Fan Favorite | Dental Receptionist Training

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management and training.

00:12
tail whenever I had opened a new store or worked with team members, there was a very definitive onboarding process. You work on the computer for a week on all the systems, you go through the manual, then you work with somebody shadowing them for a week. So you know how to open and close the store. So when I came in day one, I said, where’s the HR paperwork? Where’s my offer letter? What do I fill out? There was none of that. There was nobody to essentially train me. The, the mindset was.

00:41
You can kind of look over people’s shoulders. You make mistakes and then we’ll just correct you for it at that point. And that didn’t sit well with me because I want to know what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to do it. So for many of you may not know, some may know Heather actually was once front office position. She had the receptionist role and new patient coordinator. And so I wanted to talk about receptionist training.

01:10
and your experience with it and the dysfunction of it and some ways that that can be improved. So just to kind of set the stage here. Many years ago, my father, who’s a dentist, that’s kind of what motivated me to be here. He actually I’ll go even further for those. and, know, many of you have heard the story, but imagine how many times I’ve heard the story. So.

01:41
So when I was a young lad, my father told me not to be a dentist. He said it was a difficult profession, insurance issues and corporate interests and so on. So I went to law school. I worked for Tony Robbins, did a bunch of things, but my father’s practice was facing financial difficulty. It was near bankruptcy and I offered to help and I was able to send a lot of new business to his office, but very few.

02:11
were becoming patients. The phone was ringing. So Heather, you at the time, we weren’t married boyfriend. There was no ring on it yet. No ring on it yet. But I had a deadline. Yeah. And and you. So tell me a little bit of background. So I’m going to stop there in the story. But even before that, you.

02:37
did a lot in retail. In school, you were studying to be microbiology. You wanted to be a doctor. So why did you, and this is actually kind of a, why did you decide to go from being a doctor to go into retail sales? ah Well, I always liked medicine and I still enjoy it. That’s one of the reasons I think I liked being in dentistry. But from a perspective of time being in school,

03:03
and what I wanted to accomplish, I thought, well, if I go the molecular biology route, I can work in a lab, something like that. So I worked at a cancer research lab and I always got in trouble for talking, same as I always used to in elementary school, middle school, high school. I said, it doesn’t matter where you move me, who you sit me by, I’m going to talk to whoever is there. So I got in trouble a lot at the lab.

03:31
And it was great work that they were doing there. mean, it’s cancer research, but to me, I loved working with people, being out, working in retail just seemed like a natural fit because I had always done it. So I started working at Bloomingdale and doing sales and mentoring, training new team members. And I loved that. And eventually I wanted to be a manager. So I became a manager of

04:00
Kate Spade and theory. And I learned a lot about management. learned a lot about systems, opening new businesses because we opened so many different stores around the country. So hiring team members, basically everything that goes along with the HR part of it, the management part of it, the sales part of it, looking at numbers, production. And I loved all of that. Great closing allowance. I had a lot of really nice things.

04:29
spent too much probably on some shopping and just decided that the transition for me to something more nine to five, because as you know, or many of you may be aware, when you work in retail, you’re working nights, weekends, really long hours. so consider yourself in the dental practice very blessed and very lucky, even if your dental practice is open a little bit later or more often.

04:57
you’re not going to be working on the 4th of July. You’re not going to be working on, you know, late, late nights, weekends. We’d have to go in at super early for inventory. We’d have to stay really late when it was Black Friday and things like that. So just knowing that we wanted to start a family and have that a little bit more of a set schedule, but still have that interaction with people, I felt dentistry would be the perfect fit.

05:26
So that’s what we did. Well, that was the situation. You were getting tired of the nine to five, but you enjoyed it. And I said, well, let’s see if we can put this together. And, and that ended up being very successful. was a kind of naive or, uh, thought let’s just take somebody out of retail and try it works. This, this fits, let’s try it. So we tried it and it was successful. We took a $1 million practice that was in

05:55
great financial difficulty and did over 2 million in 18 months. So we grew quite a bit there. And so the story that I want to talk about for here is really want to focus in not so most. Yes, it was successful. Yes, all star in our training. talk about some of those things that we’ll learn and we’ll talk a little bit about that today. But tell me about your experience because again, you came in to answer the phone. You were doing receptionist position.

06:24
So what was that like for you coming in to the office? mind you, there was no All-Star at this point. Correct. There was no All-Star. There really wasn’t any sort of formal training unless you hired a consultant at that point. There wasn’t a systematic approach to training that had an online sort of access for people to be able to always have that consistency. for you, there was no training. were just- You just came in.

