133: Etiquette and Service in the Chiropractic Practice

 

133 Etiquette and Service Transcript

 

It's time to bring etiquette back to your chiropractic practice. 

 

Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC CHIROpolse Podcast, brought to you by Kats Consultants. I'm Dr. Michael Perus, one of your hosts, and I'm joining with my co-host today, Marisa Matea, our CA expert. I'm gonna call her. There you go. Yeah. So Marisa.

 

You and I have been talking about this a lot lately about Yeah, the, the fact that just basic etiquette and good service is really just kind of dwindling away all over the place and Yeah, and I'm not just talking about in chiropractic practices, I'm talking about everywhere you go, there's like service just went poof out the door and yet it's one of the most major things to build a business.

 

It is. And you know, I think it even starts on a personal level, you know, of having etiquette when people text you or call you and just returning those right calls. I mean, it's the, it's the little things, you know, that I feel like have just gone away texting in the mobile phone and the, and the, uh, I will call it distractions that happen on the phone.

 

Right. And getting to go back to things and follow up on things happens daily to all of us. Right. Right. So one of the things that I was looking at is, you know, in the US we are said to have all these things that we require of people for etiquette, you know, or we want from people, maybe not require, but want from people.

 

And two of the top things out of the top five we're being on time and good service. Huh. And boy, imagine that that's, yeah, that's two of the things that we preach often about in our practices. Right. Right. You know, that we have to have, and I'm even gonna say, those are just the expected things I would think.

 

Yeah. You know, and, and I think, I think we've gotten so far away from. Over the top, I'm gonna call it over the top customer service, that we've really forgotten what it looks like. Yeah. And how great it is. And so I don't think people even expect it anymore. Sure. You expect, you know, the practice to be running on time.

 

On time if you're a patient, cuz you, you made an appointment, now you have to keep the appointment. Right. Okay. And. You know, we have to not only be on time, but we have to give good service now, build relationships. But what happens when we give over the top service? I'm telling you, in today's world, you're gonna get noticed.

 

Well, we stand out for sure. Stand out For sure. You, you gain and you gain something there that a lot of medical practices don't have. Right? And that's service. That's, you know, that. Caring ability to know their patients. They're not just a number coming into the office. Those kinda things. It's a relationship.

 

I mean, yeah, I think, I think there's several things that we can do on our end to really help keep our etiquette and good service and being on time. All of those things are kinda at the forefront. And it doesn't take a whole lot, it doesn't take a lot of. Effort or anything like that, right? To be able to do that, you just have to be paying attention daily to little things.

 

Like one of the top reasons that, um, patients may not feel like they wanna come to you or they may cancel is our phone etiquette. So you think about, yeah, what's happening on the phone? You know, how do we sound? Are we smiling? Are we, you know, talking to these people when they call us and really gaining information from them and asking them questions and really diving deep into what their needs of us are?

 

Or are we just going through the motions? They feel that. And that's something that I think they do, we forget is, you know, as humans we feel energy around us, right? And so if we don't have that good energy and we have that poor energy, which is that poor etiquette, I think then, you know, they may run the other way.

 

Okay. I want you to hold that thought for just a minute cause I'm getting the white flag from the studio manager. Uh, we need to, we need to break just real quick for a message from our, our sponsor, but I want to come back and I wanna dive into this idea of bringing etiquette back into the chiropractic practice and how we can create over the top customer service to really blow the doors off of our businesses.

 

We'll be right back.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast. Marisa, we're talking about bringing etiquette and the principles of, of just good etiquette back into our practices and creating that opportunity to really shine in the marketplace with great, crazy, over the top fun customer service.

 

Yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of things that we can do. We were talking, um, before we left for the break, uh, about our phone etiquette. That's one of the top things that we can actually improve upon to make patients feel attracted to our practice. Um, but some of the other things would be like, just, just our patient focus.

 

You know, like when they're in front of us, where is our focus? Are we really thinking about them? Are we talking to them? Are we learning about 'em? What, what are we doing that brings that. Good service to them and, and scheduling comes into this, you know, it's, are we scheduling correctly in our offices to make sure that we're giving the doctor time to be with the patient?

