Customer service has a better return on investment than any equipment you can buy or any skill you accumulate. If you have good customer service, you will have more customers, which means more profit.
As Howard Farran often says, dentists sell the invisible. Another way to put it is that dentist sell something complicated that the public doesn’t try to understand very well. Your clinical expertise, although incredibly important for treating patients, isn’t as valuable for getting and retaining patients. You can’t treat patients you don’t have, and you can’t advertise with something they don’t understand.
How do you know what good customer service is? Well, what do patients say about you? When they talk about their dental experience, they talk about how friendly your staff is, or how good your chairside manner was. They don’t really think about the dental work you did, because they don’t know what it is that you did. Instead, patients value a dentist based on kindness and comfort.
Are you kind, and are your treatments comfortable for patients? These are how you get referrals from your patients. That is how your patients remember you, and how they tell their friends and family about you. Customer service has a great ROI and it costs you nothing!