Dentaltown December 2012 - (Page 12)

howard speaks column » Develop Your Front Desk Think about how much training goes into running and practicing in a dental office. Dentists go to school and get trained in the art and science of dentistry for eight, 10 or sometimes even 12 years. That’s a long time! Dental hygienists have four years of training in college. My dental assistant Jan went to dental assisting school for a year, like many dental assistants do, to get her degree. But unfortunately the absolute most important position in a dental practice just happens to be the most overlooked when it comes to training – and that’s your front desk! How your front desk interacts with your patients and what this position does for your practice might not seem like a big deal to you, and if that’s true I’d take great pride in telling you how utterly wrong you are. For 25 years I’ve said if you’re the owner of a football team, make sure you have a stellar quarterback; if you own a basketball team, get a seven-foottall center; if you have a hockey team, you want the best goalie, and if you own a dental practice, your best employee had better be stationed at your front desk. Your front desk person is always the first staff member to greet your patients as they enter your practice, and they’re typically the last person your patients talk to when they leave. The front desk handles all of the money, scheduling and recall. They are the face of your practice, and without them, you have an empty schedule and you can’t do any dentistry. The most overly trained person in any dental practice is the dentist. Doc, you can talk the ear off of anyone about gold inlays or your in-office CAD/CAM mill, but if you start talking to a dental practice’s front desk staff, seven times out of 10 they can barely list off two or three procedures that the practice offers. It’s so sad. In 2008, I was re-evaluating my own practice and, while I had an outstanding front-desk team, I thought there was by Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, Publisher, Dentaltown Magazine room for improvement (there’s always room for improvement, right?). While I was deciding what to do, I had lunch with one of my best friends here in Phoenix, Arizona – Dr. Thomas Mattern – and he told me how I really should sign my practice up for training with Jay Geier’s Scheduling Institute as it made a serious impact on his practice. I might as well have been distracted by a purse full of butterflies, because I wasn’t really interested in Tom’s endorsement. I thought, I’ve trained my staff, I’ve got an MBA, I know what’s going on. But as the economy tanked and we started seeing fewer new patients come through our doors, I realized a little outside help might tip the scales more in our favor, so I decided to finally listen to Tom, pick up the phone and call the Scheduling Institute. In the four years we’ve been working with the Scheduling Institute, we’ve learned so many valuable lessons. Phone book ads are dead and gone in my Phoenix, Arizona, market; most of the searching Mom does for dental practices is done on Google these days (which means you need to have a killer Web site as well… and I’ll get to that in a moment). There are 168 hours in a week and the average dental practice is open only 32 hours a week. Let’s say your dental practice gets 100 calls per week and 50 of them go to an answering machine. Hey guys, guess what, those 50 callers are not going to leave a message – they’re going to hang up! They always will. And they won’t call back. I know for a fact. Why? Because we track all of our incoming calls. They’ll just hang up and call the next number on their Google search and schedule the appointment with the first practice that actually talks to them. Every single one of those calls your front desk is missing could be a new patient! So instead of thinking of your front desk as “mere overhead,” Jay Geier teaches that you ought to beef up your front desk. If you only have one person answering the phones and half of those calls are going to voicemail, you need to hire another person so you can take all of those calls in person! If you have another staff member answering the phones, there’s now time to pull up charts, answer questions about billing, statements continued on page 14 12 DECEMBER 2012 » dentaltown.com http://www.dentaltown.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown December 2012

Howard Speaks: Develop Your Front Desk
Dentaltown.com Highlights
Professional Courtesy: In Pursuit of CAD/CAM Harmony
Continuing Education Update
Second Opinion: The Advantages of Strategic Giving for Your Practice
Radiation CA Treatment and Fluoride Trays
Localized Anterior Tooth Surface Loss and Dahl Appliance
Townie Choice Awards
Product Profile: Ivoclar Vivadent
Product Profile: Zest Anchors
Do-it-Yourself Finance, Part 1: Tame the Piles
Current Guide to All-ceramic Restorations
KöR Whitening System
Personal Disability Income Insurance: What Every Dentist Needs to Know
The State of Digital Dentistry in 2012
Dentaltown Research: Implants
Perio Reports
Ad Index
Prophy After Extraction
Doggie in the Dental Office
Dentally Incorrect

Dentaltown December 2012