5-Star Practice

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
76 % of people trust online reviews more than they trust their own parents or their own doctor. Even if you’ve got good traffic coming to your website, you’ve got good referral sources and all those awesome things are going on, people are going to look at those reviews. And if you’ve got bad reviews or you don’t have a good amount of new reviews, a lot of people are never going to call you in the first place. And reviews, in my opinion, is the cheapest way to get really good traffic at very little cost, sometimes no cost at all to your website.

00:32
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management and training.

00:41
Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Patrick Chavasti, Omni Premier Marketing. I’m so happy. Patrick’s one of my favorite people. And our topic today is the five-star practice. And we’re to look at reputations and reviews. This is based on a book that you wrote, Patrick, and we’re so happy to talk about it. So welcome on the show. Co-wrote the book.

01:07
And from props to Cynthia Taylor, who did a lot of the heavy lifting in the book as well. So Cynthia, now is that your wife, your brilliant life? Okay. Power couple. Awesome. Nobody really knows, but yeah, she was a big part of it. She works in urgent care and so had a lot of a great input from being inside the practice perspective um with the book. But yeah, I’m glad I’m thankful. I’m grateful to visit with you. Grateful to talk about it. Let’s see how we can help some people. Okay.

01:36
So let’s talk about the book. Let’s get right. Let’s get right to it. Uh, maybe we can go into like, why did you write it? What’s the problem? I always go with there and then what’s our solution besides by the book. And by the way, we’ll talk about this. like to talk about it. Different points, the podcast, but at the end we’ll provide the link as well, but let’s do it here as well. For those that want the book, how do we get the book Amazon? No, uh, yep. Absolutely. There’s a couple of ways you can get the book.

02:05
So, um, the first, easiest thing is you can go to a five star dot doctor. So that’s simple five star dot doctor. There’s a link to Amazon. can get the Kindle version. You can buy the paperback version, um, or you can actually download it for free. It’s I think about, uh, 90 pages. Um, so it’s going to be a lot to print out if you plan on printing it out, but yeah, absolutely free on five star dot doctor. Um, just go there, buy it. You can, uh,

02:34
download it, whatever works best for you. Okay. We’ll put that link in the show notes and we’ll ask you again. what is it all about? What’s the problem? Why the book help us Patrick, the marketing guru. Yep. So I think the biggest, one of the biggest problems, um, with the practices have is getting good amount, getting more than their fair share of traffic from Google search. So Google search, uh, is broken down in a few different ways. Usually the thing that comes up.

03:03
When somebody does a search like a dentist near me, the first thing that will come up will be some Google paid ads. You got to pay Google for those clicks right under those paid ads almost as always as a map. The map will have three or four different practices on it. This isn’t just dentists. Of course, this is restaurants, law firms, doesn’t matter. So that map will have usually three or four listings on it. ah And then underneath that will be what we call organic search that map.

03:31
is so important because people are typically looking for a dentist that is close to them. Almost everybody wants that. And people know when they see that map that they’re close. They usually notice that they’ll actually see little pins on it go, oh wow, this one’s right around the corner for me. Well, proximity is important. So how far away you are from that person doing that search. If I search Dennis near me, I’m in Colorado.

03:57
I’m going to get dentists in Colorado. If you do dentists near me, you’re going to get dentists in Florida. that’s just proximity matters, right? That’s part of it. But there’s other ways that you can influence how you come up in those rankings. And the number one way outside, the second uh factor outside of proximity is the amount of reviews you have and the frequency of those reviews. So. m

04:22
Having 500 reviews is really good. If you have 500 reviews, you probably will be at a beat out of practice that has 50 reviews for that ranking dentist near me. But new reviews matter too. So if one dentist has 500 reviews, but hasn’t got a new review in two years, and someone else has a hundred reviews, but they’ve gotten 50 of those in the last three months, Google is probably actually going to rank the one that has 50 reviews.

