conciergecontactcenter

Anyone who is in a successful relationship soon learns that harmony is good, and conflict is bad. However, there are those who only feel comfortable in the presence of a low-grade constant chaos. They may have valuable skillsets, but cannot seem to work unless there is some drama going on. 

Why people need chaos is best understood that some people learn how to trigger their stress response because they need it to feel normal. These people are their own worst enemy. While most people are trying to remain calm and efficient during the day, these sufferers wind themselves up and speed around in an anxious rush. 

The negative effects this behavior has on a dental office are much greater than merely one staff member creating chaos. The chaos started in one person has a way of causing tension in everyone exposed to it. For example, in the front office staff, if the person who greets patients is the source of this chaos, then that staff member’s anxiousness and negativity may make patients feel like their presence is an interruption or a bother. Soon, others in the front office have picked up on the negative buzz and everyone’s energy goes from calm and efficient to nervous and inefficient. Nurturing positivity is a delicate thing. Even a small amount of negativity can poison a whole room of co-workers and visiting clients.

If someone on the clinical side is addicted to chaos, then the negativity is even further magnified. Many patients are already a little nervous during a routine visit (after all it only happens once every six months) so if a hygienist or dental assistant foments chaos and anxiety, patients will immediately notice, because those employees are sticking very sharp pieces of metal into their mouths. No patient, not even the least dental-phobic one wants to have an anxious, careless hygienist or assistant anywhere near his or her teeth and gums. 

Keeping real harmony in an office environment is and will be a challenge for all practice owners. Success takes sustained effort and monitoring to keep it going, however once established as the norm, harmony has a way of gaining momentum and discouraging any negativity that threatens it. 

Solutions are many and diverse, but the first one is positivity. Don’t take “no” for the answer. Focus on “yes”. Focus on possibilities not problems. From the top down be positive. 

• Leave any negativity from outside the office, outside the office! 
• Listen to your staff -front and back offices- and identify issues before they become problems.
• Have compassion and understand that everyone makes mistakes and very, very few of them are catastrophic. Every problem has a solution.
• Appreciate all that is right, and make it a team effort to constantly improve the office.
• Lastly, lead by example: leave bad out and embrace the good.

If you get the entire office rolling in the right direction, then it builds enough momentum so that negativity is seen for what it is –a destructive force-, that those who have worked hard to develop a harmonious environment will reject. Harmony is not only nice, it is highly profitable and rewarding. Valuing a pleasant environment is not only good for morale, it is necessary for sustainable success.

John Ross

Conciergecontactcenter.com

Across the board, ask any businessperson which part of business is the most challenging and one resounding response will come back: EMPLOYEES! It is a general complaint and it covers a multitude of iniquities on the part of the employee and on the part of the employer. When I say the employees cause problems in the hiring process, I mean they must take responsibility for how well and how honestly they represent themselves on paper and during interviews. When I say employers can cause problems in the hiring process, I mean they must take responsibility for how well and how honestly they present the culture of the workplace. 

The employees’ part of the hiring equation will not be discussed here, because employers -the intended readers of this blog- cannot control any part of what applicants decide to write in a résumé or to say in interviews. What employees can do is to articulate their businesses’ customary practices and the underlying values of those practices. 

Needless to say, what happens in a dental practice is not subjected to the corrosive effects of outsourcing seen in Ford or General Motors, but the industry has been in a fairly precipitous rate of change over the last couple of decades. Consider how much has changed in restorative dentistry based on technological breakthroughs in imaging, making impressions, introduction of titanium and other advanced materials related to just implantation over the last 40 years. It has changed from a rarified and costly procedure to a common offering in a large number of practices. However, the basic need has not changed and neither has the underlying value that a dental practice has espoused by offering the service: a permanently restored mouth that allows countless patients recover from the effects of injury and disease, resulting in a vastly improved life for the patient. 

Practitioners need to commit to paper the values on which they justify the existence of their practices, such as the abovementioned one. By articulating these values that form the business culture from the very beginning of the first interview, employers let applicants know what is expected of them in the operation and they will know why the practice does what it does. Employees who are not aware of those values will never truly understand and buy-into the way the office works. Also, if there is something an applicant cannot agree to relating to the practice’s culture, then it is better for the employer know immediately, rather than to find out later. 

