 December 1, 2018
By: Trude Henderson Over the years, I have visited numerous dental and medical practices (as part of my work as a dental and medical consultant and startup co-founder), as well as spas (for pleasure). Based on observations culled from these experiences, as well as my gleanings from ToothFairy’s 3-year pilot study, I have reached a conclusion that I would like to share with you - too much silence and a lack of empathy will make your competition easier to accept than your treatment! My recent experience at a spa, described below, has prompted me to blog about this topic, not only because the same patterns have surfaced and re-surfaced several times during our pilot study of dental practices in the Western US, but because I feel so strongly about the close relationship between a great customer experience (one that’s memorable and consistently good) and the longevity of your practice. After all, the customer experience is about how you make people feel! In this introductory blog, I will briefly mention the first of what we believe are several ‘root causes’ of too much silence, and not enough empathy, in your practice. Then, in Parts 2 and 3, I will elaborate, drawing on my experience working with High Reliability Organizations (HROs), and on the results of the pilot study. My Visit to a Spa last month, while visiting a city in Texas, I chose a spa for a day of pampering. As usual, I checked the popular social media sites, carefully perusing reviews until a spa with 69 reviews and averaging a 5-star rating caught my eye. I said to myself, “This is the one, just what I’m looking for” and booked an appointment for what I was sure would be several hours of serene contentment. Almost immediately upon my arrival the following day, however, I sensed with shock that the experience I had anticipated was probably not going to materialize: as I set foot inside the room, the silence was deafening. I had to wait another 5 minutes to be greeted, as there was another customer being waited on, and then when it finally did come, it was in the form of a nondescript, apathetic-sounding voice behind the counter droning, “Please have a seat, it’s going to be a while.” As I was shuffled from one place to another, I hoped that this was only another bad day for one employee, but then I overheard two people talking in the breakroom and I realized that one of them was the owner of the spa, busy preparing my coffee. As I sat in a hallway equipped solely with bar stools (whose idea was to it to offer only bar stools to spa patrons?) waiting for my upcoming procedure, the owner handed me a cup of coffee, a packet of sweetener, a spoon and a half-gallon of creamer! All I could do was snicker and ask myself, “What am I supposed to do with all of this?” Based on these preliminaries, you can easily draw your own conclusions about how well my experience ended, but I just want to add that my first minutes in the spa exhibited, to an extraordinary degree, a lack of the attention to detail and mindfulness that one would expect to see at a spa. It should surprise no one that there is a steady and noticeable increase in competition in the dental industry, as the number of practicing dentists is “projected to grow by 18% from 2014 to 2024, a much faster rate than the average for all occupations” (U.S. News Staff, 2016). So, it is easy to understand why the need to show more value and beat the competition couldn’t be more important. In addition, corporate dentistry has experienced explosive growth over the past few years. Our research reveals that fees are the focus and prospective corporate buyers are not only rewarding owners with higher valuations, but showing a willingness to pay more. The reasons for this, says practice transition expert Roger K. Hill (Hill, 2016): “In some cases they want to enter or gain market share in a particular area, but in most cases, they are confident that they can significantly increase profit potential of the practice through making management changes.” In other words, they believe that many practice leaders leave too much money on the table, and that by cleaning up the business, they can reap big rewards! In an article entitled Crunch the Numbers, well-known orthodontist and international speaker, Dr. Ben Burris, DDS, MSD, substantially agrees will Hill: “Most orthodontists’ gut reaction is that the only way to compete is to compete on fee” (Burris, 2016). Hill’s take on this is that instead of lowering fees in response to a declining close ratio, practice leaders should look at other factors, as the data shows that the top two concerns patients have that are under management control are “quality and comfort.” This was certainly the case of the spa I visited last month. We would also like to make the point again that, essential as it is, technical competence will not by itself enable your dental practice to enjoy its full potential. This leads us into the first ‘root cause’ of too much silence and lack of empathy - a lack of leadership - which, with the others, we will discuss in our next blog. For more information about High Reliability Organizational concepts, read our previous blogs: Works CitedBabcock & Wilcox Technical Services LLC. (2008). High Reliability Operations: A Practical Guide to Avoid the System Accident. Amarillo: U.S. Department of Energy. Burris, B. D. (2016, July 14). Crunch the Numbers. Retrieved from http://orthopundit.com/treatment-fee-vs-conversion-data/ Hill, R. (2016, Feb). McGill Advisory Articles. Retrieved from McGill & Hill Group:http://www.mcgillhillgroup.com/content_display.asp?id=2147 U.S. News Staff. (2016, January). Careers. Retrieved from U.S. News & World Report:http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-best-jobs Read our blogs about HROTen Steps You Can Take Right Away to Improve the Reliability of Your Dental Practice High Reliability Concepts: Insights of Value to any organization. Trude Henderson is the co-founder of ToothFairy, a startup elective dental and medical practice improvement software company which delivers an unparalleled customer experience that inspires delight, loyalty and positive emotional connections to improve the lives of patients and the practices they visit. In 2016, she was the first to introduce High-Reliability Organizational Concepts to the dental industry. For questions, contact her directly at Trude@GetToothFairy.com. Follow Trude on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trudehenderson/ (no email required). Go to ToothFairy's website: www.ToothFairySoftware.com.
