Loyalty: The quality or state of showing complete and constant support for someone or something.
What does it mean in today’s dental practice? Work — hard work!
So how do we go about establishing loyalty with your patients, dentists, hygienists and other staff?Patient loyalty is challenging because each patient is different. Therefore, we must ask how we identify the core requirement that each patient is seeking that will guarantee his or her loyalty.
Everyone in the office was tasked with this mission. From providers (both dentists and hygienists) to staff, we all play an integral part in maintaining customer loyalty. Although there is great diversity within this group, we see two common themes: To improve oral health and increase satisfaction with services.
Where do you start?
With the providers, we started by building on the forces that drive them and their desire to help. We all agreed that it is not enough to just show up — we had to bring passion and a determination to connect with and assist our patients in obtaining and maintaining oral health.
We know: It’s not easy. But we decided the only way to accomplish our goals was to approach it on a patient-by-patient basis and focus not only on the patient’s specific needed treatment but on the entire patient. This gives each provider great autonomy to engage and treat their patients and works to ensure that each patient believes and feels we are here to help.
With the rest of our team, which consists of assistants and front desk staff, providers have focused efforts on supporting them in their roles, providing training and revamping areas identified as ineffective. This allows them to create and manage projects of improvement, all while increasing job satisfaction.What we realized in this process was that we were building strong relationships that benefited from our hard work to earn the trust of everyone we interact with daily.
With that trust earned, we’re well on our way in the journey to loyalty.