I have had some feedback on my recent blog: “”Are You Giving Your Patients The Wrong Message?
The wrong message is the message you give by having a cancellation policy that you give to your patients.
Cancelling an appointment is a negative action that affects the patient’s oral care, other patient’s appointments and your appointment scheduling.
Outlining the Cancellation Policy to a New Patient when they make an appointment, is indirectly telling your patient that you believe they are going to cancel their appointments.
What if they were never going to cancel or change any of their appointments because they understand the importance of keeping them?
Your Practice Cancellation Policy should be what you give your team, not your patients.
If your team know how to correctly set up and make appointments so that patients are fully committed and ready then the likelihood of any cancellations is very close to zero.
If your team know how to handle cancellation calls correctly if and when they do happen, then again the cancellations are reduced dramatically.
Try calling the “cancellation policy” your “cancellation team guidelines”.
The Cancellation Team Guidelines are created and followed by the team for the patients rather than followed by the patients for the team.
Your mission is to prevent and handle any cancellations.
Keep in mind that most patients do keep their appointments and only a few cancel.
Once your team are highly skilled at preventing cancellations and know how to handle the cancellation calls, you will soon realise how unnecessary and insulting a cancellation policy is to your patients.
Start the relationship with a New Patient in a positive way.
Presume a New Patient is about to make an appointment, be fully committed to their appointment, keep their appointment and make their next appointment, and they will.
So instead of focusing on educating your patients on your cancellation policy, educate your team on how to prevent patients cancelling, how to set up the appointment correctly when they make it with the patient, educate the patients to see the urgency and importance of their treatment so they are committed and ready for the appointment.
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This blog features simple practical ideas that are easy to implement tomorrow in your Dental Office, impacting immediately on your Patients’ Dental Phone Experiences, and ultimately, improving your practice profitability.
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My FINAL live full day workshops for 2017 “How to Turn Every Dental Phone Call Into A Valued and Kept Appointment” are being held in Sydney on Friday October 6, 2017and in Brisbane on Friday November 24, 2017.
Click here on this link to register.
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Dental Phone Excellence is a simple to implement complete Phone Answering system I developed that helped me to build an extraordinary dental practice in the heart of working class western Sydney.
If you’d like to know more, download my sixteen page FREE special report “How I Quickly and Easily Went From 35% to 77% New Patient Telephone Conversions, and Doubled The Size of my Dental Practice Along the Way” and discover some of the many costly mistakes being made on your phone…..
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At present I have availability for only ONE new private client. For more information on how I can improve your Dental Office’s Phone Numbers contact me, Jayne Bandy at jayne@theDPE.com
