Heather Nottingham, VP of Training at All-Star Dental Academy, shares expert tips and proven strategies to create remarkable patient experiences, build loyalty, and boost practice growth
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About Heather Nottingham
Heather is the VP of Training & Phone Skills Instructor at All-Star Dental Academy. She is a former retail sales trainer and manager for Bloomingdale’s, Kate Spade, and Theory, and a top new patient coordinator for a multi-million-dollar high-end dental practice where she personally increased revenue by over a million dollars in less than 18 months. She has over 24 years worth of customer service, training, and phone experience, and designed the All-Star Dental Academy Phone Success Course as well as the GREAT Call® Process.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. With me is Heather Nottingham, co-founder and VP of Training. And our topic is Dental Customer Service Training. Please welcome Heather Nottingham. Hi, Alex. Hi, everybody. Hi. Hi. Dental Customer Service Training.
00:31
You do a whole course on customer service training in our online training program. Tell us about the importance of customer service. It’s important. Okay, end of podcast. Until next time. That’s it. There you go. Because you built a whole course kind of building on phone skills and because I’m looking at the course syllabus here.
01:00
We go through in our training program, your phones, scheduling, and then we go to the advanced courses, patient experience, case acceptance, as well as customer service, which is one of the courses as well. So yeah, tell us about why, well, actually, you know what will help because depends who didn’t listen last time, give us a little bit of background about you and your journey kind of really focusing on the retail side.
01:28
and kind of weave that into customer service. Yeah, so initially, before dentistry, before I got started working four-year dad’s practice, I worked in retail sales and management and for some big companies like Bloomingdale’s and Kate Spade and Theory, and just learned a whole lot from companies like that. Of course, those are relatively high-end companies.
01:55
and the people that shop in them have a high level of expectation when it comes to customer service. And there was a lot of training that was emphasized with those different positions. So you know, like if you go shop in any store, they typically just ring up your stuff. If you have a person at the checkout, now it’s sometimes just self-checkout. But if you have somebody there, they just hand you your stuff. One of the things in Bloomingdale that they always trained us on is
02:25
everything in the bag, you walk it around the counter and you hand it to the person. So it’s nice. It’s like an extra touch. It’s like, you know, when they say my pleasure at Chick-fil-A or in the Ritz-Carlton where they like will actually show you to where you’re going versus just pointing like if you ask where the bathroom is. So there’s different things like that. And I think that the more the practice focuses on training for these things, it becomes, it becomes a
02:54
a custom or second nature in the practice, but we have to train on them. And so just learning what I learned from Bloomingdale’s and this high end environment about just really it’s about exceeding expectations and kind of anticipating what the customer or patient would want or is thinking before they actually have to ask for it. So that’s how you, you listen, you pay attention, you understand what they’re interested in.
03:24
And the customer service course, I wanted to do that just to create some sort of a standard of like even the littlest things in the dental practice that we don’t think about make a difference. Like what’s playing on the television or what’s what kind of music you have playing or how does the office smell or how does it look. And you know, you’re never going to please everybody, but you can get pretty close to doing that. So like little extra things in the bathroom.
03:53
you know, go to a med spa and they have like different things in the bathroom, like little goodies. And it’s like, just like those nice extra touches, or what you put in your goodie bag for your patient when they’re leaving or how you ask for referrals. It’s all customer service. And even we talk about when you have a patient in the operatory, you never just want to leave them sitting there, right? Or like be talking to them with your back turned to them.
04:23
It’s stuff like that that we don’t even think about that it’s subconscious sometimes that patients might not even realize is important until they have it. And they’re like, wow, this business was so good or so attentive. So I just love it. And I think it’s important and always just thinking about how we can, as dental practices, exceed expectations for our patients. Now with your story, our story, and my father’s a dentist.
