Heather Nottingham discusses how phone skills are critical, as missed or mishandled calls can lead to significant revenue loss. Regular, intentional training, role-playing, and continuous learning are essential for maintaining these skills.
Resources:
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, and with me is Heather Nottingham, co-founder and VP of training, and our topic is Dental Front Office Training. Please welcome Heather. Hello. Hi Alex. Hi everybody. How are you? Hello, hello, hello. Dental Front Office Training.
00:32
It’s interesting. I wanted to address this topic because I think maybe second to phone or close on par is this issue of the front office and front office training. So of course some caveats here. We don’t, well, you have dental front office. We call it, or some people call it front desk. We don’t like to say that because you’re not a chair, not a piece of equipment. Yeah. Or furniture, but the staff is the staff section.
01:02
Exactly. But it’s okay. We allow all those are all acceptable answers. You get credit. The front office is typically where when people think about our training often they think, okay, it’s going to apply principally to the front office because we’re talking about phone skills, scheduling, and then we do case acceptance and so on. But the first is, well, I don’t want to as a doctor do training. I want my team to do the training. So there’s a number of issues there.
01:31
But just, and I think let’s start like narrowly and then kind of expand a little further to the entire team. So with the front office, first tell me, why is it important to train your front office? And remember, the front office typically, it’s not dental specific, it’s administrative, it’s people stuff. Why is it important to train your front office? Well, I think we can,
02:00
take it back as we often do to your dad’s practice, my father-in-law. And, you know, one of the biggest things that we saw is they had a pretty seasoned team, you know, people had been there for quite a, quite a bit of time. So it wasn’t from lack of experience and they were oftentimes focused on the front office tasks, if you will.
02:26
you know, making sure that they were checking in and checking out patients, making sure that they were checking insurances and verifying claims and things like that, which are all necessary and important parts of the dental practice, they’re tasks. Just like, you know, you have to go into the office and turn the lights on and do different things. But what we saw is that in your dad’s practice, when we took it over, before we took it over, when we were assessing things, there was…
02:55
a deficit, a lot of debt, if you will, and just due to mismanagement and things like that. But also the practice wasn’t being productive. They were busy, but they were not productive. And when we started looking at things, there was a lot of people doing a lot of tasks, but those tasks were making smaller amounts of money than the bigger, more…
03:23
important things, I would say. So when we started to assess the practice, we recognized a huge missed opportunity, which was the phones. Right? When we started listening to the phone calls, we saw that a lot of the calls weren’t being answered, or if they were being answered, there was not a level of customer service that was converting those calls to appointments. And so as you’ve shown in other videos and in your webinar, the business growth formula
03:54
Whether you’re paying money or not for marketing, it still costs an incredible amount of money for somebody to pick up the phone and call your practice. And if those calls aren’t getting handled properly, that’s basically the first impression of the practice. They’re not getting converted. Then you don’t have people to show up, come for visits, present treatment to. And so it’s really taking the emphasis off of the task-oriented things.
04:22
and making sure that the team and especially the front office team is focused on the important things which are patient care, making sure that the patients are getting great customer service, that they’re moving from that phone call to showing up for the appointment, that they’re coming in excited, that we’re giving a phenomenal patient experience, and then they’re accepting treatment and ultimately referring more people, which means less money that you have to spend on marketing.
04:51
So that’s really where it is. Yeah, it’s very costly when it comes to the front office. And I don’t know if, I mean, people who have followed our webinars, and I’ll give you a good one, alls backslash webinar, where I talk about just when it comes to phone skills, and that’s the first impression. When you have your front office, the first thing that’s gonna happen is they’re going to answer the phone.
05:22
And, oh, not a big deal. It is a big deal because what we find in call tracking research and many marketing companies that we work with and the feedback they give us is that not only they’re missed calls, they’re not converting calls. And, and it’s not that just right off the bat, we don’t preach unethical behavior or sales, it’s service-based, but you have to have intentionality. You have to have a level of detail and training. I know dentists know about training.