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 Includes a Bonus: 3 tips on how to demonstrate more compelling value in your dental practice August 25, 2018
By: Trude Henderson In today’s blog, the last in a three-part series, we will deal with the “Attention Cluster” of emotions as enumerated and described by Colin Shaw, and how your dental practice should address them. Interested, Energetic, Stimulated, Exploratory and Indulgent are the chief emotions found in this group, and are the ones most likely to generate only short-term spending if not properly handled (which includes that first call). Properly dealt with, however, these feelings can have a tremendous effect on a dental practice’s cash flow and overall success. In the course of its 3-year pilot study, ToothFairy has gathered and reviewed tens of thousands of data points relating to this cluster of emotions at orthodontic practices in the Western US. Overall, the study revealed that 43% of new patients are eager to start treatment on day-one and 72% within 7 days. This validates our research, so we recommend that you put strategies in place to ensure that your practice attempts to convert patients within this critical 7-day window. This result from ToothFairy’s pilot study helped leaders in one practice pinpoint a problem and develop a strategy that improved their conversion ratio by 27% within only 6 months. Although 70% of the patients in this office indicated via our consumer profiling platform that they were ready to start treatment within 7 days, less than 40% of them actually did so. Upon closer examination, via data reviews and interviews with patients and Treatment Coordinators (TCs), it was discovered that the key reason why these patients disengaged or delayed the start of treatment was that TCs and doctors didn’t communicate compelling value and/or identify emotional triggers and buying motivations during the exam/consultation. Then, after patients left the practice without starting treatment, a secondary problem occurred - staff failed to follow up. Below are three tips that can help you utilize the “Attention Cluster” to demonstrate more compelling value, resulting in an increased number of dental patient conversions.
As patients have more options open to them than ever before, it’s important for everyone in a dental practice to understand and appreciate the value the practice has to offer, and to act quickly and with confidence to convert patients. This is best accomplished through inspirational leadership, management of the practice’s systems and ample patient follow up. If patients don’t grasp what you have to offer right away, they might choose a competitor whom they believe provides better value. That competitor may be right next door or on in another state, but there are people prepared to travel to get better value. Shaw’s takeaway: these critical 20 emotions, divided into the 4 clusters, have an important influence on your customer experience, in ways that are not always at first apparent. Once, however, you understand the type of emotional engagement you have established with your customers and how it drives or destroys value for your organization, you can design an emotional experience, not leave it to chance. We at ToothFairy want to leave you with the following to chew on: The reality is that practices will lose some patients no matter what, but why not try to convert and retain as many as you can by taking proactive measures that help promote patient loyalty? Staff and doctors need to understand the simple fact that what they say and do directly impacts patient loyalty and their production goals. Finally, they should remember that when it comes to dental treatment, much of which consists of elective procedures, today’s patient has a host of options, and if unhappy with the treatment he/she is receiving, can blithely get up and go somewhere else. --Read Part (1) Advocacy and Recommendation Clusters --Read Part (2) Destroying Cluster --Read our other articles on topics such as Operational Excellence and High-Reliability Concepts: Ten Steps You Can Take Right Away to Improve the Reliability of Your Dental Practice High-Reliability Concepts: Insights of Value to any organization. Trude Henderson is the co-founder of ToothFairy, a startup elective dental and medical practice improvement software company which delivers an unparalleled customer experience that inspires delight, loyalty and positive emotional connections to improve the lives of patients and the practices they visit. In 2016, she was the first to introduce High-Reliability Organizational Concepts to the dental industry. For questions, contact her directly at Trude@GetToothFairy.com. Follow Trude on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trudehenderson/ (no email required). Go to ToothFairy's website: www.ToothFairySoftware.com  Read more to find out how a huddle can have a tremendous impact on your practice improvement goals. August 6, 2018
