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7 Steps of Complaint Handling

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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..

Welcome to Recall System Pro's Blog

Over the past 20 years, along with my wife and business partner Heather Sparrow, we have operated a dental practice management consulting firm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

As consultants, our primary focus has been to assist dentists and their teams to maximize the productivity of their practices while providing patients with the highest standards of treatment, service and care possible. No easy task. 

It’s not easy dealing with the complexities and demands of managing a busy dental practice, running a successful business and consistently providing patients with high standards of care.

Over time and after many hard earned lessons, we came to understand that patient recall was one of the most important systems to the overall success of dental practices. Not only did patient recall have a beneficial impact on the dental health of patients, recall systems also drove hygiene and restorative revenues and had a direct impact on patient retention and practice growth. We realized that if you took care of patient recall, practice productivity and other key factors that determine the long term success of dental practices, simply start falling into place. As a result, we decided to make patient recall a primary focus of our consulting practice. 

On the other side of the coin, we also came to understand that patient recall was one of the most difficult and challenging systems for dental practices to get a handle on.  Practices tended to struggle with a number of costly and time consuming problems with the most challenging being slippage. Recall systems are notoriously subject to slippage and by the time you figure out you have a problem, it takes months to correct. In the meantime, dental teams are trapped having to deal with empty chairs, lost revenues and high doses of stress over prolonged periods.

As a result of these problems, it became clear to us that under-performing recall systems were costing dental practices hundreds of thousands in lost revenues annually.  Practices simply did not have the systemization or tools they needed to put an end to these challenges and take advantage of the difference a well run recall system could make. 

In response, we developed a comprehensive patient recall system to assist our clients to effectively deal with these problems and fully benefit from recall. Our system eventually played a major role in our clients success and as challenging as it was to systemize recall, it was  equally rewarding to see the difference an effective recall system could make for practice productivity and growth.

We are dedicating this blog to providing all of the information we can to assist dental teams to take advantage of the benefits of patient recall and maximize the growth of their  practices. We hope you will join us and we are always open for questions or comments.