Essential Patient Service Requirements

1. Greeting of patients is prompt / professional / warm.
2. Staff are friendly and quick to establish rapport.
3. Practice is clean and well organized at all times.
4. Appointments start on time.
5. Procedures are explained to patients before treatment begins.
6. Patients are comfortable and provided with gentle dental care.
7. Changes in scheduled treatment or treatment plans are explained.
8. Patients do not have to return for unscheduled adjustments.
9. Patients are not kept waiting to be dismissed.
10. Patients are provided with treatment and financial information.
11. Patients do not experience financial surprises.

If you'd like the complete patient service resource sent to you, click here and download "Patient Service Excellence".

Presence vs Time

Providing outstanding service and creating valuable relationships with patients does not need to take a lot of time - it requires providing patients with undivided attention when they are in your practice.  Being present to patients in the short time you may be with them.

Service research demonstrates that the smallest of things can make the biggest difference when it comes to patient service satisfaction:

• Patients receiving undivided attention.
• Patients feeling appreciated that they are patients of your practice.
• Patients feeling they are being listened to.
• Staff anticipating and supporting patients to deal with problems or concerns that may occur.

Patients know when there is stress in a practice and if they are not being paid attention to.  They may not be able to voice it but they know when it is occurring.   Patients also know when the opposite is occurring - when your team is paying attention to them and they are wowed by it.

Patients are wowed when they are paid attention to by any team member on a visit.  When patients are paid attention to by each and every team member they come into contact with on a visit - they typically cannot stop talking about your practice for a day or two because of their experience of service excellence.

Systems play an important role in delivering service excellence to patients from two perspectives.  Well defined operating systems keep staff out of stress and better able to pay attention to patients on a day to day basis.  Well defined service systems also ensure your staff are paying attention to the things that matter most to your patients during their visits.

Maintaining Composure

Consistently delivering great dentistry while delivering great service is not an easy task to accomplish as an individual and it becomes even more complex and challenging as a group. 

One of the essential factors involved with providing high standards of service is your ability to maintain composure in the face of day to day problems and the ebbs and flows of daily activity.

Maintaining composure while focusing on problem solving and clearly communicating with teammates is the only effective method of dealing with problem situations without compromising the level of service provided to patients.

Rethinking Your Working Relationships

Achieving excellence in the treatment, service and care of patients requires that practices organize their view of work and working relationships around systems and processes versus job descriptions limited to a certain position or area.

Ones’ position in a practice is secondary to the role that one plays in the overall system of consistently delivering high standards of treatment, service and care to patients.  From a systems perspective, everyone plays an equal and important role in the process of providing treatment, service and care to patients and everyone is equally dependent upon everyone else in order to get the job done.

 “For organizations to excel, people have to understand it is in their collective best interests to cooperate; they must be more concerned with how the system as a whole operates versus just optimizing their own little piece.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Brian L. Joiner

Solutions to Service Problems

Depending on the type of service issues that surface with your patients, the following customer service strategies can be employed to resolve problem situations and maintain patient loyalty:

Apology / Empathy - Minor service problems or situations where the inconvenience or service problem cannot be corrected.  i.e., Wrong address, wrong billing, being late.

Urgent Effort / Attention - Commit to look into the customer’s complaint or special situation and assure the customer of your intention to resolve the problem.

Problem Resolution - Resolving the problem, offering an acceptable solution to the problem, meeting the customer’s request or requirements, negotiating an acceptable counter offer to the customer’s request, providing the customer with pertinent information.

Compensation - Honoring guarantees and / or similar service commitments.  Correcting the customer’s problem at the expense of the organization. In addition, compensating the customer for any inconvenience by offering a token of appreciation.

Going the Extra Mile - Be sure to follow up with the customer to ensure they are satisfied even once the problem is resolved. Is the customer is satisfied with the final outcome?

The Benefits of Patient Complaints

All organizations experience service problems and have areas in which they can improve. Successful service organizations:

• Understand where they experience problems in their service delivery.
• Consistently look to improve the service provided to their customers.
• Pro-actively seek complaints and feedback from customers.
• Train staff to effectively deal with service problems.

In order to encourage feedback from your patients, staff must be prepared to confidentiality deal with day to day service problems.  Most service staff are concerned about not being able to deal with particular types of service problems  or the possibility of a situation with a patient getting out of control (see my Complaint Handling Blog for tips). 

Complaints represent opportunities and signals from your patients that they are not happy and at the same time woo-able.  Only 4% of unhappy customers complain which means for every complaint you receive, 26 other patients experienced a similar problem without saying a thing.  Complaining patients give your practice an opportunity to put in a correction and keep their business.  95% of customers whose service complaints are dealt with quickly will purchase again.  Patients that do not complain typically vote with their feet.

Encourage complaining from your patients and support staff to actively seek out complaints without having to be concerned about being the bearers of bad news.

The Patient's Perspective

Although patients come into contact with different team members and different areas on a visit, from a patient’s perspective, it is all one continuous flow of experience that either leads to service satisfaction or service dissatisfaction.

Service excellence involves providing patients with one continuous flow of positive experience in their contact with each and every team member, in each and every area, on each and very visit. 

From a service perspective, it is essential to design a system so that every patients' experience is seamless between office, hygiene and restorative treatment areas.  This includes ensuring:

• Patients receive consistent attention during their visits.
• Patients are not dropped through cracks between office and clinic areas.
• Patients are not subjected to surprises or problems.
• Patients are kept informed about procedures throughout their visits.

In our upcoming blogs, we will talk more about the factors that lead to high levels of service satisfaction.

7 Steps of Complaint Handling

1. Maintain Composure

• Notice your emotional temperatiure - upset / defensiveness / negative assumptions and self talk.
• Breathe / exercise constraint / depersonalize the situation.
• Focus on the matters at hand / ask yourself good questions / begin to frame the problem.

2. Listen

• Do not interrupt – let the patient state the complaint.
• Listen for the central problem, issue, need or want vs. listening to the story, upset, or make wrong.

3. Acknowledge the situation and feelings.

• Thank the patient for voicing their complaint.
• Authentically apologize for the situation if appropriate – inconvenience, etc.
• Listening and acknowledging a patients issues is the first and most important step in resolving any problem situation.
• Empathize vs. Sympathize related to a patient's upset or feelings - I understand how you feel - does not mean you agree with how someone is feeling.

4. Restate the Problem / Probe For More Information

• Restating the problem insures you clarify what the problem is before proceeding to find a solution.
• Let me see if I understand your concern.  As I understand it________( restate the problem and what you perceive the patient needs or wants.)
• If you are unable to determine what the problem or issue may be, ask questions to better understand the situation (what happened?).

5. Propose A Solution / Commit to Getting Back to The Patient

• Propose a solution to the problem.
• Provide patients with information that would enable them to better understand or deal with a situation – policy or procedure guidelines.
• Commit to getting back to the patient if you require input from others – specific time.

6. Ask For Feedback Or Alternatives

• Would that work for you?
• How would you prefer to have the situation handled?
• What would you need to have happen in order to resolve the problem for you?

7. Restate Solution and Agreements

• Summarize the agreed solution to the situation and confirm any agreements reached related to time lines for solving the problem – I’ll do X by Y time..