The last point that I would like to make is that the description of a business’ culture has a way of helping an employer have a point of reference from which an applicant’s potential for success can be assessed. Though the process may slow down how quickly a new person is hired to the team, it will produce better staff members who are better suited for long term satisfaction for both the employer and the employee.

I leave you with a few key questions Brent Gleeson offer his is INC article “The 1 Thing All Great Bosses Think About During Job Interviews” (https://www.inc.com/brent-gleeson/how-important-is-culture-fit-for-employee-retention.html).

• Why do you believe you are the best candidate to work here, outside of your technical expertise?
• From what you have seen, how would you describe this company’s culture?
• How would you describe the culture of your previous workplace? How well do you believe you fit in?
• What’s most important to you about an ideal workplace environment?

Gleeson’s questions cut right to the heart of the question about how aware the applicant is of an operation’s culture, and how compatible the future employee would be working in that specific business culture.

In the end, the articulation of the business culture creates a level of uniformity of behavior, expectation and symbiotic cohesion for all employees. But until these pillar beliefs are written down and understood and accepted by the staff, the practice will remain rudderless and always under threat of internal dissention. Once everyone is on the same page, applicants who do not fit into the system become easier to identify and to avoid.  

John Ross

John@conciergecontactcenter.com 

Anyone who has been in the workforce for any length of time at all, invariably runs across people absolutely in love with their jobs, who repeat the platitude that When you love your job, you never work a day in your life. What I have noticed about these people that it is better to be one than to be around one. If you are around one, all you do is wonder how they do it, so years ago, I decided to study the person who was constantly happy at work.

Originally I thought that this rare person had a lessened workload than those who consistently grumbled about their jobs, but found that that was not the case. Most often happy workers had the same or more of a workload than did the grumblers. In life the willing and competent are frequently given more of the load precisely because they are cooperative and easy to work with.

Then I suspected that the happy group was getting more compensation or privileges than the unhappy workers, but in most cases were not receiving any scaled up benefits. No, there seemed to be no obvious monetary advantage that inspired these workers’ contentment.

So I began asking the people that seemed to enjoy their work, what it was that kept them energized and happy. Over the years several characteristics began to emerge as common traits of these people. The first is they cared enough for their own wellbeing that they would not choose paths in their lives that ran contrary to their nature. That is the beginning of the habit of making decisions with the intention of not putting themselves in situations that caused them to feel constantly inadequate, out of step and uncertain of their place in the system. They made these decisions for themselves and did not let others’ opinions weaken their resolve.

The second trait was knowing what kind of life they wanted and what they were ready to do to attain it. They worked toward that goal in their studies, training and continuing education. They all have said that when they kept true to their plans, they remained motivated to make the necessary sacrifices and investments to get to where they wanted to be. This gives meaning to what they are doing to build their futures.

Finally, the last trait that seemed strange to me at first, was the decision to just be happy during their lives. They were no Pollyannas, blindly greeting every day with unrealistic enthusiasm. Like everyone else, they had suffered the unpleasant, disillusioning losses and hurts that are essential parts of the human experience. However, they embraced the belief that they could not stay down and defeated whenever hard times that would come into their lives. They understood that sadness, loneliness, loss and failure are going to happen, and they could either give into despair, or rejoin life wiser and ready to move onward toward their goals. All correspondents agreed that in the end they decided they could accept defeat and be unhappy, and felt compelled to regroup and embrace happiness. Each saw it as a decision to default to being happy, no matter what trouble they experienced in their personal or professional life.

In summary, my observations are the following:  1. Know yourself well enough to make decisions that put you in the best positions that fit your natural strengths and predilections, and let no one define those for you.  2. Clarify your desires and goals and make the necessary sacrifices or investments to get you where you want to be. 3. Choose happiness as your default attitude toward life, and no matter what disappointments you suffer, find your way back to happiness.

If this sounds like a commencement speech, it is just that I believe that whether you are 17 and trying to find a career (for example in dentistry), or you are 57 and trying to find a way to retire from decades of dentistry, the process remains the same; make good decisions that fit your nature, make the necessary sacrifices and investments to reach your goals, and choose happiness as your default attitude in the face of all of life’s challenges.

