Most dental secretaries receive little or no ongoing training in customer service. Yet they play a key role in customer acquisition and retention. Not to mention the fact that secretaries have little follow-up and evaluation to help them progress. This affects morale in the medium term and increases the risk of departures. Of course, most secretaries give 110% every day, but they are limited by time, experience and knowledge. Without ongoing training, secretaries struggle to progress. Yet the world is changing, and dental secretaries must adapt. Unfortunately, dental secretaries are struggling to reinvent the way things are done. Of course, they can contribute to innovation, but they need time and support to do so.
Secretaries need training not only in the care offered in the clinic, but also in customer service and work organization. We need to help them get organized so they can be more efficient on a daily basis. Customer service is an art to be mastered through experience and ongoing training. Obviously, you have to have the profile to be able to offer good service. Not everyone can do it! That’s why the first step is to recruit well.
Secretaries need to be trained to accompany and reassure customers on the phone, by e-mail and now by text message, to encourage new patients to come in. Very few secretaries are trained to convert a potential customer’s call into a new patient. If the secretary isn’t effective at getting patients into the chair, the clinic loses potential customers every day. Unfortunately, this costs dentists a fortune. And worst of all, most dentists are unaware of this situation because they have to concentrate on the chair.
At the very least, secretaries should be given a career development path with specific learning objectives. Having expectations of your employees fosters motivation. When a secretary doesn’t want to progress in an organization, that’s a bad sign!
Ask your secretaries about your care as well as your policies to get their answers. If you don’t like what you hear, train them! If you don’t have a customer service policy, now’s the time to draw one up, so that the whole team is held to the same standards. It’s very difficult to offer exceptional customer service if you don’t even have a policy that specifies expected standards.
Encourage your secretaries to learn and grow within your organization, and you’ll see amazing results. You’ll have happy employees, satisfied customers and growing revenues. Set up an annual learning path for your secretaries today, with assessments of their know-how and interpersonal skills. You need to take care of your secretaries by helping them to progress in their professional careers.
Secretaries play a critical role in the clinic, and like it or not, the world is changing, and secretaries need to change too. To succeed, make sure you :
- Define your customer service quality standards in writing;
- Set simple, achievable annual learning objectives;
- Offer ongoing training in work organization and customer service;
- Evaluate their progress at least twice a year;
- Equip them with tools and software adapted to today’s customer communications.
