The patient is always right. Right? Not so fast, the patient is always the patient and you can't win an argument with a patient, but that doesn't make them right all the time. Did I just hear an army of dental professionals rise up and cheer? Go ahead, you deserve it, but then get over it and listen.
I'm reading a book titled Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service, which is put out by Amacom. I'm loving it so much that I'm putting together a staff meeting built around it. I'll be posting a PDF file that you can download if you'd like to use it with your staff, when I'm done. There are a series of Knock You Socks Off books and, glutton that I am, I've bought three of them.
Dental offices all offer the same basic thing. The only things that will make you stand out from all the other offices in town are skill and service. The only thing that will make your service stand out is really caring. I'll get into that in another post, but right now I want to talk about the revelation that the patient is not always right.
Before you get too excited, realize this, just because the patient can be wrong, it doesn't mean you get to say, "Ha! You're wrong." What you have to do is acknowledge that your patient may be misinformed and use education and information to steer them to being right. That's correct, you have to use all your knowledge and professionalism to make the patient right.
One point that is made in the book is that by thinking that the patient is always right, we put ourselves in a one-down position. When we force our staff to do whatever the patient says to do, even when we know they are dead wrong, we are telling our staff not to think or ask questions and this can make service feel like servitude. This will quickly demotivate the staff and make them dissatisfied.
When we insist that the staff must always consider the patient to be right, we cripple their ability to use their knowledge and empathy to educate the patient and help bring them to a position of actually understanding and making good decisions for themselves. We can use what we know to help a patient become right without embarrassing or shaming them. That's what will keep our patients coming back again and again, and what will make them refer their friends and family to us.
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