“That’s it! I’m never going back there again!”
I’m sure many of us have had these thoughts run through our heads so loudly we worry they may actually leak out of our ears. In this case, my wife was almost yelling it to me as she came in through the door from the garage. Not for the first time had she encountered the blend of blunt speech, dismissive body language, and incredulity that people not them don’t know the intricacies of their specific operations endemic to the medical office. Or, in this case, the dentist’s office.
Since upgrading her phone (I thought I was doing her a favor, I swear!), my wife’s phone no longer receives texts sent from devices that use a specific operating system. As the Designated Tech Support Officer (DTSO) in our home, and for our extended family, I have run through all the updates, re-sets, reloads, search engine suggestions, and magical incantations I know to solve for the issue. And because of this issue, she did not receive any of the update texts from the dentist’s office regarding an appointment change. Ultimately, this could have been nothing major, but “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” as the film line goes. Fast-forward to the ending of the story: we have a new dentist, who is great, makes engaging with her office easy, and a former dentist who hasn’t bothered to find out why her patient of the last 16 years isn’t her patient any longer.
Three Lessons I wish my former dentist’s office would have learned
The story begins with an attempt to update contact details. Should be fairly routine, and yet…. While we initially had an host-to-goodness copper-wire, hard-line telephone in our house (a requirement from a gone-the-way-of-the-Gooney-bird security system we no longer use), we no longer have it. And despite our best efforts to have this number removed from our account record at the original dentist (The OD, if you will), they still like to leave messages about appointment changes. Or so they tell us, as we don’t have that number, have told them we don’t have that number, and have asked they leave voice messages on my wife’s mobile phone number instead.
Lesson 1 in keeping customers: Do what you say, say what you do, confirm you did what you were asked to do.
The story continues with our “failure to communicate” via SMS. There’s certainly no direct way the OD’s staff could have known about this failure, but they could have known about this by inference. When no response was returned, despite (according to the OD’s staff) multiple messages sent expressly requesting a response, one might (forgive me here” get the message and try an alternative mode. Like calling the mobile phone number to see if that might work.
Lesson 2 in keeping customers: Trust, but verify (your customer’s contact details and preferred communications channels).
Our story ends with attitude. And a truckload of it. From the OD’s staff. Which I find just fascinating. Every organization has its own process for completing tasks and completing work. And many of those processes are “back office” and while not directly customer-facing, they are often among the more important of those that are customer-impacting. And by customer impacting, I mean placed in the hands of the customer-facing teams to communicate. Or, in the case of the OD’s staff, not. And then present disbelief, dismissive language, and passive-aggressive behaviors to those not “in the know” (i.e., your customers) compounds the insult.
Lesson 3 in keeping customers: Don’t assume (that anyone outside your team understands what steps need to be taken and why, and how they impact the customer).
It was the behavior and attitude of the staff more than anything else that really led us to look around for a new provider. The impetus of the move was certainly the communications failures, and when these have happened in the past we’ve been able to move past them through a combination of inertia and convenience (why change unless the alternatives are either really, really good or really, really more convenient). The compound effect became staggering, and to make matters worse there have been no attempts to find out why. Since we made the call to request our records be transferred to the new dentist we haven’t had any word from the OD.
Unless they’ve been leaving messages on the old home phone-line we haven’t had for a decade now.