05:51
they train themselves to be great clinicians. It’s not like, oh, you just fill a two. You have to, there’s a process. There’s also getting to know your patient, making sure they’re comfortable. So it starts with the phone. And in the webinar, I talk about what it costs. The average office misses, I believe, 87 opportunities a month on the average office. But let’s say you just missed one a day, one a working day, and lifetime value of a patient,
06:20
What did I put at that as? Was it $1,000 I put? I forget, or maybe it was a little less. I think it was 600 and- 642, 642. 642 something. It was 642 for the first year, but it’s up now with inflation. But just for easy math, that ends up being $10,000 a month. And if you put that across a year, that’s 120,000. Lifetime value of a patient, 1.2 million, from that one month that you messed up on.
06:47
forget even multiple months that this is happening ongoing. So it’s a huge impact. It’s a silent killer, we call it. We talk about in the webinar how to overcome that. Our training does that. We have a lot of free eBooks and the webinar specifically will help you with some of that phone training because we give it away. We give away our entire, I mean, our online training. We go in more detail, of course, but we want you to see what you learn at All-Star, service-based and our systems so you can say, oh, this is great, I should be training with this. Now…
07:16
So we see that it is costing us money. That’s the first thing before we say, I wanna train my front office, why? Why? Because that’s where we start with. So there’s the cost, but yeah, you wanna add something Heather? Well, and a lot of times they, you know, dentists will say, I wanna train my front office, but they think again, they think to those tasks, like they think that they need to know how to.
07:42
check insurance or do this or collect money, which yes, they need to do know how to do all of those things. But that was the thing that we noticed in your dad’s practice is they were so focused on doing those tasks because they were good at those tasks and they liked doing those tasks and people that are comfortable doing things and it’s that’s in their comfort zone. Whereas they’re not as comfortable.
08:07
talking to patients and dealing with rejection because that’s a little bit outside of their comfort zone. And typically they try to avoid that. So when I came into the office and I said, I want to answer the phones, they’re like, take it. I don’t want to take it. But that’s how we grew the practice from a million dollar practice that was struggling facing bankruptcy to over 2.4 million in less than 18 months because the tasks then became
08:37
put on other people. And then there was a high focus on the really important opportunities, which were new patients, you know, making sure, like those things we talked about. Getting people to schedule an appointment, making sure they show up for the appointment, giving them a great patient experience, getting case acceptance, and then making sure that they’re referring friends and family. That’s the only way that you grow a business is by the people. So…
09:03
I would say, why are we processing insurance checks right now while the phones are ringing? Why are we collecting this thing or doing this task right now when there are patients in front of us? That’s where it really… Well, you know, I like to use dental analogies even though I’m not a dentist. And I have a rule with all of our dentists. I’m not interested in DDS, all dental stuff. I want to focus on the business area. But it’s like drilling a tooth that is…
09:32
not a problem or focusing on a tooth or healing a tooth with an issue somewhere else in the mouth. I mean, that’s the issue that we’re keeping busy, but are we productive? And that’s where phone skills, scheduling to reduce broken appointments, case acceptance, it takes, and that’s the thing, it takes learning it, role playing it, do it again and again. That’s why we have an online training system that’s systematic to go through it.
10:02
And then we recommend you repeat it every year because it’s not, let me do it one time. And then there’s coaching that we offer and events. These are ways to reinforce the and create a support system for it to be embodied. We love to use example about personal training. We use personal trainers. Why? For their skill set, for the motivation, because you’ve got to keep doing it. You can’t lift some weights and there you are, Arnold, and you stay that way. It’s an ongoing process of eating healthy and so on.
10:31
So we got to stick with that. And we have to value, as we talked about before, the cost and why we do it. So we’re training, so all right, so I think for purposes of this podcast, we’re like, okay, then this is like, I understand it. I see it’s important. I should put some time into it. I mentioned the webinar, you watched it, or at least you got the gist of it, or part of it. Now it goes, how do we train our front office? How do we get them better?
11:00
on phone skills, on scheduling, on case acceptance. How do we utilize this untapped resource that can really expand our practice? Because I will note, and you kind of alluded to it, what caused my father’s practice to go, you know, skyrocket. Yes, I was sending marketing leads. Yes, I’m a decent manager leader, but I had a superstar in you that we took from Bloomingdale’s that answered the phone with no training.