06:53
Right. I came in and I agreed to be one of the lower lowest paid admin team members at the time. And I was okay with that. I took a big pay cut from retail because I wanted the flexibility of the time and the schedule. And I knew that that was okay because knowing my capabilities and my drive, I knew that I was going to be able to bring a lot.

07:20
to the position and grow the position, expand the position and grow within the practice. And that eventually that would change. So I came in as the person at the front that was there to help with whatever they needed, sort of like a receptionist flash floater. I was literally filing charts and labeling charts using a typewriter, which I know it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, it was definitely.

07:50
this point probably 15 to 20 years ago, but this was when paperless charts were just starting to kind of come on the scene. So there was still the actual paper charts and there was an old fashioned typewriter that I was making labels with for that. And so the first thing I said is we need to get a label maker so that I can just type it in and print it out. and as you came in,

08:19
What was because again, I was overseeing the strategic aspect of it, the marketing. I come in so on from time to time, but not the day to day stuff. Yeah. So who was helping you learn the position of reception? That’s the thing that I came in and I thought that, you know, this office is a seasoned practice. They’ve been in business over 35 years at that time. A lot of people had been there for a very long time and

08:49
They knew how to do their jobs well. So I came in with the assumption that what’s the onboarding process look like? Because in retail, whenever I had opened a new store or worked with team members, there was a very definitive onboarding process. You work on the computer for a week on all the systems, you go through the manual, then you work with somebody shadowing them for a week. So, you know how to open and close the store. So when I came in day one, I said, where’s the HR paperwork? Where’s my offer letter? What do I fill out?

09:19
There was none of that. And so that was, you know, a little bit upsetting that there wasn’t any anything with that. And there was nobody to essentially train me. The, the mindset was you can kind of look over people’s shoulders, you make mistakes, and then we’ll just correct you for it at that point. And that didn’t sit well with me because I want to know what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to do it. So.

09:46
from day one, as I started learning and figuring it out, and I would consider myself a fairly resourceful person that if I can’t get the answers, I’m going to seek them out. So I started asking people to help me, any assistant, any hygienist that I could pull out, you know, please help me figure out the schedule, all dentrics, whatever it was, if I had to study on the weekend. And I said that from that point, whatever I learned, I’m going to systematize it.

10:15
so that this doesn’t have to happen to somebody else coming into the dental practice. Whether they’ve been in dentistry before or not, it’s important to have certain set consistent systems for training so that people come in and they feel more confident in their onboarding process because that first 60 to 90 days is so vital where a lot of times we’re seeing turnover, which is very expensive.

10:43
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If they feel like they know they can come in and the office is organized, they know how to onboard them and they feel like they can do their job. Well, you, you made a comment that they knew their jobs. Well, I would question that. don’t, you know, in training them, I don’t think they knew their jobs. Well, I don’t think that they were really efficient. I mean, they, they were on a few of the technical things they did well.

11:13
They knew how to use dentrics. knew how to maybe set up a room. knew, but the customer service was not well. It was not good. was problematic. so A, they weren’t training you and B, whatever they did train you was probably not the industry standard or not even say, I wouldn’t say industry standard. Maybe it was the industry standard. It wasn’t the standard of the Ritz Carlton. It wasn’t the standard of the best.

11:42
It was a medical standard, which is not the standard you want. And that’s the thing that a lot of dental practices train on and think that if I learn these task oriented things, if I learn how to file insurance really well, if I learn dentrics really well, that’s going to make my practice a success, but that’s not where the success comes from. And we saw that because obviously they knew how to do all of those tasks. Well,

12:11
But when we’re sitting there and the phones are ringing and they’re not friendly, not rushing to answer the calls because they’re busy filing insurance checks or doing things like that, it’s like you’re losing money. And that was why the practice was facing bankruptcy, even though there were so many people working there, there were so many operatories. just, the money is in the calls, in the scheduling and making sure that

12:39
The customer service and systems are there. And that makes no treatment. The that’s why sometimes we, we play around and say front office skills are not helpful and don’t train your team on front office skills too much because it’s a bit of a deception because we say, okay, if we do these things, we know how to handle the insurance. know how to handle a router. These, get so on these technical areas that yes can be are important and we need to learn these.

13:09
But we fail to really examine the customer service. So it’s kind of like the 80 20 role that we’ve heard about. most offices, 80 % is on a technical aspect of how do do this? How do I do the, the, the dental aspect of it, which is important, but we’re not paying attention to the, to the customer service aspect. And, and yes, she’s, oh, I know we’re poor. I know these things, but how well, how detailed are you a master?