04:53
and you worked in Bloomingdale’s and retail, and there was an opportunity because I needed help there. Dental office, I was sending a bunch of business and they weren’t converting, so we tried something outside the box. I like to stir things up a little bit, and the ladies there weren’t excited to have a Bloomingdale’s person come in with the fancy service. They just wanted to do insurance claims. So you come in there and within 18 months, we take a $1 million practice that’s struggling to 2.4.
05:22
million dollars. And so like we mentioned before is you didn’t have any training in the dental office. It all came from Bloomingdale’s and much of that and also much of your training thereafter you put into these, the training program, the online training. So it has, I mean, they do it the best, these retail establishments, even Amazon, even Walmart, which you don’t consider customer service entities.
05:51
do really the customer service and they don’t, they reduce the friction and they also make things where it’s sticky. And this is a podcast, we go off topic a little bit, but I think this is important here because I’m gonna tell you that are listening right here. We wanna make All-Star sticky. There’s no like deception around, I’m just gonna say that because you want your practice the same way. What does that mean?
06:20
That means we’re going to take such great care of you that when you do our online program, it’s so good. It’s a great program. Then you have coaching and events and other things where like, where am I going to go? They’re customer service based. They take care of me. They help support myself and my team. I get a wonderful return on investment. That’s good business. Any business should work that way. A dental office.
06:49
Same thing, I come to the dental office, great customer service, as well as maybe there’s stuff that you offer, whether it’s products and additional services that can support the experience, but they come back and they refer. And that has to be intentional. Yes, if you’re a nice person and you’re good to people, you’ll have an okay business for sure. Unless you’re like my father, poor thing.
07:18
needed some help on the business end and then made a lot of business mistakes, which it’s all good. You still need to have support professionals to help you with that. But assuming your business is solid and you’re nice and you, well, you’ll get somewhere, but you can get even more efficient because again, being nice is not enough. That’s a good place to start, but you have to be intentional. This is where it’s all about intentional, intentional about training.
07:45
That’s why we built the online training to be very easy, 20 minutes a week, to be intentional to work on those things. But there’s this concept called the winning edge principle. Small differences in abilities translate into enormous differences in results. So Heather, you’re talking about the scent, the little thing, even in the bathroom, how you craft emails, how you respond, the bringing around a baggie, whatever that might be. All that.
08:13
adds up to where you become better, not just from corporate dentistry, but all of your competitors down the road. Yeah. And it’s important to talk together as a group in meetings and things like that about, because I think what happens is everybody has a different perception of what is good customer service. That’s a good point. Some team members…
08:40
maybe have never been to like a really fancy restaurant to know like what is good service or etiquette or things like that. And they might think that the level that they’re providing is good customer service. Whereas, you know, then for me, when I came to the dental practice, the team would be like, this patient’s out there, they don’t want to fill out their paperwork. And I’d say, Oh, okay, well, let me go talk to them. And I take them in and I bring them into a private room. And I’d say,
09:08
you know, talk to me about your concerns about filling out this paperwork. You know, what are, what are your concerns and your hesitations? And they’re like, well, I’m just here for a free consultation. I’m like, you know, even though you’re here for free consult, we’re still treating you as if you’re a patient, you know, you’re part of our family. So it’s important for your safety, our standard practice. We want to make sure that so. And then they’d be like, oh, okay. And they’d fill it out. Whereas before they would get into an argument with the team member and then they would just leave.
09:37
So we don’t want that to happen, but why is it that I know how to do that and somebody else doesn’t? Different levels of understanding of what customer service or following the rules or following a process, not having the training, not being taught that before, right, like I don’t want somebody to leave my store because I’m like, you know, focused on this is the rule. So we can have both, but I think it’s important for teams to get together.
10:04
And that’s why we teach it. So it gives you kind of a standard and something to think about. Is it starts the conversation. All of these big companies like the Ritz and Chick-fil-A and others that are very customer service focused, they train together and they understand their, yeah, they understand their vision, their values, their mission, like their processes and procedures for like, like at the Ritz. For example, if somebody gets upset with.