John Ross

By way of my own professional journey, I have had the good fortune of having three careers in my life. Before graduating in 1979 from the University of Georgia, my brother and I purchased an old plant nursery that had been destroyed in a tornado. We got it for a song and rebuilt it. As that business grew, I did a master’s degree and a doctorate. In 1999, I sold out my stock in the plant nursery to my brother and accepted an academic position in the University of Georgia in my old department as a lecturer; a post funded by the Department of Romance Languages and the Terry School of Business. I taught business Spanish and business culture for working in the Hispanic world. In 2010 Lynette and I started R & C Consulting which we turned into the Concierge Contact Center. As it grew, I maintained my academic job until the summer of 2016, when I retired and came to give a fulltime effort with Lynette. We are now more than eight years in this process. I can honestly say that the lessons in this blogs were the result of years of effort on my own path, and I can report that I am still happy and excited about what will happen next.John@conciergecontactcenter.com

A lot of times, I talk to Doctors and office managers that say “We are not a very busy office” on the first sales call. My initial thought after hearing this is always, Is that by choice? I go on to ask how they market the practice, what their referral programs are like, how often is the office open, and where are calls going when the staff can’t answer? Although they answer my questions, they are not confident about their answers.

Why are these potential clients not very busy? Maybe it is a Doctor close to retiring and wants to slow down or maybe it is preferred by the doctor to be a small practice that is only open three days a week. Most of the time, however, it is because their marketing isn’t consistent or efficient or phone calls from patients are being missed. There are countless resources out there to help you with marketing your practice. You should know that if you take the step to change your marketing game, you also must make sure those calls are being answered.

We had a client that closed one Monday, a day that they are typically open on. Therefore, we took all their calls that came in that day. In a 24-hour period, we took 113 existing patient calls, 13 new patient calls and one emergency call.  Let’s say that they didn’t use our services or didn’t have an answering machine, or maybe the office had an answering machine but over half the callers decided not to leave a message. An average new patient appointment is $400, give or take. Because they didn’t answer their phones that day, they are potentially missing out on $5,200! What if that one emergency call didn’t get handled? Depending on what the issue was, the office would have missed out on a potential $2,500. Keep in mind, this is just one day. Imagine the value of the patient’s potential lifetime with you.

Your marketing is out there 24/7 so when someone sees your ad and need your services, they are going to call then, whether you’re open, closed, at lunch or busy with a patient in the office. I always tell clients that the phone is the most important piece of equipment in the office. Not a fancy chair or top of the line dental tools. Although these things are great, a patient in need wants a voice on the other end that could help them in that moment. They want the comfort of being able to call their dentist and make an appointment for the toothache they’ve been experiencing for two days, no matter the time of the call. That is going to help them make their decision to spend their money with you, more than any fancy chair.

Guest Blogger: Shea Davis

In every dental publication, forum or blog, dentists are bombarded by the necessity of marketing their practices to the public. Every marketing agent from billboards and postcards to algorithm-driven social media campaigns are pushing their wares, guaranteeing results from their media-generated lead production. As for the veracity of those claims, that is a discussion for another day (after all, marketers are marketing their goods and services as much as you are yours). Suffice it to say, and I quote a wise friend of mine who said, “Marketing involves information that is in the vicinity of truth.” 

One thing that we can all agree on is that the goal of any marketing campaign is to bring leads into your office who will become patients who pay, stay and refer. If this is the goal, then why do many dentists never see the growth in new patients they expect? If your marketing company is smart, it will provide you one or more dynamic tracking numbers so they can see exactly when anyone responds to their campaign. Then they will deliver you the bad news: “We generated more than the number leads we guaranteed, but your office could not convert them into patients on the initial phone call or live chat.” They will have the call logs, and some will have recorded calls to prove that they did send you the leads, but your office either failed to convert them, or never answered the calls that came in during afterhours. This is the breakdown in the marketing system that so few people fail to understand. Providing your office with leads is what they guarantee, converting them into patients is your job. And let’s be honest, most traditional staff members are not good at selling the office and inviting leads into the office for appointments.

