Mastering Verbal Skills – Part 3

Episode #357 with Jenni Poulos

Cancellations will always be a part of your practice. But wouldn't it be great to reduce or even prevent them? And that's exactly what Kirk Behrendt and Jenni Poulos will teach you how to do in the final part of Mastering Verbal Skills. If you communicate the value of your dentistry well, your chairs will be full, and patients will keep their appointments. But when patients do need to reschedule, there are good and bad ways to handle it. To learn the best practices for handling cancellations with “A,” “B,” and “C” patients, listen to Episode 357 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Your tone, your words, and your body language matters.

Filling chairs starts with communicating value to your patients.

Don't place the onus on your front desk staff. Set them up for success.

Cancellations and rescheduling shouldn't be easy for patients.

Learn how to respond to “A,” “B,” and “C,” patient cancellations.

Have excellent note-taking practices to record patient information.

Quotes:

“The words we use matter. The tone that we use matters. How we lean in and how we listen, it matters. As humans, our brains are hardwired to read into specific terms, to read into specific words, to read into nonverbal communication. And whatever we say to someone, they're already writing a story in their head based on the preconceived notions that they bring with that piece of language or with that tone. So, how we deliver things and the words that we choose are really, really important.” (2:55—3:30)

“I gave you an action item in the very first [episode] to start making a “say this, not that.” I want you to pull out that list, and the first thing I want you to do is put “cancel” and a circle around it and strike through it. We change appointments. We reschedule appointments. We don't cancel appointments.” (6:14—6:29)

“People pay for things that they value. They show up for things that they value. So, if we, as a team, are really good at communicating the value of the treatment, the value of the appointment to the patient, the likelihood of their changing the appointment, not showing up for the appointment, is dramatically reduced.” (6:48—7:07)

“We talked about before that I don't want you to confirm appointments. There is a little caveat there. When you schedule appointments, I want you to tell your patients, ‘We consider all appointments confirmed when scheduled. We’ll give you a reminder call, but this time is reserved specifically for you. It’s confirmed in our books. So, we’re putting it in Sharpie in the book, and I want you to put it in Sharpie in the book too. Don't just pencil us in. We've got you confirmed. We've reserved the time for you.’” (7:53—8:27)

“The story that I bring with [using the word] “confirm” is that I can change it; it’s not yet confirmed. I like to remind someone of the time that has been reserved specifically for them. It carries a different weight.” (10:17—10:31)

“You don't want to make it easy for people to change their appointments. And if you do have to change your appointment, there's a legitimate reason, I want to get you reappointed immediately. I don't want my admin team to be spending time chasing you down, going back and forth, to reappoint that. I want your after-hours message to state very clearly, ‘We do not accept any changes to the schedule via message. We only accept changes to the schedule during business hours.” (13:57—14:32)

“The RFR (reason for return), what it is doing is it is letting people know we have listened to them, we have heard them. We are creating that trust and that safe space. So, this one item is hitting on so many of these key concepts that we talked about in the first webinar.”...