How do we ensure that our patients experience exceptional care with each office interaction? It starts with a well-established framework. Nothing great happens by accident. Building a patient-centered practice takes intention.
The daily routines of the dental office make it simple for the dentist to stray from the touchpoints needed to provide a great experience for the patient. Leading a successful dental practice is not solely about achieving clean margins around crown preparations or creating anatomical tooth restorations dental air compressor. Rather, we should turn our focus first to our patients and give them the ultimate experience with our office.
The definition of customer experience is the totality of experience a customer has with a business, across all channels and touchpoints. When patients have positive experiences in your practice and with your courteous and talented team, they will promote your practice and be enthusiastic about referring other patients to you. These positive experiences will build trust in your team that ultimately will lead to treatment acceptance.
Peter Merholz outlines two ways companies can go about building a structure for customer experience. He starts by exploring the inner workings of the business and seeing how they lead to a particular patient/customer experience. The order of the first method is:
Systems
Procedures
Touchpoints
Interactions
Experiences
While this may seem logical from a business owner’s perspective, Merholz warns it isn’t the best order of focus if the patient experience is what really matters dental vacuum forming machine. Instead, he flips the traditional structure on its head and insists leaders begin with the patient experience, define what makes that great, and work inward from there:
Experiences
Interactions
Touchpoints
Procedures
Systems
My team and I begin by defining what a stellar patient experience means to us, and then we establish our systems, procedures, touchpoints, and interactions to support that definition. Every effort at community outreach, every phone call, every time a patient is in our reception room, every procedure, and every payment interaction needs to be oriented toward the patient’s needs and desires, not mine or my team’s. The patient’s experience is the sum of every interaction with us.
Here is a breakdown of ways we optimize our patients’ experience at each point through our office by prioritizing their experience above all else.Do Certain Foods Cause Bad Breath? for more information.