By: Trude Henderson In his article, “Reliable Organizations: Present Research and Future Directions” (Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 55), Gene Rochlin defines a High-Reliability Organization (HRO) as an organization one that “conducts relatively error-free operations over a long period of time, making consistently good decisions that result in high quality and reliable operations.” The industries that initiated the use of HRO concepts included aviation, nuclear power, manufacturing and the military. Although vastly different in their very nature from dental practices, the high-performing organizations in these sectors offer a plethora of valuable insights to any dental practice wishing to consistently accomplish its practice improvement goals. Below are some basic High-Reliability Organization (HRO) principles and behaviors that you, the dental practice leader, should keep in mind if you want to make your practice more reliable and get closer to achieving your goals. 1) Encourage transparency. People who are open and honest generally inspire greater esteem and confidence than others. This applies to dental practice leaders and employees alike. Be sure to reward employees who model these behaviors. 2) Get continuous feedback and listen carefully. This can result in better decision-making, because it will help team members learn more, improve their processes in real-time and reduce the number of inconsistencies. The latter, plus a lack of swift issue resolution, can lead dental patients, (especially millennial ones!) to change providers in a heartbeat. Be sure to listen carefully during the feedback process. When employees feel that they are ignored, they may become disengaged. 3) Maintain a keen awareness of operations and systems. Pay close attention to what is and what is not working. Be deeply concerned about complacency, routine and a lack of employee engagement. In short, be aware that “when you lose focus, you lose value.” 4) Ask “Why?” as many times as necessary to get to the bottom of any issue. Dental practices are very busy, oftentimes resulting in a casual approach to problem-solving. This, in turn, can lead to the gratuitous repetition of unwanted incidents and mistakes that can be detrimental to your practice improvement strategy and a blatant waste of organizational resources. 5) Strive to de-stigmatize failure by communicating the importance of viewing challenges and negative feedback as opportunities for improvement. And remember to reward this behavior! 6) Provide frequent opportunities for meaningful conversations and collaboration. Connecting with employees is more valuable than most dental practice managers realize. Sharing ideas gives your employees a sense of purpose, beneficial alike to the individual, the team and the practice as a whole. James Kouzes, co-author of The Leadership Challenge said it best: "The best way to lead people into the future is to connect with them deeply in the present." 7) Try to discuss and resolve issues on-the-spot, rather waiting for the occasional conference room meeting, but make sure that such exchanges are out of earshot of your patients. A daily huddle, if well-executed, can be one of the most effective leadership tools and have a tremendous impact on your customer experience as well as your dental practice production. A good, five-minute huddle can be more effective than a twenty-minute, poorly executed one. 8) Draw on experts, and/or on simply knowledgeable people, to help you solve problems. Research indicates that such individuals can best identify trends and meaningful patterns in the course of your dental practice improvement journey. 9) When hiring and promoting employees, keep an eye open for people who appear resilient in confronting obstacles. They can be your best cheerleaders, as well as thinking up new ideas that can lead to an improvement in dental practice production! 10) Say ‘Thank you!’ often, as it can help foster resilience. Employees who feel appreciated are more likely to endure the inevitable bumps in the road while continuing to move forward, directly impacting your patients. Dental practice management is challenging, but by cultivating an ‘attitude of gratitude’ you increase the likelihood of team success! To conclude: always being mindful of where you are now, and where you hope to be, helps you fill in the gaps and hopefully, achieve the practice improvement goals you set for your dental practice. Read our other articles on topics such as Leadership, Operational Excellence and High-Reliability Concepts: High-Reliability Concepts: Insights of Value to any organization. Trude Henderson is the co-founder of ToothFairy, a startup elective dental and medical practice improvement software company which delivers an unparalleled customer experience that inspires delight, loyalty and positive emotional connections to improve the lives of patients and the practices they visit. In 2016, she was the first to introduce High-Reliability Organizational Concepts to the dental industry. For questions, contact her directly at Trude@GetToothFairy.com. Follow Trude on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trudehenderson/ (no email required). Go to ToothFairy's website: www.ToothFairySoftware.com. |
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