13:39
at it. Because this is all about relationships. That’s what you didn’t retail. It’s a master of relationships. It’s not about clothes. This relationship. And when you that relationship, you’re able to increase case acceptance or increase people will buy more clothes and in this case in dentistry case acceptance. So again, there’s wrong focus and they weren’t training you and they weren’t training you well. I remember the office manager told me how she trains I throw the she calls them the girls or the ladies I throw them

14:08
into the wolves den or the lions den and I see who can fend for themselves and who can figure it out. That’s a very harsh way of training. So it’s, it’s, it’s leading to poor potential culture is leading to, to a lot of problematic situations where they’re not getting trained. They’re not getting trained well. So you were kind of thrown into it and you weren’t trained and what you were being told didn’t really fit so much.

14:37
And you had a little bit, we didn’t want to go crazy into it, but you had a little bit of tension with the ladies because your perspective was we provide great customer service and they were like, I just want to get them in and out. And it wasn’t about the customer service was just about the day to day thing. So tell me about the philosophical difference between what, what you were looking to create and what they were doing kind of.

15:07
I think it’s like how you said before that there was just different philosophies that, for me it’s, I’m coming from looking at the big picture from the business perspective, coming from the background outside of dentistry, where I’ve opened stores, I’ve worked with multimillion dollar stores, I’ve hired team members. I’m used to looking at the numbers. Dentistry is still a business.

15:35
And we, you we want to take care of our patients like they’re our family members. But at end of the day, we still have to have a successful business or it’s not going to survive to be able to help those patients. And so we have to always be looking big picture as well as the day to day. And so for me, I didn’t want to just have a transactional approach to our office. I wanted to set the bar higher than that.

16:03
And it’s the same thing in what we teach. We can’t just use the buzzwords rapport and customer service and use that in our training and say, well, that’s what we do. We have to live it. have to do it in everything that we do, whether it comes to following up with patients, whether it comes to presenting treatment. And I think that that’s something that has to be more than lip service. has to be

16:29
that we really enjoy talking to our patients on the phone, that we really enjoy scheduling appointments for them. And not just how can I get you on and off the phone as quickly as possible, but I’m looking at your chart online, I’m reviewing things, I’m seeing what you’re due for, what you’re overdue for. So if somebody calls to schedule a cleaning, we’re not just scheduling their cleaning, we wanna see, they overdue for x-rays? What else do they need to have done?

16:57
Do they have family members that are part of the practice? Do they need appointments? So it’s thinking bigger than just that one thing. If it’s a new patient, it’s getting to know them, setting ourselves apart from every other office out there. Because that’s one of the things that I hear a lot from dentists when I talk to them, talk to dentists every day is we have a great practice. The doctor has a lot of clinical training, which is important.

17:26
And the team might have done these task oriented training things where they know how to file insurance and this and that, but they’re not making money. They’re not being successful. And I think part of it is when we listen to the calls, we see that it’s just a transactional call, which means that it’s very robotic. It’s something that you can hear in any dental practice. And that’s not enough these days. There’s so many dental practices. Some people tell me that

17:53
They used to be the only dental practice in town and now they’re 70 and a, you know, two block rate, two or three block radius in order to differentiate yourself and stand out amongst all the different clutter that’s out there. You have to step it up and really make that a memorable experience. And I think the first part of that comes from building rapport and caring about the patient. So, yeah. I think there are two ways to look at receptionist training.

18:22
And one is from the doctor’s perspective, which is like you were talked about a lot of the competition is, out there and you have to find your way to differentiate and to separate. a lot of doctors want a customer service approach where they just don’t know how to do it. And there’s a lot of clutter out there in terms of what do I do? What train do I do? What type of training consultant, what online training, you know, we were one of the first to do the online training. Now there’s a lot of options out there.

18:52
And there’s always more in terms of, there’s always more that follow to, and then it starts getting cluttered. You have one who’s kind of the innovator and then you have others that kind of go with that. So the, in terms of the dentists, those are two things. Do you have the competition aspect? And then what do I do? And what I say is in whatever is out there in terms of decision-making, and I’m going to do a discussion on decision-making is you have to go what resonates with what I believe in.

19:22
That’s really key. What, what is what I’d like to be the ideal and be educated on that. And like we talked about, try to, to move outside your comfort zone where typically you’re focusing on the tactical aspects and the clinical aspects and see more of the human component and really listen behind it. Like you said before, not to not just lip service, listen behind it. The other area is for those that are listening and that are team members.

