Summary: Orthodontic practices can gain a competitive advantage by adopting “outrageous customer service,” which goes beyond standard care to create exceptional patient experiences. Achieving this requires consistency, strategic implementation, and a team-wide commitment to making every interaction feel positive and memorable.
Key Takeaways:
- Essential elements include a beloved orthodontist, a fun and positive culture, strong scripting, and a variety of well-executed customer service strategies.
- Outrageous customer service aims to make an orthodontic practice the top choice in its area through consistency and strategic execution.
- Success depends on engaging not only patients but also parents, ensuring they feel valued and eager to recommend the practice.
By Roger P. Levin, DDS
One of the evolutions that always takes place in business is the act of becoming more extreme. This means more extreme advertising, more extreme marketing, more extreme claims, etc. Becoming more extreme offers the chance for a competitive advantage and one of the best ways to move toward the extreme with excellent results is to think about the concept of outrageous customer service.
What is outrageous customer service?
Customer service is the foundation of building great orthodontic practices. Before a practice can achieve outrageous customer service, these questions need to be answered:
What is the goal of outrageous customer service? The goal is amazingly simple. To be the best customer service oriented orthodontic practice in your area. For this to happen, the practice must be consistent, have the right customer service strategies, and offer patients an outrageous experience.
Who is outrageous customer service geared towards? Anyone that touches the practice. Parents are just as important as patients and adults are just as important as teenagers. The best practices have orthodontists that enjoy shocking parents and patients with outrageous customer service to the point where they provide excellent reviews and refer other patients.
How do you select outrageous customer service strategies? Draw from your own outrageous customer service experiences that occur with business you encounter and read books on the topic. My book titled Wow Every Patient outlines over 80 customer service strategies. The good news is that you don’t need 80 strategies to do very well. The key is to pick strategies that make people feel good and repeat them for every parent and patient every day every time. In fact, consistency is one of the most important factors in providing outrageous customer service. You don’t get to have a bad day that interferes in providing outrageous customer service.
How do I get my team to participate in outrageous customer service? Start with training yourself and your team to believe that outrageous customer service is just as important as clinical care. Many orthodontic practices believe that if they have excellent care, they will be successful when in fact that has less to do with orthodontic practice success than outrageous customer service. The reality is that parents and patients judge the practice first on how it feels and how well they are treated. Get your team to buy into this concept and focus on outrageous customer service day after day.
READ MORE: 5 Strategies to Improve Your Customer Service
Four characteristics of outrageous customer service
After providing consulting services to thousands of orthodontic practices, we have seen many that thought they had outrageous customer service when, in fact, it was average. There’s nothing wrong with average, but average is not outrageous. Outrageous means that the practice is over the top in providing patients with a great experience. Practices that excel in this area often have these characteristics:
- A long-term orthodontist that everybody loves. Patients love the personality of the orthodontist and have brought multiple siblings and/or the next generation in their family to the practice. They don’t shop other practices, and they don’t quibble about fees.
- A wealth of customer service strategies. Applying numerous strategies consistently day in and day out is the key to building outrageous customer service, and a foundation where parents and patients begin to recognize the practice as “the place to go.”
- A fun and positive culture. Patients are drawn to practices that offer fun contests, upbeat staff, and convenient appointments.
- Great scripting. Do not underestimate the importance and power of scripts. In life, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. For example, you can merely say goodbye to a patient as they leave, or you can make the extra effort to inquire about their appointment, ask them if they need anything, and tell them how great it was to see them.
Customer service can be delivered at many levels. Outrageous customer service can only be delivered at one level, which is the highest level. You need to work every day to design systems that are followed consistently by the team for every parent and patient every day. This is how world-class practices with excellent brands and reputations are built. The great news is that almost any practice can make this happen. OP
Photo: ID 137988204 © Siam Pukkato | Dreamstime.com
Roger P. Levin, DDS, is the CEO and founder of Levin Group, a leading practice management consulting firm that has worked with over 30,000 practices to increase production. A recognized expert on orthodontic practice management and marketing, he has written 67 books and over 4,000 articles and regularly presents seminars in the U.S. and around the world. To contact Levin or to join the 40,000 dental professionals who receive his Practice Production Tip of the Day, visit levingroup.com or email [email protected].
