I want you to imagine for a moment being at a movie, or a sporting event, or an amazing restaurant or Disney World or even your favorite place to shop.
No matter where you’ve chosen, you likely recall that feeling of being drawn in as you become one with the environment. This happens when your senses become engaged, your awareness becomes heightened and you are in a state of presence, of focus, of being – instead of thinking.
Last week, I promised the most powerful breakthrough in any practice is to recreate this for your patients – to go above and beyond making their experience just friendly or comfortable. Anyone can be nice to someone and get a person to ‘like’ them. It is an entirely different thing to have influence over a person so much that they are compelled to do what you suggest, follow what you recommend, desire what you can provide.
Yes, you need protocols, processes and systems. Yes, you must have proper business infrastructure. None the less, no matter how dialed in any of those things are – the real magic in your practice happens when patients get past dentistry as a transactional thing that happens to them (with a doctor and team that robotically go through protocols and steps).
Getting to the point where you really truly and fully engage your patients and they get to experience dentistry. This is possible; my doctors do it every single day and the goal should be to do it with every single patient.
Here’s why this matters so much…
If we give patients nothing else to base their decisions on – related to how they view, perceive and value dentistry – then they are going to default to a price, money, insurance based decision and that is the opposite of what we want them to do.
This results in practices getting the lowest level of dentistry and the easiest to reach dollars which never puts you into a real powerful and profitable position for your growth, the schedule, and the financial consistency that brings peace of mind to every Doctor.
Going back to your favorite experiences and thinking about the emotions that created and energy that is felt. Obviously, it can be different for a fine dining experience or a loud concert; a sporting event or a romantic movie; a theatrical play or an invigorating hike; a day of skiing or a long-awaited relaxing vacation.
Now, I’m not saying that you could ever perfectly replicate these feelings with a “Dental Experience” but if you were to describe how you felt during any of these events, that gives you something to build upon. The secret becomes when you can elevate the feelings your patient has at every step in your process so that you overcome any preconceived ideas or past experiences that are bringing mental, emotional, physical, or clinical baggage into your office.
You want anticipation for their visit but not anxiousness. This means you must provide reassurance and empathy from the first phone call forward.
You want a well-prepared patient with the proper paradigm of what to expect and what your practice is about. This means you have to reprogram (in many cases) by telling them exactly how and why you are different.
You want to properly position the doctor’s credibility in the patients’ minds and you want to share stories that set the tone and expectations of what a good patient does in your office.
You don’t want to default to a patient being “surprised” by things at the end of their visit. You want full patient involvement in everything from health history forms to photography, from the problems to the possibilities, from treatment planning to a vision that is tied to positive health outcomes that anyone would value.
Of course, you want to have a physical space that enhances your patient experiences – and that doesn’t have to be the nicest, the newest, the biggest – instead it just needs to be intentional, clean, organized, and homey yet professional. Most of all your environment must drive home and accentuate the experience.
I can’t think of anything more exciting than making your patient experiences more fun which ultimately leads to greater results and more patients saying yes. Imagine patients being happy to pay you because they have without question in their minds decided that you are the place to be. Your dental practice becomes their dental home because the relationship is founded on trust without the need for gimmicks or justification. They simply can’t get YOU or YOUR Experience anywhere else.
The best thing you can do is to un-dental-ize the traditional same-as-everybody-else clinical visit that is the opposite of a patient really wants to experience.
Remember people buy by emotion and justify by logic. How your experience FEELS from the phone call all the way through each one of the systems I outlined for you last week. Case acceptance is going to be infinitely easier if your patients feel good about what they just went through and about what is going to happen next.
This is about deliberate, methodical, transparent and authentic interactions with your Patients in a conducive environment to create feelings of positive energy that leads to an obvious outcome. Just like when you are at one of your fun events, the one thing we know is that you are not anywhere else – all of your senses and awareness are present with you in that moment.
And I can tell you, acceptance of the real life changing dentistry requires exactly this.
Next week, we’ll dissect experiences and I will show you how to enhance the value perception of your patients so that they will never be price sensitive or think something is “too expensive” again.
Once your Experience building blocks are in place, we now can refine the nuances and details that will take your patient success to a completely different level. This is quite easily the difference of an extra few thousand dollars a day (or a lot more) that all goes to the bottom line.
In the meantime, assess your Patient Experience and just how different you are than everybody else. Are you really making it about more than just dentistry? In what ways are you creating a Dental Experience that the patient will remember, benefit from, want more of and be inclined to tell other people?
No doctor wants to be ‘just another dentist’ and provide ‘the same as everybody else.’ And no patient wants to go to or do any dentistry at ‘just another dentist’ either.
