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Happy awesome Monday, everybody!

We are switching up the format a little bit. You have probably noticed that we have missed a couple of weeks of blog posting, due to changes with some of our team members and team members taking on new responsibilities. This week we are going to do a post on Monday and then another one on Wednesday.

Today we are going to focus on creating a next level patient experience. So as you already know, I have travelled a lot, I went to many offices and everybody is looking for this next thing. What is the next thing? What is creating this new client experience? How can we do it? Is it coffee, or warm towels? How do we do these different things? In my opinion, it all comes down to people; and how your people treat your patients. One of the biggest things for me was creating a culture where my team come first. The better I serve my team, the better my team will take care of our clients. It’s always been my formula, it’s always been my strategy.

When I look at creating the next level patient experience, and what I’ve experienced myself at some of the top dental practices in the country, or at least some of the top practices that are clients of ZenSupplies, I see the same pattern every single time. The people that create the most unbelievable experiences for patients always start with their own team members. If you create a great positive environment in your team, you’ll get the same great positive environment for your patients.

Many people will say, “Ok, so how do I do that?”  If we break it down, there will be a few simple steps. One is morning huddles. By far, doing the morning huddle is the most important part. In addition, if I were the doctor, what I would do is take the responsibility to buy coffee for all team members every morning. I know that for some of the offices, depending on the size, it might be a bit of a financial stretch. However, doing this for the morning huddle would be special. It would mean, “She really cares about her team, or He really cares about his team”. How you start your morning huddle, will affect the culture, how you start your day and how you create the next level patient experience.

The next part will be knowing little details about your clients. Back in the day, I’m sure it happened with some of the offices, when you had little posted cards. Let’s take Susan who comes in to do cleaning. She might be in a chair and say, “My son is getting married this day; my daughter is this, and my dog is that”. And so when during your morning huddle you look at the schedule, and you look at your posted cards and say, “By the way, Susan had her son’s wedding two weeks ago, we need to find out how it went”. Asking those personal questions (and I’m not even mentioning knowing your patients by name to begin with) is going to be super critical. When your lead assistant or whoever is greeting patients at the front, says, “Hey Susan, how are you doing today? It’s so good to see you!” Then you bring the patient to the room, and when in the room, you’re going to go over some personal information. And when the doctor comes into the room, she/he is going to say, “Hey Susan, how are you doing? It was Matthew’s birthday/wedding a couple of weeks ago, how did it go? What did he say? How was the first dance?” Just take 2-3 minutes of your time to go over these things.

The second part I’ve learned from one of the most successful offices in Chicago, Dr. Steven Orser, DDS. What they do is, the assistant or the lead assistant pull the patient into a room. In the hallway, they have pictures of patients that completed the treatments, and it’s not just the mouth, but a whole person, smiling, with their spouse and kids. And they would stop at least 2 or 3 times and say, “Susan, this is Gloria. She did this and this. Look at her confident smile!”  And they will keep going. “This is Melony and she is smiling” and they will give a quick story on that. I feel like doing this hall of fame is super important to creating the next level patient experience.

There are a couple of hacks that I always suggest. If I were the doctor, what I would do early on, with all the social media, I would hire a part-time person in the office, the sole job of that person would be to look at the schedule the next day, go on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and look at the people’s posts. Most of them are going to be public, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of, look at what people post and what they are talking about, and create posted notes for the morning huddle. And this is going to be the responsibility of the hire that you are going to make. That’s going to be your chief emotion person, or the chief connecting person, or your community manager. I would literally call them the community manager or the community organizer; however you’d like to call them. This would be the person who would say, that this person is coming in for this procedure, and this is something we need to talk about because this is what happened and this is what I learnt about them, and that would create an intimate environment. So that’s going to be important to have a person who is dedicated to finding out and keeping track of information about your patients. That’s going to be awesome!

The second part of it is sharing. You’ve got to have your Instagram page, you’ve got to have your Facebook page, you’ve got to have your newsletters going out to your clients talking about the things that are going on. You want to establish yourself as the go-to person.

That’s all a part of creating the next level patient experience. There will be little hacks like coffee, warm towels, TV, but to be honest with you, the biggest will always be the people. And the people comes down to having a full or a part time person fully responsible for your community, and getting that community feel. They’re in charge of giving the information at the morning huddle about anybody and anything going on in your practice. You taking action on it is going to be ridiculously important.

Lastly, let’s say you have 1200 patients. Let’s say you find out that somebody is going through some hardships and you reach out and ask if you can help. You don’t have to do it for everybody, but one or two people every quarter – that would mean the world to them. They will talk a lot about you. And remember – you are in a 1.5-3 miles radius, the more unusual stuff you do, the more people will talk about you.

Hope this helps! Till next Wednesday!

Tiger Safarov

[Edited by Anna Ilyina]