04:50
that came in the last three months higher than the one that had 500 reviews. So what we’re trying to do is help dentists get more traffic to their website, more relevant traffic, new patient traffic to their websites in low-cost ways. And reviews, in my opinion, is the cheapest way to get really good traffic at very little cost, sometimes no cost at all to your website. That makes a lot of sense. I I think about this as an observer and a user of

05:20
of Google Maps and search, but it’s, man, back in the day where SEO was, you would just do a search and didn’t have that. Right. But now, I mean, this has been around for a while, but it’s like, it’s where are you close to me and what are those reviews? And it’s like, it’s warfare. I mean, and there are different aspects of it. Now in the book, do you talk about the different, how they’re kind of put together? Because you also have.

05:49
Now with Google, there’s sponsor reviews, there’s organic, there’s this, there’s a lot of stuff to navigate, which I’m aware of since you’ve taught us all this stuff over the years. But it’s, bottom line is we gotta think like the customer. Think like, you for those that are listening, the dentist are listening, like the patient, and they want easy. They want easy button. Are you close to me? How are your reviews? And do you good, do good work? And then they’ll probably…

06:16
go to the website and then do some more research, many of them and say, then how is your customer service? But before we could even get there, right, we have to know how they’re going to find you. And sometimes this can work backwards. We’re to come back to how they find you. Sometimes it can work backwards. Maybe they saw, they get a referral from a friend, a family member. They’re still going to check out your online reviews. Like it happens all the time where someone, this happens with specialists all the time. You refer to a specialist as a dentist.

06:43
And then, you know, your patient comes back to you and is like, Oh, I checked the reviews. There are 3.8. Why are you sending me to this place? Right. So people trust that 76 % of people trust online reviews more than they trust their own parents or their own doctor. So it’s so important. So even if you’ve got good traffic coming to your website, you’ve got good referral sources and all those awesome things are going on. People are going to look at those reviews. And if you’ve got bad reviews or you don’t have a

07:10
good amount of new reviews, a lot of people are never going to call you in the first place. Really online, your online reputation is the number is your first impression, right? Or it really gives you, it determines whether you’re actually going to get a first impression with someone coming into that practice, right? Those things matter so much. would you rank the different modalities of people looking for a dentist? I mean, is it, you have the website.

07:38
You have organic search, have paper click, you local. Where is most of your social media? How would you prioritize the effort? Yeah. So I think um when it comes to proximity, oftentimes you can’t change that. If you want to put your practice on an island outside of Alaska, good luck getting any traffic. So proximity is obviously important. I think that your online reputation is

08:08
Probably the it is definitely the lowest hanging fruit and advertising Like I said, it can it can be really low cost you can use software We can help you with this that’ll attach to your practice management software and automatically pump out these requests for reviews. It’s very inexpensive It’s absolutely free to ask your patients for reviews Although a lot won’t do it and they don’t do it because they don’t like you they don’t do it because you’re not making it easy enough for them one click, right? So having something that’s sent right to their phone and we can help you with this. You can read about it in the book

08:37
Um, you know, that is incredibly important. The responses to reviews is also important. So here’s kind of like next level, um, online reputation. So you’re allowed to on almost every place that you get reviews, whether it’s Google or health grades, you’re able to respond to those reviews. How you respond to those reviews is very, very important. One from a patient, right? So it builds sentiment with the patient, right? So they’re seeing that you’re responding to the reviews, you care, you’re in touch.

09:06
That’s for negative reviews as well, right? So if you get a negative review, you better be responding to that review. You never, ever violate HIPAA, right? So be very careful and get into this in the book. There’s resources out there. You never want to mention the person’s name. There’s just no need to. You never want to mention any symptom, any treatment, anything in diagnosis, nothing along those lines ever. It doesn’t need to happen. If you get a negative review, responding to that review and letting patients know what you stand for,

09:36
Hey, I had to wait 45 minutes. is, you know, this is crazy making me wait. If I’m late, then have to pay a cancellation fees. I’ve seen that review. I think everyone’s seen that review. Well, you know, respond to it in a way that says, hey, we’re thankful for the feedback. We’re terribly sorry for this situation. We’re very sorry for your experience, but then tell them what is important to you. It’s important that our patients never wait more than 10 seconds to visit us, right? Never wait to see us whatsoever.

