The following is a guest post by William D. Esteb. If you are interested in guest posting for Dental Heroes, please sign up here.
Do you care too much?
If you have a voracious appetite for new patients, you don’t enjoy the repeat visits, and patient referrals you think you deserve, it may be because you care too much.
As a professional caregiver, being a dentist requires that you care—but not care too much.
This often comes as a surprise by many in dentistry who boast about how much they care on their website and other marketing overtures. Turns out, few patients are specifically looking for a dentist who cares! They simply assume that dentists and doctors of all types, care.
Find the “Sweet Spot”
As a healing arts professional, setting appropriate boundaries around being emotionally engaged in what patients do and don’t do is a key responsibility. Care too little and your emotional distance and mechanical detachment prevents appropriate patient bonding. Care too much and patients feel an obligation or a “duty” that can actually work against you. When you find the sweet spot between these two extremes, notice improved patient retention and an uptick in new patient referrals.
As a dentist, you probably don’t realize that searching out a new dentist is an unpleasant task. They contemplate the dreadful paperwork, the new practice environment, new procedures, new personalities and not to mention the general fear of the unknown of finding someone new. In fact, changing dentists is so distasteful, their old dentist (you) would have to inflict a lot of psychological pain to prompt them to start over with a new one.
By caring too much, you impose a type of obligation to follow through with certain home care procedures designed to improve their dental hygiene. Which is the point, right? However, to patients it often comes off as “this is what good patients do.” Even if you see it as merely a reminder about regular flossing, some patients interpret their subsequent failure to live up to your recommendations as, well, failure. Rather than face you and your disappointment, they seek care in another dentist’s office.
Of course, each patient, not you, determines if your recommendations are an obligation, or merely a friendly reminder. It may have nothing to do with what you actually say, but the tone of your voice and countless other subtle cues.
That’s why it’s critical that you care, but not to care too much.
One way to make sure your spoken recommendations are not perceived as a burdensome duty is to move from the first person, as in, “It’s my opinion that you…” or “I think you should…” or “If it were me, I’d…” to the third person: “Many of our patients find…” or “Over the years patients have reported…” Patients are likely to see this as less threatening and obligatory than first person recommendations.
Do you care too much? One way to know if patients perceive that you’ve crossed this invisible line is to take an inventory of how many patients in typical month are first timers as a ratio to total patient visits. The higher the number, the more likely you are of making this common mistake.
Your Thoughts
Do you agree with Mr. Esteb? Can you care too much?
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