A dental practice is populated with patients who respect and admire and trust you. Of course – otherwise they wouldn’t be there! So why don’t they refer more friends, family or co-workers to the practice? Probably because they think you are so busy that you don’t want or couldn’t accept any more new patients. I suggest it is time to educate your patient base and start asking for referrals.<\/p>\n
But dentists and staff are reluctant to ask for referrals because they think it is either demeaning or un-professional. My assessment is that if you don’t ask, you are missing a golden opportunity. So when is it OK to ask and how do you ask? Very simple – you ask for referrals whenever a patient says “thank you.” This needs to be like a Pavlovian response – a patient saying “thank you” triggers the request for a referral. The doctor and each and every staff member needs to develop their own script for this. Here are two examples.<\/p>\n
Patient says to the doctor after looking in the mirror – “I just love the way these front fillings look – thank you so much.” \u00a0Don’t be shy – you just heard the magic words. The proper reply would be “I’m glad you are pleased,\u00a0 they do look great and I am excited for you. I love doing this kind of treatment – so if you have friends who might benefit, please send them our way. We’ll take just as good care of them as we did of you.”<\/p>\n
Patient says to someone at the front desk – “Susie – thank you so much for getting my son a last minute appointment to get his teeth cleaned this week. We totally forgot he was going back to college.” A response might be “Mrs. Jones – it is my pleasure. That is the way we try to take care of all of our patients. So any friends you want to refer over – well we would love to see them. And you can be sure we will always extend the same courtesy to them.”<\/p>\n
You get the idea. \u00a0Hopefully offering exquisite customer service is a corner stone of your practice philosophy, so you should be hearing patients say thank you all day long. Just be sure to seize that perfect opportunity to ask for a referral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A dental practice is populated with patients who respect and admire and trust you. Of course – otherwise they wouldn’t be there! So why don’t they refer more friends, family or co-workers to the practice? Probably because they think you are so busy that you don’t want or couldn’t accept any more new patients. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n