10:05
We block out time specifically so that we can wait. Now every once in a while, emergency comes up. That does happen, but it is so important to us. So when people see that somebody’s upset with you because you were late, took 45 minutes, they also see that you care about it and it’s not what’s typical there, right? That things happen, but it’s not what’s typical. you know, another important thing about responding to online reviews is Google sees that you’re responding to them. It’s increasing the amount of content that’s right on Google’s profile.

10:34
You can also get some keywords in there too, right? So you can talk about, know, the reason why we opened our practice right here in Fort Lauderdale was because we saw a need for exceptional dental care. It sounds to us, it sounds to us like we hit that mark with you. Thank you very much for the feedback. So you just got the word dentist or dental and Fort Lauderdale in your review, Google sees that. So it’s kind of a way that you can get some extra keywords and further reiterate to Google what you are and who you serve.

11:04
That’s awesome. I love how you’re providing the whole playbook. I mean, there’s a lot of nuances here. And it’s so true when I look at reviews, I want to see responses. And if there’s a bad review, I want to see how they respond. How do they handle adversity? And are they defensive or do they… I like it when I see them, they’re polite, they’re they’re apologetic. They’re like, hey, call the office. We’re happy to do anything to help you.

11:32
And I think you told us before that it’s okay to have a few bad ones because it shows how you, uh, how you respond and that it’s not fake. that again, people feel, uh, put things in, in certain contexts and so on. Uh, so I think it’s really helpful with respect to that. So great, great tidbits. Yeah. And Alex in this book, like it’s literally is the playbook. Like this literally shows you exactly how to do it. Like we have.

11:59
Resources for templates for responding to reviews. And it’s not a template as far as like just change out the names on it. It’s literally like the it’s a blueprint. I think is a better way to put it. Blueprints on how to do it yourself. You know, one thing about all of this is, um, you know, it’s, it doesn’t really take money to make money. That’s kind of an untruth that people believe you hear it all the time. Um, if that was the case, people with out money would never ever end up with money. Um, we see plenty of people.

12:28
born poor and end up becoming very wealthy. But it does take resources to make money. So if you want to do it yourself, you have to put the time in it. If you have more time than you have money, this book is excellent. uh If you want to check up on what’s going on in your practice now, maybe you have a marketing company that you’re working with. You want to see if they’re doing their jobs correctly. This is a great book for you. So a lot of, a lot of people can benefit from this, whether you have

12:53
More time or more money. That’s obviously your personal situation, but I definitely recommend getting the book. It is the playbook. It’s at five star dot doctor. We have an entire team Alex that does this for you. But if you want to do it yourself, we give you everything that you need to do it. It reminds me of the quote from Tony Robbins and said it’s not about your resources. It’s about resourcefulness. Yeah. And I think that that’s what you’re talking about is you. It doesn’t mean you have to

13:22
do a big spend, you have to do intention, do the work, care. And then, you know, the problem is, I know that you’re big into technology, but you would acknowledge that if there’s nothing behind it, it’s a waste. if you’re product of management software or using a system that’s generating or asking for reviews and it wasn’t a good experience, you’re going to solicit bad reviews and or just wasting your time.

13:50
Yeah. And you have to be authentic. This whole process has to be authentic. I brag about you often to our clients and I say, one thing I love about you and your, and your marketing company is you’re like, listen, I’m not going to take a client if they’re not doing the work, if they’re not doing phone training, if they don’t care. Yeah. I’m not going to, our French at homes, right? We’re not going to, we don’t want to waste their money and our time. Yeah. And so I appreciate the authenticity, the integrity with, with

14:19
how your philosophy is, or you’re saying like, make sure you’re educated. You want, whether somebody works with you or not, you want them educated. You want to make sure that it’s a full on, like you said, playbook, blueprint versus just tactical. Because we’re always like, what is that script? What is the one thing I have to do? And it’s a combination of a lot of little things with intention that creates an experience. And then it’s sticking with it. Can you stay with that process? Can you stay engaged?

