Greatly impressed by your customer service, your patients leave the office and say just one thing to themselves, “WOW!” – this should be the goal for every practice.
Excellent customer service goes far beyond simply being nice to patients. “WOW” customer service involves exceeding patient expectations and making certain patients do not consider going elsewhere for their dental needs.
Levin Group has determined that five key factors can help practices achieve exceptional “WOW” customer service:
1. Focus on the Patient
Patients want to believe they are the practice’s only priority when they come in for their appointments. Practices with excellent customer service strive to make their patients feel this way. If a practice fails to return phone calls in a timely fashion, is running late when the patient arrives, or does not seem prepared for the appointment, patients begin to question the quality of care they are receiving. Consequently, their confidence in the practice declines.
To help build a strong practice-patient relationship, the dentist and staff members should learn as much as possible about patients. No patient wants to feel like a number to the practice. When team members bring up little things such as birthdays, upcoming weddings, and graduations during appointments, patients will respond very positively. This is the essence of relationship building, essential for generating trust in the practice. More than any other factor, trust will lead patients to say, “yes” after a case presentation.
2. Track Patient Information
Patients should not have to provide information about themselves more than once. If patients spend time giving the practice information over the phone when they first call, they do not want to have to supply that same information again minutes before their appointment. And they certainly do not want to give it yet a third time to a dentist or staff member when they are called from the reception area.
Levin Group recommends that the practice take the original information sheet and use it as a frame of reference for future patient contact. Use it as background to ask further questions so that you may find out more about patients’ dental history and their current concerns, while learning more about them personally. This will help the team build a positive relationship with patients.
3. Manage Expectations
Practices manage expectations by making everything about the patient’s treatment plan clear. Do your patients fully understand their treatment plans? Do they know what the procedure can accomplish and what it cannot? Do they know exactly what the treatment entails, what the fees are, and why the work needs to be done? Does the patient know the projected outcome? All of these questions must be answered before treatment starts.
When there is a complete understanding about why, how and when dental treatment will take place as well as realistic expectations of outcomes, then your practice has a chance to exceed expectations. Even if you do a phenomenal job, you will not meet patients’ expectations if they assumed different things were going to take place.
4. Follow Up
Practices must always follow up with their patients. This means several things, including:
- Returning patients’ phone calls
- Getting them information they have requested
- Rescheduling appointments
- Effectively tracking incomplete treatment and recare program participants
If for any reason you are too busy at the moment follow-up is requested, it is incumbent on someone in the practice to call the patient as soon as possible. Even if you cannot return a phone call right away, or cannot get hold of necessary information, you should never let a day go by without getting back in touch with your patient. Failing to do so could lead the patient to go somewhere else, which means lost revenue and profit for your practice.
5. Market Your Excellence
When patients walk into a practice for the first time, they obviously do not know the doctor or the staff. Remember the old adage, you get only one chance to make a first impression. Each practice has to prove itself to each new patient from the very start. You have to market your practice – and yourself.
Marketing the practice begins with a few basic facts. Provide information about the doctor’s educational credentials (both degrees and continuing education programs) and the staff’s experience. Even more important, however, is displaying testimonial letters from satisfied patients who have had a wide range of procedures done in the practice over the last 12 to 18 months. This provides a solid foundation for patient trust. Your customer service will take it from there.
Summary
Customer service is probably the single most important aspect of your practice. By following the five key steps mentioned above, your practice can begin to achieve a “WOW” level of customer service. Doing so will increase patient flow and generate greater profitability for your practice through more referrals.