HUMAN TOUCH DENTISTRY: The often overlooked detail budding dentists should be focusing on when dealing with patients

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One of the most important points to keep in mind when you’re incorporating the “marketing” approach in your practice is that a patient before he/she undergoes the “ACTUAL” TREATMENT on your chair has already been UNDER YOUR TREATMENT the moment he/she walked into your clinic. What do I mean by this? Well, there are really TWO types of TREATMENT that a patient undergoes at your clinic! For the sake of simplicity, let us just call it PHASE I and PHASE II TREATMENTS.

Most of us, especially when starting out tend to be too focussed on the PHASE II TREATMENT or the ACTUAL TREATMENT on the chair, doing our best and working hard to achieve the BEST result possible for the patient and rightly so...that is what we are TRAINED to do after all!

However, we are NOT TRAINED to give the same amount of importance to the PHASE I TREATMENT or the TREATMENT that the patient receives the minute they enter your set up with an EXPECTATION in mind. Now that expectation can be anything from wanting relief from a severe tooth pain to desiring an aesthetic smile. These “EXPECTATIONS” even though being influenced by previous encounters at the dentist either good or bad will still have a “WINDOW PERIOD” if you may, in which YOU, THE DENTIST at present can capitalise on as far as terms such as “patient retention” and “patient conversion” are concerned! These EXPECTATIONS are not just limited to the patients desire to get treated for a given condition but also include an IMAGE of how a “DOCTOR” usually looks, speaks and behaves in the patients mind.

PHASE I TREATMENTS focus on how YOU, THE DENTIST greet, speak, behave and ultimately develop a rapport with the patient not only when it is their first visit but also on every subsequent visit after that (granted they do return a satisfied “customer” so to say!). So it doesn’t matter how perfect your obturation was on that “hot” molar with oh so difficult curvatures and canals and it doesn’t matter how “life-like” your restorations were that brought back the patients smile, if YOU as a person haven’t really bothered to develop a RAPPORT with the patient, if you haven’t made them FEEL that they are comfortable talking to you and approaching you, if you haven’t CARED enough to make every walk-in feel at home, no matter how perfect your PHASE II TREATMENTS are, you will still be left scratching your heads when those perfectly treated patients don’t turn up for subsequent visits for other problems.

This is not to say that you can thus compromise on PHASE II TREATMENTS, the quality of your work and the results do matter nonetheless, but it is the work you put in during the PHASE I TREATMENT that takes you from,

“Oh I visited a dentist last week and he did a good job!”

To,

“You know, MY dentist does a good job!”

So the next time you see a “suffering” soul walk in through your doors, just put yourself in their place and imagine how YOU would like to be TREATED if you were to be in their place. Stop being the DENTIST and try being a PERSON FIRST! Be comforting, be polite, listen and above all...UNDERSTAND the PERSON before you go all out trying to CONVERT and RETAIN this “CUSTOMER”. 

If you do PHASE I RIGHT, conversion and retention should come automatically!

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