14:48
You care. Is it important enough? Yep. And then having people around you to help coach you and keep you accountable. So, I just wanted to make sure that we put that into it. Yeah. I think, you know, as I’ve heard some of your, your, um, coaches talk about this a little bit that, you know, clinical skills, as far as your success in business, actually, you know, they’re important, but there’s a lot of other things that are important too. And you’ll, you’ll see DSOs that, um, um

15:16
go through associates pretty quickly, right? Maybe they stay there and the associate isn’t really bested because they know they’re going to be gone and they might charge crazy fee for treatment or crazy fees for treatment. see this happen, but then they’ve got all these reviews. got 2,800 reviews. I hear dentists all the time go, Oh, it’s a DSO. They’re terrible. I get the revision work all the time. And that dentist has 23 reviews and you know, 20 of them are positive and two or not two or three or not so much. So it’s not just about

15:46
It’s not just about providing great customer service, great dental care, know, having amazing clinical skills and doing the right thing. You have to work with patients to get them to do this. Right. You have to ask for them. And if, know, if you’re afraid to ask for them, you know, you’re going to struggle. It’s just going to happen that the SOs are going to get more patients. And I will tell you, if you really do care about clinical care, right.

16:12
I mean that in the right heart. If you really care about that, well, you should want patients coming to you. You should want them seeing your reviews and not necessarily seeing and not seeing the reviews of a DSO down the street. So asking for patients to give you reviews is helping make sure that you provide amazing care to other patients. it comes to mind. I want to be woo woo here, but you want to treat the entire patient. And so only one aspect of it is clinical. You could have clinical excellence and most do, but

16:42
What about how the person’s feeling, making them comfortable, making the experience easy for them, being their friend, building rapport. If you can get that aspect of the experience, that’s the side where people make decisions. They’re not going by who designed the perfect veneer. Right? So I think there are almost like three areas. Clinical is a surprise of doing business. And unless you’re award-winning clinical on an, you know, NBC and

17:12
whatever and being interviewed. what are the, that’s a very small percentage, but most dentists, it’s going to be who you know, how you treat people, your reputation, your, your chair side manner, all those things. And then great customer service. Now those can be enough in terms of, a certain extent, if you’re really high end with that, because you get a ton of referrals, but if you can add the marketing element, if you can have those three operating at a high level,

17:42
You never have to worry that the ups and downs aren’t as much, but if any of those areas are weak. So if you don’t have good marketing, you better be great at customer service and clinical. If you have great marketing, right. And, okay. Good clinical. It’s gonna, you’re going to be working really hard, try to overcome that weak, uh, chair side situation. So you have to make sure you’re paying attention to all of those where the DSOs do. Right. mean.

18:11
Is that and depends and i’m stereotyping most of them. It’s more about it’s a low price. It’s easy It’s systematic right you’re in and out but you may not be getting the great clinical stuff, but people may not know or care Right And hopefully they have some training with respect to that. They’re at marketing, but it is a lower bar Right, but if you can’t go above that bar the dso bar you’re going to be competing with them, right? Yep. No, that’s true. Um one thing about

18:40
you know, when we talk about reviews and reputation is, you know, you definitely need a system in place. And that is something that the DSOs are always, uh, I shouldn’t say always, are usually ahead of most practices on is having great systems in place. And it’s really, really important. If you look at some of the best customer service on the planet, it’s systematized. If you look at some of Nordstrom, if you look at Disney, right, it’s there, they have a system in place and a playbook and everybody is following that playbook and it makes for a great, great experience.