19:51
is well very important because team members get frustrated when because they know what they’re capable of. They know what patients, the really good ones, the ones that are listening are the good ones. Okay. They’re always wanting to learn more and they know what the patient, what the patient needs and they know they need that extra service and they see that the doctor isn’t providing enough resources, training. have you have all the time. Team members are reaching out to you begging for our training because

20:20
They want to get better and Dennis are not providing it. And they also have some resentment, which you had as well with other, other team members that are not sharing that philosophy. And that, so doctor has to lead and have to be clear and team members want to follow this approach of customer service. Okay. So we talk about receptionist training kind of as a title or as a topic area. Okay.

20:50
that we really got to step back and make sure we’re aligned from doctor’s perspective and from the team members perspective. And that like you said, Heather, it is getting to the core of it, get into the heart of it on customer service. And that we’re all on the same page. And, kind of what I’m hearing as well is that from your retail experience versus standard, there was a process, an onboarding process. What did you step by step when you come in?

21:18
So we have philosophically, philosophical step one, that is customer service based and approach. So that’s really, you have to hit the culture aspect of the entire team. The second is the systematic aspect that Bloomingdale’s and others had onboarding always, cause you’re always training at Bloomingdale’s, always merchandising and those things. That this is a constant, because again, we talked about competition. Theory wasn’t the only one out there.

21:44
You have theory of Kate Spade, you have Nordstrom’s, you have to differentiate and you have to be able to, to, to stand out. Theory is known for the quality of their, and you would, you would explain the different differentiated factor. You talk about that and share the sizzle. What was it an example? This was cashmere or something or other verse stretchy. Well, you know, if it’s just black pants and you’re selling $300 black pants, people are like, why do I want to play it?

22:12
pay 300 bucks for a pair of black pants when I can go somewhere else. And we explained that it’s an investment that it’s, you know, 96 % know, fine Italian tropical walls. So you’re getting that really good quality fabric that isn’t going to wrinkle. It’s going to last for years and years. It’s got the nice stretch to it. And it’s something that travels well and packs well. And it’s an investment. So if you buy the

22:40
you know, 40, $50 pair of black pants. Those might last you a year, but as, as you can see, Alex, when you’re trying on a suit theory, it’s been what 15, 20 years and it looks brand new because it holds up. So if you figure out the amount of money, you have to buy a pair of $50 black pants every year because they rip and the seams, then you know, you just got yourself so many pants. could have just bought one. know, I kind of want to end with this.

23:10
concept for, and this is especially like, that’s why I like where you and I are talking because I think you embody more the team member perspective and be more the doctor because, we’re very similar personality wise because when we go shopping, you don’t look at price, you look at quality. When I go, I look at price and a lot of dentists are kind of like, what does this cost me? That’s all I want to know. What does it cost? Well, you’re more expensive. You know, why, why should I pay? Yeah.

23:35
We always want to find like I’m the same way I want the cheapest thing I can find. Well and people and patients do the same thing when it comes to dentistry. mean they call they price shop but if they understand the value and the quality difference, the training difference of the doctors, it’s not a commodity. It’s as most team members will vouch for one dentist and another dentist are totally different things. So you can’t you know you can’t factor it based on that. Yeah you so again this is human nature.

24:05
is what you’re saying that you always have one person that tends to focus more on the commodity and the price and one who’s more on the value or the quality and then you want to find a balance. Of course. So, so I, I see Dennis tend to get stuck on a price or versus what is it doing? Okay. And, and so I think that’s something you have to look at the big picture when you’re making decisions and the, like you said, T was it, uh,

24:35
Patients that call do similar things. We have to be able to educate them and look at what, what the effect is. So speaking of quality materials, you’ve educated me. I’ve learned that you do it right. You do it right. The first time is this quote. If you don’t have time to do it right, when do you have time to do it over? Just do it right the first time. So in summary, with your team, do it right. The first time have the perspective of customer service, train your team.

25:04
with a system and a process. Okay. And it’s an important, it’s an important investment for that because the amount of difference that those people that your admin team, everybody in the team, but especially the people that are answering the phone, that’s the gateway to the entire practice. The amount that they can make or break the practice. I mean, it puts training in perspective. It’s like the amount offices are losing.

25:33
or potentially could gain as much more, many, many hundred times over than training is. And I like to give a next step. I’m always big on what’s the next step. So for those who haven’t got a chance, check out my webinar. You can go to allstardentalpractice.com and what that is and I’ll provide a link as well. And what you’ll be able to find is our webinar.

26:01
We have several, but this is our seminal webinar. And I think it’s great for you and even team members to watch, learning about the silent killers in your practice and putting what the cost is by not training and kind of going a little more in depth about the customer service model. And you can learn a lot. And I found a lot of team members also enjoy it and doctors get a lot of that. So I definitely recommend you take a look at that. So thank you for joining us until next time.

26:30
Go out there and be an all star.

26:37
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com.