well, George we were so worried about you; you are always on time for your appointments.” Do not scold them.
Consider your own ideal moment scenarios for the following:
- Running late on a procedure.
- Patient arrives on the wrong day for their appointment.
- Patient is very upset about a bill they received. They have proof that they paid.
- Patient is concerned that the hygienist has just told them that they have periodontal disease. They have never been told this before.
- Patient claims the doctor told them that the fee for the procedure is different from the complete financial arrangement.
- The dental assistant walks a patient to the front desk. The patient needs another appointment. The phone is ringing and the front desk person is in the middle of making an appointment for another patient.
- A new patient claims that their new insurance company will cover their dental costs 100 percent.
Establishing good service standards helps you to know what to do and say so you'll be assured patients will be satisfied. Remember that every dissatisfied patient tells 10 people about their bad experience. Make sure they are not speaking poorly about you! Developing good standards increases patient satisfaction and will ensure your prosperity in the years to come.
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