10:34
something that happens. Any team member, it doesn’t matter if they’re a high level manager to anybody, literally anybody on the team has like a $2,000 maximum that they can, you know, obviously they’re not going to just be like, here’s two grand, take it and you know, enjoy yourself. But they can escalate things without having to like go to another person or to a manager to
11:00
like exceed that person’s expectations. Oh my gosh, like you weren’t, your, you know, your bags weren’t there. I’m gonna, you know, give you a free breakfast tomorrow or I’m gonna get you a spa pass so you can enjoy that just to make up for that error that, you know, we’re so sorry about that. So they have those things in place, but I think it’s important to have that conversation together as a group so that everybody understands like,
11:25
What is our level? What is our process? What is our procedure? How do we handle customer service situations, both positive and negative ones that come up? So we know, like, what do we do? And like you said, Alex, customer service doesn’t mean just being nice to the person and letting them walk all over you either. So sometimes team members think, well, if a patient calls to cancel, I should just be like, sure. Well, you know, we’ll…
11:53
cancel it? Do you want to schedule again tomorrow? Like we also don’t want to be push overs. We want to be like, Oh my gosh, what happened? Like, why aren’t you able to make it? How can we, you know, get, get you to come for your appointment? What’s going on and you know, be firm, but also polite. So there’s, there’s a balance in that. Yeah. I mean, nice as a starting point, better than being rude. Yes, of course. But again, I keep coming back to intentionality as well as I’m thinking about
12:23
I mentioned before Walmart, Amazon, even Chick-fil-A, it’s a fast food and they’re doing customer service. We gotta get with the times everybody. Everybody, oh, that was Alexa in the background talking. She’s listening to us, okay. But the customer service is marketing and that attention to detail, people remember that. And showing you care with intention.
12:52
And sometimes being nice is not really caring because, oh, I’ll just let them break the appointment. But they’re going to suffer because I know that we’re enabling them to keep doing that and they’re not going to get good dental care. So it’s not just how they’re for us, but for them. And being just an advocate. And this is the perspective, everybody, as I mentioned before about the stickiness that we want.
13:20
I mentioned at All-Star, we create that. That’s a after effect. But the idea is you want to build a brand and an experience. We do that at All-Star and you want to do it as well as a dental practice, an experience that is lasting, where you attract people like Heather to work there. You attract people that have an ownership mentality. I spoke with a friend of mine. He runs a very large marketing company for dentists. Great company.
13:50
And he was saying that he had a team member that made a mistake of $7,000 and said, oops, but if that was your money, how would you be different? It’s that you care that you’re the leader. So it depends who’s listening. If you’re the dentist, you’re thinking, oh, I appreciate so much what you’re doing. Relax. It’s okay. But you want everybody to care as if it’s your own. Right.
14:18
Dentist listening, you’re not the hero. It’s you’re the hero to us, but to your office, it’s your patients and your team. And to your team, the patients are the hero who we’re serving. So we have to be intentional about it. And then we say, oh yeah, we wanna be great at customer service, which, and the patient experience, same thing or similar thing. What are you doing about it? Put your money where your mouth is. Are you investing?
14:48
Are you doing, so we recommend in our system, you start with the online training. Can you do 20 minutes a week? If you can’t do 20 minutes a week, oi, we got bigger problems. But just little by little, being exposed to the philosophy of customer service. Because no matter what we teach, phone skills, scheduling, case acceptance, it has customer service built in, that we’re doing that over and over. And then it’s stacking on top of that. Self-funding coaching, or going to an event, right?
