Practice Management for Dentists, Personal Responsibility

You’ve undoubtedly heard the story of the family suing the fast-food restaurant chain for making them obese, right? And the story of the lady suing McDonalds for the hot coffee being too hot?

It’s absurd.

It all boils down to taking personal responsibility.

As owners/CEOs of your own practice, you have to take full, 100% responsibility for every single action (or NON-action) taking place in your business.

Matters not if it is marketing, staff, equipment, software, whatever. You are responsible for it.

Let’s take the routing/handling of incoming phone calls. Ultimately, it’s the business owner’s responsibility to ensure each and every single phone call is handled properly.

Whether it’s selling an appointment (YES, these HAVE to be sold - just because someone calls your practice DOESN’T mean you are going to see them as a patient later in the week!) or resceduling an appointment, make darn sure you have your best, nicest, friendliest staff person on the phone taking those calls.

If you don’t, your patient numbers will reflect it.

In fact, one of my private coaching clients running two practices found this out the hard way. The overall new patient numbers began to drop. Because he watched his stats on a weekly basis, he caught it, acted, and corrected the problem. What he found was the person answering the calls had poor phone etiquette in addition to NOT selling the patient on the appointment.

If you caught Olga the Grump on the phone, so did a COUPLE of prospective patients.

ACTION-TO-TAKE TIP: How is your staff answering YOUR phone? Sometime this week when you are out of the office, call and see how they sound!