Dr Phillip Palmer, July 2014 

All dental private practices are finding themselves in a more competitive marketplace lately. It is likely that within a few kilometres of your practice, there are new practices that have been setup in the past few years, and the number of corporate entities entering the dental market Australia wide seems to be increasing by the month. Especially in the case of the corporate dental practices, they will probably have larger marketing budgets and may be offering prices you can’t afford to give in order to get new patients in their doors. And sadly, if you are not making considerable efforts, some of their new patients are being poached from under your nose.

Even if your practice is one of the new ones, it’s important to know that competition is fierce for dentists and the message below applies. With all of the increased competition out there in the industry (that is looking to increase by the year) how do you protect your business? How do you ensure you keep the patients you have? How do you get them to refer their friends? How do you compete for new patients with the big marketing budgets and loss leader offers (cheap new patient exams and scale and cleans) without going bankrupt in the process. Here are some sustainable inexpensive solutions:

1.  Provide excellent service: Even though most dentists think they give good service, many patients don’t feel that they are receiving it. They may not say anything, but with most practices losing 15-20% of their patient base every year, many of your patients are voting with their feet. There are hundreds of ways to show your patients you care and ensure they remain loyal to your practice. These include:

a) Little things like being on time or if not sending a message to let your patients know.

b) Don’t underestimate how foreign and intimidating the dental practice can be to your patients. It can be made significantly less so if you spend some extra time communicating with each patient, guiding them the whole way through their experience. Make sure that communication is consistent through their journey and patients are being told consistent messages by your team when it comes to treatment, timing, costs etc. This will require top-notch communication and procedures so that it will appear seamless. And don’t assume that this is happening because you spoke to your team about it a while back. Check in, train and retrain your team to make sure they are communicating well.

c) Send thank you notes for referrals- it’s amazing how much rapport is built through the small task of saying thank you. With some of the most successful referral programs, practices send small gifts to their referring patients such as a gold class movie pass, $50 gift vouchers to David Jones or a box of chocolates.

d) Sit down with your team and brainstorm ideas to provide service that goes the extra mile. Often, your team understand the patients better than anyone and you might be surprised at the insights your team have into what excellent means to your patients.

 e) Regularly survey your patients post-treatment to find weaknesses in your customer service levels. A great tablet app product specifically for the dental industry is Dental Patient Surveys (www.dentalpatientsurveys.com.au).

2.  Lift your practice aesthetic: Leases for retail spaces in shopping centres like Westfield often have a mandatory regular renovation/ refit clause in them. They do this because having a modern and fresh appearance is paramount to keeping shoppers coming back. In the health care industry, having a clean fresh and tidy practice is important for the same reasons but it is even more imperative as in patient’s minds a modern practice’s appearance speaks to modern standards of hygiene, sterility and how up-to-date the practice is with the latest, procedures, techniques and materials.

 Too many dental practices are blind to the mess that accumulates around them. Many times I have been into a practice and seen old upholstery, a dying pot plant in the corner, or magazines in the waiting room from the 1990s. Lifting the appearance of the practice doesn’t need to cost a lot of money. A simple coat of paint and regular changes of the furniture in the waiting room every few years can do wonders. 

3.  Reciprocity: If you want the local community to support you it is much easier if the relationship is reciprocal. Your current patients would love to see ‘their’ dental practice supporting something they believe or have stake in in their community:

• sponsor a local school soccer team, gala dinner/fundraiser, a local fete.
• whatever you do in your free time, try to do it local as much as possible to support your community’s businesses. Frequent local cafes and restaurants as much as possible. If you go to a gym or play sport, try to do it in the community near your practice.

It is a relatively low cost way to get in front of your local community and show that you care about them and give back. For potential patients, the value is incredible.

4.  Never break their trust: the skills for treatment presentation are so important yet never taught at school. We often find dentists spend a lot of effort and time making recommendations for treatment only to get knocked back over and over again. This is destructive in so many ways, but most importantly, the dentists get so sick of being rejected that they no longer diagnose optimally, but present only the cheapest possible option. Alternatively, the dentist gets taught some way to “sell” dentistry to their patients- often using slimy sales techniques which patients can smell a mile away. Put simply, dentists are obliged to present all options available to their patients and the pros and cons of each and let the patient decide which would work best for them. This may sound simple and it is really, but also requires much skill that is carried across the whole practice.

5.  Add value to every 6-monthly visit: by doing a vocal, meticulous, oral cancer examination. Too often, we only look at the hard tissues-teeth, and the soft tissues around them to check for perio problems. Are we as meticulous in checking for oral cancer, as we are for incipient caries, or 4-5 mmm pockets? Dentists are the most likely health practitioner to be the first to notice oral cancer. We need to prioritise doing an intra-oral and extra-oral cancer check, not just the soft tissue in the mouth, but the hard palate, the soft palate and the tonsillar area. It’s the tongue, the sublingual area, the angle of the lip, any other areas that could be missed by a GP or dermatologist. You will be adding value to the patients, giving them a reason to return to you every 6 months, and thus building your patient base.

In my 34 years practicing dentistry and nearly 20 years helping dentists to run successful dental practices (there was an overlap, for those doing the maths!), I have never witnessed a more challenging time for dentists to thrive in the Australian dental practice market. The only way to stay ahead is to understand your business, keep more of your patients, do more of their treatment and have a team that supports you in this. The above tips are a good start, but there is so much more proactive work you and your team can be doing to thrive in these turbulent times.