15:17
These are all opportunities to immerse yourself. And that is what, so you can have an idea, what are you doing about it to achieve it? Not just money, but time. I look at your schedule and you’ll tell me what you prioritize. Do you give your team enough time to talk to patients? Do you give them, which we don’t believe in limiting or scripting or anything like that. Do you give them enough time to give that extra attention? Like you said, can they solve a problem for someone without having to…
15:46
Nickel and dime everybody. You want to create a brand that’s everlasting. Yeah. Make sense? And I think that also customer service is, you know, you have the overall processes and principles of customer service in your office, but a lot of it is just being aware of how that person would, you know, like to be acknowledged because people are different, right? So like…
16:16
One person might love getting a personal phone call because they like talking on the phone, but somebody else might be like, I’m kind of introverted. I don’t like talking on the phone. I’d rather you text me. So if you’re like, keep calling that person that doesn’t want to be called and they’re telling you they don’t want to be called, that’s not good customer service either. So it’s a lot of it is rapport, understanding the person’s individual needs. We can exceed
16:44
how does that person like to be acknowledged, right? It’s like the love languages. If they’re like not a touchy feely person, you’re not gonna like walk up and give them a big hug. They’re gonna be like, you know, I don’t like germies. Get away from me. But if they like to be acknowledged by like, you know, oh, your outfit, you look so great. Like that’s also customer service. So it’s like taking note of the individual person, how they like to be acknowledged, making notes in their chart, whatever it is.
17:13
and really making sure that we’re doing that as well. So that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Yeah. Customer service. Well, I think, well, yeah. Huh. You really explained it so well. Heather, thank you so much for explaining about customer service. A few things, as I mentioned before, if you want to learn more, go to website alls We have a free webinar alls backslash webinar.
17:43
Also, Heather being a co-owner, VP of Training, one of the course instructors. You do phone skills, you do the customer service course. Feel free to reach out and chat. We recommend you watch the webinar before so you have more questions we can talk, but she loves to talk to everybody. I mean, and I think that, you know, we kind of explore that here, but you’re happiest when you’re talking.
18:08
That’s what we do as well with our company. It’s not just, okay, what’s gonna make money? I mean, you have to make money to run a business, but it’s what do you love to do? Well, not even just talking to people. It’s a lot of, especially initially is listening to their needs, their needs, their wants, their frustrations, their goals, their challenges. Connecting, connecting with people. Connection, yes. Because what I’m saying is, and that’s what’s cool about this podcast, is we can just talk. Like, hey, we’re here.
18:37
And I think it’s important you know who’s behind the product and what’s going on. And yes, you like to connect with people, you’re happy as connecting with people. And even though you’re high and mighty a co-founder, you don’t have to do that. It’s like that is, yes, it’s a good use of your time, but to you, it’s like, it’s a good use of your time. Well, it’s, it’s, I mean, every interaction that we have, whether it’s in…
19:05
just the day to day life or business is human interaction is so important. And I don’t know, maybe it’s my psychology background or, you know, just the fact that I’ve been doing doing dentistry and, and, you know, before that retail and what it was is you had a million dollar client book in retail and you like to talk to people that want to, here’s a little, little, little, um, uh, secret here. And I think I mentioned in other podcasts, if you like,
19:34
to make a difference, we like to talk to you because that’s fun, that gets us excited. If you don’t wanna make a difference, why are we talking? So like we get excited, Heather gets excited about connecting and support. And that’s the same way with your patients is you gotta be their biggest fans. They’re the star and how can we support them? And as you’re hearing me talk about this, yes, it’s fun, it’s funny.
20:01
but it’s also customer service. Customer service has to be not just theoretical, but it’s gotta be what you do. It’s gotta be in your being. You gotta look forward to it. And if not, you work at it. You cultivate that activity. And I mentioned a few things. One of the areas we do, we do an event every year called All Star Live. Yes, you’re learning, but it’s fun. You see examples of customer service. You get motivated. So networking.
20:31
So like our whole goal at All-Star is it’s a recipe. Heather is a superior cook, but as I know about recipes and I’m successful at sometimes, I’m gonna be positive with my recipes, but it’s following that recipe. Now dentists love recipes and it’s sometimes you need a little bit of salt and pepper, not too much of the other. So with All-Star you have a little bit online stuff, you have a coach, if you like to coach, you have a mastermind, you have a vent to.