11:29
Because what you had to do is you had to use your Bloomingdale’s training, which they give you and adapted it to All-Star. In our online training, a lot of your Bloomingdale’s background we imbue in the course that customer service mindset. So this to kind of give a little background of what you did. So how do we train our front office team? Because sometimes we get dentists that say, I just want to train one person and I want to get them trained pretty quickly.
11:58
And I’m not interested in the entire team. Yeah. So help me out here. Well, and that’s that’s always common. And I’m noticing it’s more common recently, especially because there’s so much turnover in dentistry. You know, we know that a lot of people left the industry or, you know, when we have a hiring service at All Star, just a little plug for hiring service, we find amazing, high quality team members that are great fit for the practice from
12:27
not just a skills and experience perspective, but in most importantly, from the right attitude perspective, because it’s easier to train skills and experience than it is for attitude for sure. And so we’re seeing that a lot in that practices now more so than ever, I think in our past 10 years of doing this, they have all these new team members and they’re like, I just want to train
12:57
I always think of like the best, you know, I don’t know, let’s think of like a theater production or a sports team or whatever a good analogy is for you. Something where there’s an entire cast of people, players, theater production, whatever it is. Imagine just saying that one person is going to do training, but the rest aren’t, right? So I think for the new people on the team, it is important to…
13:26
have some training for them to get them up to speed, especially if they don’t have a dental background. Like myself, I came in having absolutely no dental background, but I was a fast learner, I asked a lot of questions. And one of the reasons we created All-Star was because I was frustrated not having any sort of onboarding process or protocol. Coming from Bloomingdale’s, there was always a very succinct like…
13:51
Here’s what you do the first week. Here’s what you do the second week. Here’s the order that you do it in. Here’s how you answer a phone. Like they walk you through the steps. They, you shadow people. In a dental practice, that hardly ever happens. They just throw you in there and expect you to figure it out. And then you have all these different people at all these different levels, completely incohesive, right? And that’s probably one of the number one things that
14:20
when I talk to dentists that they’ll tell me is, I wish my team was more consistent, but I want you to just train this one person. And I’m like, if you’re looking for consistency, you have to train as a team, just like a sports team. You know, you have different players or in a theater production, different, you know, people with different parts and they study their own parts. Eventually they come together and they rehearse.
14:45
And that I would say is the most important aspect, especially because offices are looking for consistency. We didn’t just train on our own at Bloomingdale’s or at the different stores that I managed. And even companies like the Ritz Carlton and Chick-fil-A and others, where you see that they have a very high level of customer service, they train together as a group. They train individually, and then they also train together as a group because that’s how, you know, the
15:14
Otherwise, how is your performance going to be if one person’s answering the phone one way, another person’s answering the phone a totally different way, if you have all these different processes for check-in and check-out. It doesn’t look like an organized practice. And the better quality practices that merit the higher quality patients and the better production numbers, they typically have a process for that.
15:42
So training together, training consistently, and not just training with the new person, because you have that new person, that’s new, but I’m always curious, well, what about the rest of the team? When was the last time they trained? If they haven’t trained in the past few months, they’ve probably gotten pretty rusty on their skills too. And so just because they did training before, you worked with a consultant one time three years ago, doesn’t mean that they’ve kept those skills.
16:11
It’s like if you exercise three years ago, are you gonna be buff? No. Or go to the dentist one time, it’s enough. Yeah. Or floss in the breath. Last year, you saw me when I was here. And I’m a big fan of modeling the best. That’s one of the things I learned when I was a top coach for Tony Robbins is, I don’t model what works. That’s what we’ve done for the past 10 years plus at Ulster Dental Academy. And whether you like it or not, this is what works. And I’m not saying we’re the only way to do it.