19:10
Um, yeah. Well, what’s interesting is DSOs corporate dentistry are tiny compared to Disney, to the Ritz Carlton, to Amazon, to others that they can have at a large scale, pretty good customer service. I was just on with Amazon audible, for example, which is a subsidiary of Amazon. I didn’t like an audio book, so I didn’t like it. The guy would, they liked the voice refund. problem. Here you go. We’re happy. They’re throwing free things at me.

19:39
They’re making me feel really good about them. And I’m like, I don’t think it’s an AI, maybe it is, it doesn’t matter, but I’m liking it. But the point is, is that they know what works and they’re able to scale it. so the same thing is with customer service and systems. Now I will say what I’ve noticed with corporate and DSO, one of their Achilles heel is they’re not at the level of Amazon and so on. And it’s also more complex of a business, right? Than giving people a free, you know,

20:09
$2, whatever it is versus thousands of dollars of dentistry. But they’re very slow to change. And many of them are not gonna make the high quality investments because they have to do it over, when you start doing great marketing like yourself and great customer service, what we provide, to scale that over their practices can be expensive because it’s quality. They want the lowest because it starts adding up, right? So what I’ve noticed in working with a few of them and seeing,

20:36
Is that something they’re very slow to be able to change? Cause you have to change the entire corporate structure. Right. For the listeners that are mostly independent dentists or smaller groups, they’re able to change when the visionary says, you know what? like what Alex and Patrick has to have to say. I’m going to put that into play or I’m going to work with them or I’m going do something that can be done within five minutes. Yeah. Their entire business changes. And that’s the power that you are, all of you are listening is by hearing Patrick speak, by reading his book, by

21:06
So listen to this podcast. If something resonates with you, you can change it instantly. That is your superpower. That’s what you have over the other businesses. Yeah. It’s good advice. I know. Isn’t that good? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can literally win your business in a second. In a second. Yeah. So let’s, let’s wrap up with some, some action steps. So I think that was a good segue into perspective that at the end of the day,

21:33
All of you are listening. You have the agency to make the change and it’s just continuing to educate. And when you educate yourself, it’s also thinking about how can I put this into play? So talking about the five star practice, let’s, let’s do some extra stuff. So first step is you got to be able to acquaint yourself with the book and there are two ways you can get it. assume it’s on, yeah, cause I purchased it on Kindle on Amazon. So you can get an Amazon.

22:00
You can also go to tell me the URL again, please. You can go to five star dot doctor. So it’s just the number five, then star five, doctor him five, S T a R dot doctor. That’s it. And then you can go there and you can download it for free. Yep. Absolutely. That’s easy. That’s easy. And then read, read or consume the book. Uh, that’s, that’s probably would be good and think about applying it. Right. Yep.

22:27
And then if they have more questions like, or maybe they’re like, listen, cause I think I heard you’re talking about, like, and I know you do offer this, but you offer reputation management. offer all types of marketing, um, either full packaging or add ons, uh, or even, uh, I’ve known you where people just want to talk with you. You and your team are very generous. So if someone’s reading the book and they’re like, okay, well, I can’t, can’t, I don’t want to do all this myself.

22:55
They want to hear what you have to say or maybe working with you guys. What can they do next? we have they can reach out on the on the five start out doctor. They can. There’s a schedule, a demo section. Just click on that. You can also go to Omni Premier.com. Ask schedule unemployment Patrick there and you’ll be hooked up with me. So that’s if you don’t want to do it yourself. Awesome thing about the calls will show you the system will show you the products will also show you the competition.

23:23
So you can compare us to others now something else that’s really important I’ve seen this come up some of the practice management software that’s out there right now And some of the phone systems that patient falls from it’s already built in So you may already have the software and you’re not using it We’re gonna make sure that if you already have the software and you’re already paying for it that you use that software So you’re not gonna get sold anything that you don’t need or that you already have I see this happen in our in our industry a lot

23:51
where somebody actually sells somebody something and they know they already have a product and they’re under contract or it’s included in something else when you could just say, hey, it’s included in what you have already and it’s a good product, go use that, right? Don’t buy anything from us. So we’ll make sure that we do write by you, of course, no matter what. So if you’ve already got the system in place, great. What we can help you out with from there is we have a team of content writers that writes custom review responses. That’s a good note. I don’t recommend using AI to write review responses.