How to fix the problem has be the subject of many experiments and frustrations. The original idea was forwarding the office number to a cell phone and then having an employee take the phone home to answer afterhour calls. That works fine in some states, but not in all. In some states, anyone who takes a phone home is to be paid every hour they are responsible for the phone. When discovered, the owed overtime, tax liability and possible fines can be catastrophic to the unsuspecting practice. As we go to a work-at-home telecommuter workforce, more of these laws are being passed in more and more states. Some practice-owners will use traditional answering services, but those call handlers are limited to taking messages and have no idea of how convert an inquiring lead into a scheduled new patient. Also, answering services are not set up to handle chats or texts.

What many people do not understand about marketing to the public is that once you start a modern advertising campaign, then you have to be able to answer calls 24/7 because the internet is a 24/7 medium. Leads will not call when it is convenient for you, but when it is convenient for them. At our contact center we handle calls and texts 24 hours a day, afterhours, weekends and holidays, and we schedule new patients directly into your practice management software. We send you a text and/or email to let you know every time you get a new patient scheduled. 

So, if you have one office or dozens of offices, we can get your phone covered and keep new patients coming into your office while you and your staff enjoy your time off. You will no longer have calls and chats disappear into the marketing gap from the leads your advertising campaigns generate.

John Ross

Six years ago, we began offering a phone handling service package called The Ringless Office. The idea sprang from working with smaller understaffed dental offices that were losing patients because they could not keep up with their current client calls, and had problems bringing in new patients to the practice. Our product was popular and helped rejuvenate practices stifled by the workload. Suddenly the in-office front office staff were no longer plagued with constant calls and could focus on the patients in the waiting area. They were free to make benefits confirmation calls to insurance companies and to confirm appointments. Because of the phones being answered for them, onsite customer satisfaction went up, collections went up and the front office became calmer and nicer. Suddenly new patients began filling the practice’s empty schedule slots because our trained, professional agents are taught to get them in as soon as possible. 

Since then, we have helped those new practices who have yet to hire enough staff, those who have purchased practices with inept or tiny front office staffs, those who have suddenly lost their staff, or those who discover that their front office cannot convert callers into new patients. When medium and large practices sign up for our service packages, we do not offer our Ringless Officeoption because they usually have numbers of trained call handlers. Typically, they sign up for the corporate rate and use us as a backup during peak hours, during the workday, and for all after-hour and weekend calls. What occasionally happens is that for the first month the plan works out as expected. Sometimes, however, the staff realizes that they are no longer losing calls and that our agents are rescheduling current patients and scheduling more new patients. The front office becomes complacent and begins to relax. They let more and more calls rollover to us. The second month there will be an overcharge because they have given in to the temptation to let-the-call-center-answer-it attitude. We always call when a new client is about to exceed its prepaid plan, and that will usually get the staff to snap out of it and return to taking their own workday calls. There have been a few times when the front office just doesn’t care, and by the third month we are handling most of their calls, as if they had subscribed to the Ringless Officeplan. When practice owners receive the third bill that has swelled in the volume of minutes, they call us upset. 

This puts us in a bind because we have warned them when they are about to exceed the prepaid minutes and either they do not ever receive this warning because the front office not passed on to the owners our warning about exceeding the prepaid minutes, or they see how many new patients we have scheduled in the first two months and have calculated the slight increase they got in the previous month was worth the extra cost. But when the office staff uses us as a Ringless Officeinstead of a supplemental service (as originally intended), then higher overcharges may occur. 

So what are the options for the practice owner? First, make certain we have your direct email, personal text number and a phone line that no other staff members can access. We promise we will communicate with you when you are approaching your predetermined limit. We will let you know if your limit is about to be exceeded, until your monthly usage stabilizes. We have experienced situations when the emails we have sent and the calls we have attempted to make have never reached the owner. Second, look at your results. What many practices find is that new patient numbers increase when we take over. If this is the positive effect you wanted, then either let us get you a dedicated “new patient” phone number to attach to all your marketing material) from your mailers to your webpage and conventional and social media campaigns. Then during the workday, your staff can answer all the other calls, and we will handle the new patient calls. That way they can better handle their peak hours themselves, while we relieve them of the important work of scheduling new patients. After all that is in our area of specialty. We will still cover all after-hour, weekend and holiday calls to your office and for marketing campaigns 24/7. (And of course, in the event of an emergency in the practice, we will be there as your fulltime call service until your practice can return to normal operation.) The weekday minutes will shrink to expected levels, your staff will be doing the work they are paid to do, and you will increase your number of new patients.

John Ross