21:01
kind of give it that little kick that you know, so, you know, this is a bit like emerald. This is a fun like what spice we put like, like the events would be the paprika or a little bit of spice or and then you have I don’t know what’s something you need all the time you have the online is salt and then you got to do the salt and pepper maybe a little sugar is the event and then coaching is is another spice your is your turmeric
21:25
and your gingers go for your stomach. So you know, you could, so that’s the idea is if you wanna make a great recipe, you need multiple modalities to make it happen. The same thing with customer service and being a successful practice, it’s not one thing. But I know all of you listening, especially dentists because you were trained this way, it’s always learning. And what I would like to add to you, it’s not just learning, I know you’re always learning, that’s part of it, it’s always training. It’s always implementing. It’s always empowering.
21:54
is becoming a better leader. We have training on leadership. And it’s interesting because we will create things, because we’re a training company, where there’s a need in order for us to help create transformative results and able for us to grow and become better. Well, and I see dentists oftentimes, they gravitate, of course, toward the clinical because that’s like where you can get gal. And that’s dentist comfort zone is like doing what they’re good at.
22:23
It’s the clinical, it’s doing the dentistry part of it. They’re less comfortable, because I talk to dentists all the time, every day, day in, day out, where they’re like, we got like literally one class in dental school on how to run a business and how to manage team members and how to be a better leader. So that’s important. I do want to add to this, because as you were saying this, I think there’s, so dentists are comfortable and clinical. Right. Team, and not in practice management, team is similar.
22:51
Some are comfortable in clinical. Some are comfortable with not training. And so everybody, whether it’s the front office, whether it’s hygiene or assisting, whether it’s dentists, doing customer service skills, working on emotional intelligence and leadership, working on phone skills, this is not, what is this? And we did a whole program on front office training, for example, or phone training. Do that a lot.
23:19
and you have to see the import as it is to the business financially. And I talk about that webinar, alls is that what is costing. So we see that’s there. So yes, I get it. And I think many of you wouldn’t deny that it’s costly if we’re not doing customer service. But then it’s also recognizing, yes, it is difficult. I have a personal trainer. And she says when I complain, oh, I’m sorry. She’s not sorry.
23:47
But I appreciate the pushback of the coaching to be like, do you want to build muscle? Do you want to gain a certain physique or lose weight? Well, you’re gonna have to eat this way, you’re gonna have to do this. And I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. And so it’s, yes, it’s going to be uncomfortable. And she sent me a quote recently to both of us that was about really embracing discomfort. Now let’s get a balance here. We’re not saying you should be in pain.
24:17
We’re not saying that you should, I’m stop doing dentistry. I’m just doing training. You know, I’m not saying that I’m saying we got to find, we have a comfort zone and we want to push it a little bit. Uh, our chief operating officer and our president of coaching talk about the law of the rubber band. We talk about this often in our leadership programs is you want to stretch it. You want to stretch the rubber band. It was designed to stretch. If you stretch too far, it breaks. You don’t stretch at all. It.
24:46
isn’t a rubber band, it’s a band. But if you stretch it, now you’re seeing that’s the potential. So we have to create a little bit of discomfort and growth in order to improve. We wanna be a little bit more uncomfortable with customer service, go outside our comfort zone to provide more comfort and support to our patients. Heather Nottingham, co-founder and VP of training All-Stradental Academy, thank you for being with me and with all of us. Remember to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Get The Ablutso’s.
25:15
Episodes as they released share with your friends. Also, yeah give comments I know a lot of you want Heather back you love when she’s talking about phone skills about customer service Leave some comments there. Yeah, we’ll definitely have her back whether or not, but she likes the comments So until next time everyone go out there and be an all-star
25:40
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacadmy.com
