But in our “New Age Thinking” as we think about customers and customer service, I’m suggesting you and your team, as part of your ‘achieving excellence’ mindset, start thinking of cutstomers in a different way. Would you think of your customers as your boss? A customer, for our purposes is going to be anyone who receives the goods or services that we provide. Anyone! Sometimes it is my boss. Sometimes it is one of my co-workers. Sometimes it is a patient, a colleague, a lab person, a dealer rep., or one of my peers. All of these people measure you every day. They measure your commitment to creating quality. They measure your commitment to your philosophy, they measure your commitment to your goals, and they measure your commitment to achieving excellence. And if you want to achieve excellence you have to start thinking a great deal about not only objective, measurable things such as fillings, crowns, appointments, xrays, cleanings or insurance forms, but also about the subjective judgments people make. Because subjective quality says this; what you really deliver can only be judged by the recipient, by the end user.
Most of us think our performance is appraised once a year because we get an annual performance appraisal, or maybe in some offices, we get an appraisal every six months. The secret in the achieving excellence practice is — not only do we recognize that we are, in fact, being appraised all day, every day as we work, but they actively go out and seek information from people in order to find out “how am I doing?”
Now let’s talk about outside and inside customers. The question we need to ask is: What are some of the criteria that your outside patients use to judge your effectiveness: attitude, integrity, friendliness, enthusiasm, personality, or spontaneity? There are objective ways people are measured, but many, if not most, are subjective. There are lots of subjective ways to be measured by your external customers. Now let’s look at our internal customers. i. e. co-workers, peers, salespeople, etc. What are some of the ways they measure your commitment to excellence? What kind of words come to mind: attitude, integrity, personality, enthusiasm? Most of the same things.
So what is the challenge? The challenge for us is to recognize that sometimes, in our dealings with our external customers we spend more time in the courtship, more effort on the courtship than we do after the marriage takes place. We need to understand that after the customer is a customer, after the staff member is on board full-time, we need to spend every bit as much time or even more time focusing in on care, on sensitivity, on quality, on understanding and on compassion.
How many of us actively seek out information on a regular basis from our patients? From my experience, not too many. We need to begin a process that has been called “nave listening.” What is it? Nave listening is careful listening without responding. Nave listening is listening to a complaint, a comment, a suggestion or an idea. And the best thing I can do when someone offers information is to say “Oh really, tell me more. What else should I hear? What else do you feel?” But what do we typically do? Too often say “Oh, well let me tell you why you’re wrong or let me tell you why your idea won’t work.” So when you practice real customer service you come to the realisation that perception is reality, and if people perceive that you’re delivering a good product, then by gosh, it’s a good product. But even if you have a good product that people perceive isn’t being delivered that way, then it’s probably not a good product or not as good as it needs to be in order to get the customer to come to you for that product or service.
The question now is “how can we begin nave listening? Tom Peters in his landmark book “A Passion for Excellence” recommends a “daily dose of reality policy.” And that daily dose of reality policy goes like this: Every day, I will contact a few of my customers. I will contact a few of my external customers and I will contact a few of my internal customers and I will ask them “how am I doing? What am I doing right? What do you feel I am doing wrong? How can I better serve you? What else do you need from us?” All of those types of questions that stimulate that customer to give you information that they already have and want to share, but have thought “he won’t care, he won’t listen, he won’t have time, she won’t know, she’s too busy” — whatever. Think about instituting a daily dose of reality policy into your practice and think about the impact of this. If each person on the team does this twice a day and you have six staff people and they work 200 days a year, 6 X 2 X 200 = 2,400 per year. It’s like instant market analysis.
You now know a tremendous amount about your market — and then you can begin to sense what innovation, what change, what redirection needs to take place. Think about instituting a daily dose of reality policy into your practice. But if you do — remember you are going to hear some unusual responses — because people have unusual perceptions and when you get those unusual responses you will have to begin to love and accept them for their idiosyncrasies.
When you are focusing on quality details you recognize that people have surprising perceptions and we have to start thinking about their idiosyncrasies because each of us is an end user. Each of us is the other person’s customer. How do we use these thoughts? We establish a policy of “relationship management.” Relationship management is a term coined by Dr. Theodore Levitt who is Professor of Marketing for the Harvard School of Business. Relationship management is a way of saying “once the sale is made, once the marriage is affected” — we have to keep up that relationship and really manage it.
We have to actively nurture it, feed it, fertilize it and water it. We have to strive to keep mindful of the fact that in order for a relationship to grow we have to put an awful lot of attention into it. And we do that through personal contact. When the people in the practice begin to build real relationships they begin to build real commitment, and when you combine patient commitment with staff commitment you have an unbeatable dental office.
Dr. Ken James practices in Kent, WA. His practice grosses more than $3 million annually and sees more than 500 new patients a year. The hygiene segment of the practice is reported to be one of the largest in North America and grosses over 1.3 million dollars per year. The practice has had 135 quarters of record growth with some years topping $250,000 in increases. Dr James graduated in Business Management from Brigham Young University.
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Most of us think of customers as people who are outside of our organization and who pay us for either goods or service.
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When you combine patient commitment with staff commitment you have an unbeatable dental office