16:41
but consistency over intensity, continuing to do that process, you will get great results. Few questions for you Heather, one, skill versus position. So some training will say, we are going to relegate people to different silos, so you have the front office, you have the clinical, and they’re not getting, so we train for position, versus what we believe is we train for skill, and we build the skill sets, the customer service skill sets that everyone, including the dentist,
17:10
is strong when it comes to the program. Yeah, tell me a little about that. Yeah, I mean, I definitely believe in looking at and like you said, modeling what the best are doing. So when you look at the best and other companies, they believe in cross training people, you don’t you don’t ever want to have people saying, well, this is my job, and I don’t do that. This is my job, and I don’t do that. Then you have the back against the front office and like nobody wants to help out. We’re a team.
17:39
And so where we need to be is everybody has an understanding and an appreciation of the other people’s roles so that like if somebody from the back needs to help out at the front, which helps happens a lot, you know, there are sometimes people out sick or your short staff and people need to be able to float back and forth throughout the various positions and everybody from whether it’s the admin team or the clinical team or management or dentist needs to understand verbiage.
18:09
how to connect with patients, rapport, patient personality types. That’s just human psychology, human communication. And so cross-training is really important. I was always cross-trained in previous positions, whether, you know, no matter what it is. And even if you look at like the Ritz-Carlton, for example, they cross-train everybody, and everybody understands the vision, the mission, the values.
18:36
the customer service aspects of the business so that it doesn’t matter if you are walking through that hotel and you find a senior manager and you ask them where the restroom is, or if you ask a janitor in the hallway that’s cleaning up the trash can, they’re going to follow the same standard protocol where they walk you to wherever you’re needing to go and they show you where you need to go.
19:02
It’s not like, oh, well, I’m a senior manager, so that’s not my job. Or, oh, I just take out the trash. That’s not my job. Like walking through the office, if you see garbage on the floor, you pick it up. It doesn’t matter if you’re admin. So that’s where it’s important to train everybody so that again, there’s that consistency, especially when it comes to verbiage communication, presenting treatment. I mean, it doesn’t matter if you have a.
19:29
treatment coordinator or if the doctor presents treatment, everybody’s involved in that case acceptance process. If you’re a hygienist, you’re involved in the process. If you’re the front out, you’re continuously having those conversations with patients. So the one thing I like to hear from you, I love, look, the dentist is the hero, the team are the hero. When it comes to this, we’re a guide to help you get there. You’re the one that has to actually do it, right?
19:56
Tell me some transformation or some success stories that you’ve seen with people when it comes to the front office or a team. Or maybe those who have done it well, or those who’ve done poorly first, or those who’ve done well. I mean, I don’t know. Tell me a little bit, give me a little bit of a couple examples. Well, I mean, I’ve seen one particular office that came to us after they had already.
20:19
They dropped an insurance plan, so we weren’t involved in that process. We do help offices get off of insurance if they need help with that. And we’re very successful at doing it. We’ve done it so many times. We have a really good rate of keeping patients that, you know, typically wouldn’t stay if you just send a letter. But this particular office dropped the insurance plan before we worked with them. And it was problematic for them because.
20:48
The patients came in expecting to have the office take their insurance. They no longer took it. The patient would get mad because nobody told them. They’d start, you know, yelling at the person at the front. The person at the front had no training, so they would take it personally and start yelling back at the patient. And it was creating chaos in their office. They got bad reviews. They’re, you know, definitely their revenue and production drops significantly.
21:16
Um, so they came to us to, to turn it around because they recognize, wow, if we had had these verbal skills and this communication and the process for going out of network in place before we did, we did this, we wouldn’t have to clean up the mess. So you know, that’s one situation of not doing it the best way possible. Um, another office, uh, doctor came to us, gosh, he’s been with us maybe nine or 10 years now.
21:45
And he came to us because he had just hired a new admin team member and she came completely out of dentistry. And he said, she’s really good personality. I really want to keep her and motivate her to do a great job along with the rest of my team. But I feel like I am too busy to train them on my own. And I don’t have the resources to reinvent the wheel to create a whole program to teach them. I don’t know. And a lot of times.
