Retention is the key to long term success

Most dental offices are very aware of how many new patients they acquire each month BUT most dental offices do not know how many patients they LOSE each month. When doing consulting for many dental offices I often found that offices with good new patient acquisition numbers often had a NET NEGATIVE patient flow!

Can you imagine paying large number of dollars in marketing to acquire new patients only to be losing patient base size each month? It happens all the time and the offices are blissfully unaware basking in the high number of new patient data – not realizing that they are actually shrinking in size.

The least expensive patient to acquire is the ones you already have. Let me say that another way – the most important part of the growth plan for your practice must be to keep your current patient base satisfied and STAYING with you.

Keeping patients happy is inexpensive and the easiest to accomplish practice growth thing you can do for your office. I know offices that spend over $10,000 a month on new patient marketing and don’t spend $1 or one minute on maintaining their current patients – a bad strategy and bad math.

A focus on current customer satisfaction is the key and most important step in growing and maintaining your practice size. Read other articles on this and other websites about customer satisfaction ideas and start implementing right away.

Dr. Corey Gold
President - Advanced Continuing Education Systems

www.aces4ce.com

Would You Choose Your Office For Dental Treatment For Yourself?

One of the hardest and most revealing questions I often pose to owners of dental offices is, “would you choose your office for dental treatment” if you were just a regular person shopping for the best office in town? In other words, “are you the best office” in your area? If you can take the emotions out of the question, the answer to the question is quite revealing about what steps you need to take to improve your office.

When people are looking for a new dental office they want to choose the best possible office for their family’s needs. What constitutes ‘best’ is often subjective. We can look at the quality of the dental work, pricing, office facility, staff quality, friendliness of the office, ability to offer financing, location of the office, hours of operation, services offered…. the list of qualities to measure is quite extensive and subjective.

But ask yourself… how do you measure up to your competition in some of these metrics? Is my staff as welcoming as they could be? Are my hours of availability patient friendly? Does my office look clean, modern and what a patient would expect to see in a quality dental office? Does my staff make navigating insurance and financing easy? Are we offering the most up-to-date treatment care? Be honest in your evaluation!

A while back a friend of mine asked me to honestly evaluate his office. I came in as a pretend patient and went through a cleaning procedure. I took mental notes and wrote a ‘to do’ list for my friend afterwards. The list had a lot of action items… many of these items he agreed with and he fixed immediately. Other items he did not think needed adjustment and he made no changes. He said over the next six months he saw a 50% increase in new patient traffic without any additional marketing. The improvements that he made gave his current patients the confidence they needed to refer their friends to his office.

I suggest, at minimum, you take a personal survey of your practice from soup to nuts. Better yet, I suggest you have a dental friend make a list for you of areas they think you could improve. Then put your ego down, evaluate the suggestions, and make improvements to your office. The benefits will be staggering!

Dr. Corey Gold

President - Advanced Continuing Education Systems

www.aces4ce.com