The Complimentary Cosmetic
Consultation
Patients don't
understand cosmetic dentistry very well, and if you can make it easy for
them to learn about it, you're doing them a favor and also gaining more
patients. The
trick to drawing people in with a complimentary consultation is making it
time efficient for yourself. You can't spend a half hour at this and
expect to feel good about offering it for free. You need to cut the time
investment down to about two minutes or less. Here's how you do it.
The key is to have a
treatment coordinator on staff who
understands cosmetic dentistry and treatment options and who is an
excellent communicator. A second key is communicating effectively over the
phone to prospective patients so that they aren't expecting more than
they're going to get during this visit.
Let's start with the phone call. A
prospective patient calls with questions about a cosmetic procedure, fees,
or any of a variety of questions. Your staff member answers the question
and then offers a complimentary cosmetic consultation by saying something
like this: "If you'd like, we can schedule a no-cost visit for you to get
a chance to meet the doctor, to see if this procedure is right for you, to
get a rough idea of the costs involved, and have more of your questions
answered. Would you like to schedule that?"
If the prospective patient schedules, the
staff person handling the phone takes down the nature of their questions
so that the staff will be briefed, before the visit, on what questions to
expect. The
office visit is then handled by the treatment coordinator, who brings the
prospective patient into a consultation room that is equipped with a video
imaging computer. The treatment coordinator reviews the notes of the
telephone conversation, and then begins to discuss the questions that the
prospective patient has. The dentist is signaled that the prospective
patient has arrived, so that he or she can come in whenever there is a
minute break in the schedule. And I mean literally a one-minute break. The
dentist should be able to do what he needs to do in one minute.
So the dentist enters, interrupting the
treatment coordinator. He has been familiarized with the questions that
the prospective patient has. He picks up a mouth mirror, looks briefly at
the patient's teeth, and makes a brief comment about the patient's
situation. He might say something like, "Yes, it looks like porcelain
veneers would work for you. I think if you bleached your bottom teeth, we
could give you a dazzling smile with maybe eight or ten veneers on the
top." The dentist then leaves to return to his patient. His time
involvement could be as brief as thirty seconds, but no longer than two
minutes. In my
practice, we instructed the treatment coordinator to then take that
information, create a simulated photograph on the computer of how the
patient would look with this proposed treatment, and then to give an
oral price estimate of the cost of the case. Any quoted fees were
always given with the disclaimer that the dentist couldn't tell for
certain what the patient needed without a comprehensive exam. And there
was a strict instruction not to write down anything. Any written
treatment plan or cost estimate could be misinterpreted as a quotation
down the road. If these plans or estimates were not written, we never had
any trouble with them being misunderstood—they
never came back to haunt us. If the patient did return for a comprehensive
exam, which they almost always did, they would then be given a written
treatment plan with definite fees and time estimates all written down.
Keys to an effective complimentary cosmetic
consultation:
-
A minimum time
investment by the dentist
-
The prospective patient
visit is handled by a personable treatment coordinator
-
The prospective patient
understands that this is not an examination where he or she can get
concrete answers about what is wrong with his or her mouth. It is only to
ask questions and possibly get a ballpark idea of fees that might be
involved.
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