22:14
Even if you have the knowledge of what you want to teach your team, it’s better coming from a third party like us. They just, they respond better to it because they look at us as the experts. And a lot of times the dentists are like, what do you know about customer service and practice management training, even though you sometimes do know about it. And so this particular dentist had his team member sign up with us in, as well as the rest of his team. Um,
22:43
but she didn’t have any dental background and she did so amazingly well. I mean, he was like, this did great for her, our training program. And so much so that she became his office manager, very high level office manager. And she even went on to become a call grader for us for a period of time. And so that was amazing to see that somebody that came from having no dental background
23:12
go to become his office manager and to be a call grader for us, giving feedback to other team members to help them out just because she felt like she wanted to give back to, you know, where she had come from. And she called us up about a year after doing the program. They were still on the program, of course, but after a year after she had been on it. And she said, this was the best thing. It gave me the confidence to.
23:39
feel like I knew what I was doing and not have to like figure it out on my own. Because that’s what happens in a lot of offices is, like I said, they throw you to the fire. The team might be a good person or have a great attitude, but if they’re not given that on the job training that they expect that they’re gonna have, they get frustrated because they feel like they’re not confident in what they’re doing. And then they’re just like, I’m out, I’m out of here.
24:06
So I would say that’s a great success story and I’m still friends with her. She’s a really good person. That’s amazing. Yeah. Let me ask you this. So I’d like to send everybody, if you haven’t, go to alls backslash webinar. I do a webinar for free webinar on phone skills and scheduling, how to reduce turnover. It’s a great webinar. If you’ve seen it, watch it again. Share with your friends.
24:32
Now also in terms of our training, somebody’s listening saying, Heather, this, I need this, I need my, for an office help, my entire team on these customer service skills. What do I do? What do you do? How will you help at All-Star and what will be their next step to engage? Well, I’m happy to have a conversation with anybody that has questions or
24:58
would like to talk about your practice or see if it’s a good fit for you. So I always make myself available for that. You get the co-founder. Yes. That’s something that’s really important to us, um, is to have a connection with our clients where, you know, again, we’re a big company, but we’re also boutique in that I like to, and you like to talk to everybody that is a member of ours. And I always do an onboarding call with.
25:26
you and myself to just go over best practices and what I know is working for other offices over the many years and you do a strategy call as well just to kind of give them that high level business strategic advice. If they if they watch the webinar and they get that spot. If it’s not always available. Oh yes. Well not oops. It’s it’s I’m busy so they gotta we we want to look we want to serve
25:53
the dental practices that want to, that want help. And that want to be something that’s not just us, that we have a whole community of dentists that will support each other to be successful. If you’re looking just to train one position and be out in a few months, please don’t waste our time and your money. We’re for people that in dental practices that want to support their current vision. Most dental practices are about customer service and they want friends to support them
26:23
and help them through that. And everything that we do is makes money, which is nice. It helps you become more efficient. Even our coaching, we call it self-funding coaching because it pays for itself within 90 days. We build products and services that are there to last, to be something that you can do for decades and get results. And I joke about a boring practice. You come in, you love what you do, make plenty of money, your team makes money, everybody’s happy, no drama.
26:51
So and like you said, there’s there’s that merit and consistency that the offices that we see over the years that are consistent with their training. It’s ABT always be training. It’s just like exercise. If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it. And I’ve seen incredible team members that were doing really well with improving their verbal skills, communication offices are doing well. And then they think like, oh,
27:16
We’re good, we’re done. And then they stop. And typically after a very short few months, they, it’s just nature. They tend to revert back to old habits and ways of doing things. So it’s important to constantly be reinforcing progress and improvement in just those little bite-sized increments. So I recommend that attend the webinar, reach out to me. Um, the training is easy. It’s, you know, 20 to 30 minutes a week. So it’s very manageable. It’s very, um,
27:47
It’s easy to work into the schedule. There’s different ways that I can give you tips and tricks on how to do it with your team. Like Alex said, we have coaching, we have our hiring service, so there’s things that you can add, events, to help complement and supplement that learning as well. Awesome. Thank you, Heather, our co-founder and VP of training. And I mentioned the webinar, alls backslash webinar, or you can go to our website, alls
28:15
Remember to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, get the episodes as they are released, share with your friends. And until next time, go out there and be an All Star.
28:29
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
