Key Takeaways
It’s essential to provide guests with thorough, quality oral care
Communication is your most important tool
It’s important to educate your guests
Whether a guest is visiting your practice for the first time or a long-time guest that’s been around for years, each guest needs to receive the absolute best and most thorough dental care possible. We talked about providing the ultimate guest experience with great customer service. Now, we're going to talk about providing the best oral care.
Covering the Basics
There are a few things that every guest should have on file. There are more obvious things like X-Rays, but what about photos? Do you have a photo on file for each guest? It’s a good practice to implement, especially if they’re getting a lot of cosmetic or restorative work done. (Plus, it helps your front office with recognizing guests and greeting them by name when they walk in for their appointment).
When you take X-Rays, it’s best to offer the most interactive experience possible for your guests. It’s nice to mirror the screen so that the guests can also see. As you take the images, they see what you’re doing. You want them to see as much as possible.
Communication and Education
One of the most important components of providing top-notch oral care is communication between your team and the guests. We talked about why it’s important to communicate every step of a visit to your guest, but it’s also important to encourage your guest to communicate their concerns.
Any guest who comes in, whether new or returning, should be asked how they’re doing and if they have any pressing concerns about their oral health. The more communication, the better. Throughout their visit, checking in with them is important to see if they’re comfortable.
Communication is also another tool we can use to educate our guests. As oral health care providers, we must educate our guests and recommend the best treatment. A great example would be encouraging your hygienists to educate and communicate with their guests. Anyone can go to a hygiene appointment and get their teeth cleaned, but it’s much more valuable if we can communicate what we see to guests and educate them on how they can best care for their mouths.
The exam, diagnosis, and treatment plan
This is a given, but you want the exam to be thorough and careful. It’s important not to miss anything, as underdiagnosis can be harmful or dangerous to the guest.
The best way to enhance the exam experience for a guest is to conduct a talk over the exam with them. Once you go over the X-Rays with the guest, you can walk them through the rest of the exam.
It’s important to have a dialogue and conversation about what you are thinking and seeing with the guest's mouth. It’s important to walk them through what you’re thinking and seeing because that level of communication is how we educate and express concerns. As dentists, we don’t want just to sit there and think of these things in our heads and go through them without communicating.
Once you’ve completed the exam, it’s time to come up with the best and most effective treatment plan that suits your guests' needs for their oral health and finances. You can put together the best treatment plan, but some guests will tell you they can’t afford it. We want to do all we can to make the guests happy.
Give your guests the best
The bottom line is you want to provide your guests with the best possible oral care so they can live happy and healthy lives!
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