24:20
There are some automated systems out there. You just turn it on, goes on cruise control. The problem is hallucinations happen. You know, you could violate HIPAA if it has a hallucination and says, you know, I’m glad that you came in here for your root canal. We did a great job. Like boom, that’s a HIPAA violation. So, um, you know, I’d be very careful about the AI. It’s also not going to write in a way that Google is going to love it as far as I’m concerned. Um, but we have a team that does that.

24:47
Some other things that you can do too. Here’s a bonus for you is, you know, post your reviews from your Google profile on your Facebook page. We can do that for you. Some of you can do yourself of, of, of course too. Um, and then the other thing is just optimizing that entire Google business listing. So reviews are very important element of that. We started off the podcast talking about that, but we can help you optimize every area of that outside of reviews too. So I’d love to talk to anybody who has a interest in this or.

25:14
Other thing too, sorry, I’m going on here. If you get a negative review, especially a negative review that you remember the patient, you remember the experience, reach out on that. I’d to help you write a craft a review or a response to that review that is going to help the general public know exactly what you stand for. You know, just to kind of give the listeners a background. We were just talking about this other night, just on a regular chat about how you are upset with.

25:43
another company where they’re charging someone for something they already have or knew. And I know you get fired up or annoyed about people getting taken advantage of, whatever, I for sure. And the point I want to make that I find very endearing about you, and I think we have in common in terms of our philosophy is, so I was talking with our team about this, for those who may or may not know, with our coaching program, we call it self-funding coaching.

26:12
And what that means is we want to make a return within three months. So our coaching is month to month and we want to see a return. Like that’s the goal, like a three X return. We want to be paying for itself. We’re maniacal about that. Why? Well, partly me. I’m pretty impatient. And I believe that for a client, I want them to get great results and I want it quickly and I want them happy for a long time. And I think the same thing is with you is like you’re thinking, okay,

26:40
not how can I suck money out of the client, but how do I get great results and that they stay? Because I know we talk about this as friends, you’re like, I had to let this go to this client, another one do with me, but I don’t see the results, I can’t take their money. Doesn’t make me happy. And so it’s preempting. And I think that’s a great philosophy to have. That’s why we love working with you and your company. And I think dentists listen as well, to have that same philosophy with your patient, that you’re forward looking.

27:09
Like I want to take care of you beyond even myself, almost like a fiduciary, even though you don’t have a fiduciary relationship, dentists have a client patient relationship, but you’re always thinking, and not even just a clinical dentist, it’s about make sure they’re happy and that you’re preempting that. And I think if we all live with that level of integrity and some code that we stand for, I think that that is the pinnacle of great customer service and just being happy and living, you know,

27:39
Some people don’t have consciousness, whatever, you know, we unfortunately or fortunately do. And it’s nice to, to go to bed at night saying, know, I did a good job. I made a difference. I help people. That’s what it’s all about. And just being associated with people like that, being part of your team. And I can’t recommend Patrick and your team, uh, uh, any more than I can. Thank you for doing our site, our beautiful site, a lot of other things and being a resource for so many and so generous. Thank you, Patrick.

28:07
Yeah, we appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on today. I appreciate it. You’re welcome. We’ll have you again. Please, please, please. Great book, the five star practice. We’ll put the links below where you can find it. And remember to also follow us if you haven’t already on Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube, get the episodes as they release, share with your friends, let them know. mean, just as Patrick’s talking about, he’s the marketer. The more you share the podcast, the more you hit that subscribe and like button and all those good things.

28:32
I joke sometimes, go to your mom or your dad or your kid’s phone and just start subscribing to our stuff. Hey, it helps, it helps. And that’s a good reciprocity for all the great stuff. It helps us get it out there more for other people, just like reviews, right? So do that for us. And until next time, everyone, go out there and be an All-Star.

28:57
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com.