 

But b, we're staying on time and we're not spending so much time that we've got a waiting room full of people. Yeah. We have to manage this schedule. We can't just create one. We have to actually manage it. Absolutely. I, I wanna, I don't, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I wanna back up on something for just a second.

 

Yeah. Because recently I was talking to one of our clients and they were lamenting about the fact that patients don't return phone calls. Mm-hmm. To which I said, have you trained them too. Because we know that people use the phone today to kind of hide from calls and Sure. You know, I think all of us are guilty of trying to let it go, go to voicemail sometimes just to see who it is if we don't, you know, if we don't recognize the number.

 

Yeah. And so I told the client, make sure that every patient after that first visit, at the end of that first visit, make them put your clinic number in their phone with a label on it so they recognize it. Exactly. You know, there's little things that we can do. Not only should they save our phone number in their phone, but they should also, um, we should also, excuse me, have the ability to text them.

 

Absolutely. We know, absolutely We know in today's world, this is one of those things. This could even get into the technology, right. Conversation a little bit here. But, um, that's one of those things that if you're not keeping your clinic up to today's practices or. Most common used services out there, all those things.

 

And I would say texting is one of those things. Mm-hmm. That if you are not up to date on that and you don't have that capability in your office, I really think, and I implore you to look into that, that is definitely. The way of communication anymore, uh, you just said it a minute ago, people don't wanna answer the phone.

 

They want it to go to voicemail. Right? But if you text them and they know who you are, they're more likely to respond to that. Plus, if they're at work, if they're, you know, involved in something else, they can text back easier, then they can potentially call you. Absolutely and let them know and gain their permission to, to text back and forth.

 

People are much more likely to text today than to answer a phone or those kinda things, so, you know. You can really use technology and there's a lot of great programs out there too that, that we really don't even have time to talk about that you can use that are high technology to really help the process of staying in contact with patients, not only patient reminders for appointments.

 

Yeah. But birthdays, anniversaries. I mean now we're, now we're walking into the zone of over the top customer service. When you remember. Birthdays, anniversaries, special events, their kids' high school graduation, you know, all those little things really ingratiate patients to your practice and really help build relationships.

 

And that's what people crave today, especially after the pandemic. People want more contact, but they're careful about who they have contact with and it has to be somebody that they trust. And we as chiropractors have this amazing ability because we touch people. We give off that energy, we have an opportunity to really create a very strong, trusted relationship that can last for years.

 

And isn't that what we want? We want relationships with patients so they'll stay, pay, refer, and believe in everything that we do. So much so that not only do they come in over their entire lifetime, but they bring everybody they know with them. Yeah, yeah. Trust, and that's how you build a great practice.

 

Trust. Trust is huge. You know, in practices after the pandemic trust, um, and transparency and good service and keeping up on being on time. All these things that we've been talking about today are all things that your patients are craving, and if they are missing just little bits of those components, then.

 

They may be leaving you, they may be walking out the door, not returning, or they may be not scheduling back if those phone conversations aren't great. You know, all those little things play into this right now. Yeah. Very important. You know, one more thought. You know, part of etiquette is making sure if, if a patient calls and leaves you a voicemail message, cuz maybe you're busy or it's after hours or something, be sure you call them right back as quickly as you possibly can because that's incredibly important.

 

That's part of great etiquette and thanking them for being a patient, thanking them for being there, those kind of things, you know, that's, those are important etiquette points, so. Talk to your staff, talk as a team about what can we do to really bring high level etiquette and high level service into our practice to make us stand out in our community when probably nobody else or very few other businesses are actually connecting that way.

 

And make sure you are practicing good etiquette yourself. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, great topic. How to bring etiquette and over the top customer service back into your chiropractic practice. So make sure that you're talking about that with your team and be sure to go to our website, Katsconsultants.com, check us out on the web, check out all the stuff that we do.

 

We've got some great downloads on there. One of our downloads right now is our midyear review. But there's some other great stuff on there. Check out our events and things and, uh, you know, as always, if you have a podcast idea, shoot it over to us. Troy's the one that takes all those. Dr. Fox - [email protected].

 

Shoot that over to us. We love hearing from you guys. So from all of us at KatsConsultants, thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the KC CHIROpulse Podcast. We'll see y'all soon. 

 

Bye-bye.