It’s That Time of the Year Again

This is my annual “don’t jump off the bridge” message to dentists. September is traditionally the slowest month of the year for production and collection. And September is the final month of the third quarter (July through September) which is the slowest quarter of the calendar year. But every year, dentist forget this – panic – and deduce that their practice must be succumbing to the competition. The knee-jerk response is to lower fees and charge less.

Don’t fall into that trap. Please realize and understand that there will always be someone who can sell what you sell for less money and deliver it quicker than you can. The eminent  business guru Seth Godin recently posted that “once you decide to become a cheap commodity, all the choices you made to be a non- commodity fall victim to your pursuit of cheap.”

The solution is not to try to compete on price but to compete on quality. Your competition is not from the dental office across the street. It is from college tuitions and vacations and automobiles.

Exceptional quality clinical dentistry in conjunction with a consistent commitment to exquisite customer service at every level will have people in your town raving about how well they were treated, how their time was respected, how they were given choices of treatment, and how they felt like a person and not a number.

Practices with “busyness” problems are often unwittingly their own worst enemy. Business hours Monday through Thursday – 8 to 4 – shows no understanding of the need to be available. And why would you not answer the phone over the lunch hour? How about not allowing someone to leave a message?

The good news is that you are still standing. Now that September is almost history, get back to basics and concentrate on making it easy for people to do business with you. When people know how much you truly care about them, good things will happen. And as I’ve said many times regarding customer service – it is not hard to be good when everyone else is so bad!