As more NHS practices convert to private dentistry, being able to stand out from the crowd becomes more important than ever. Practice Plan Sales Support Manager, Michelle Hardy spoke to dentist and dental business coach, Barry Oulton, to find out how, by concentrating on the patient journey, you can build a successful practice with little or no external marketing.

MH:What would you define as the perfect patient experience?

BO: For me, the patient journey begins before they even come inside the practice, which I'm sure you'll agree.

When I presented Practice Plan's workshop tour, we looked at the patient journey and broke it into 15 touch points. A touch point is any moment that an organisation can interact with a customer or potential customer. Obviously, that starts with your curbside appeal, social media image and branding. At our practice, rather than viewing this journey as just one thing, we looked at each step within the journey to see how we could make every one the best version of themselves.

The first touch point is ‘how do we attract patients to the practice?' And the last touch point is ‘how do we ask our happy patients to recommend their friends, family, colleagues, and neighbours?' In my view, the last one and the first one loop back to each other. This is because the way we attracted our patients was to focus on our existing patients, ‘knock their socks off' and then ask them to recommend us to their family and friends. However, the first touchpoint also includes marketing, your website, branding, and everything else you put out in the public domain.

When it comes to the patients' experience in the practice, it's about encouraging an atmosphere, an environment and behaviours that make them feel as comfortable as possible given that they're in a dental practice. Make your dentistry as comfortable as possible, which means having great techniques and being aware of how best to communicate with each individual patient based on their preferences.

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MH:I agree with you that everything starts well before the patient gets through the door. So, are there any little extra touches that you can share that you use to make it a memorable experience for your patient?

BO: Yes. Language that we use in our head weaves magic. Our brains can't process a negative. So, if I said to you ‘there won't be any pain with this procedure', you first have to formulate a picture in your head of what pain is in order to then appreciate what pain isn't. So, by saying that, I've generated a negative image, and I've connected the procedure to pain, even though my intention is to reassure you that you're going to be comfortable.

First and foremost, using the right language is incredibly important. Not only the language we use in our marketing, but also as soon as people are in the building we should use positive affirmative about what it is we will be doing, not what we will be avoiding. Rather than saying ‘there won't be any pain', we say ‘everything we'll do is completely comfortable'.

I am a Master Practitioner of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and when I did my training I learned about ‘anchoring'. So, an example of that might be when you hear a song, and it takes you back in time to a memory. That's called an anchor, and we can anchor a state of feeling. We can do that with our patients too.

I want to anchor them to me being comfortable, everything being carefully looked after and them having a feeling of comfort when they see me. That truly worked for me because we didn't really do any marketing for 18 years. All our patients came to us by word of mouth and our amazing Google reviews. I became known as being the comfortable dentist. So, it's the little things that make a big difference.

MH:Can you give an example of a practice that you think is a standout in terms of the way they deliver their patient care and the experience for the patients, and what is it that it sets them apart from the rest?

BO: I work with a few great practices right now and what really sets them apart is the experience they provide for their patients and not necessarily the dentistry. Obviously, your dentistry has to be good but, to be honest, patients care way more about their experience of the dentistry rather than the dentistry itself. So, if your dentistry is a 10 out of 10 but it's uncomfortable and/or the patient didn't ‘feel' looked after at any point, it doesn't matter to the patient how good the dentistry was. What patients care about is how they're looked after and how they have the dentistry delivered to them. It's about how they're cared for, before, during, and after. It's especially about how they're looked after if there's a problem, such as a cancellation or something happens. It's the whole experience that really matters.

And so, the practices that stand out are the ones that understand that. It's the ones that make the patient journey, the patient experience and the patient care the absolute epicentre of everything they do. They just happen to be doing dentistry.

So, when they really focus on knocking the patient's socks off and making sure the patient has the best experience, funnily enough, they end up being able to do more dentistry because happy patients want to do more dentistry. They'll start to do the wants-based dentistry which means they're more inclined to take up cosmetic procedures and so on. So, the practices that I believe are really nailing it are the ones that are consistently looking at improving their patient experience and putting it at the forefront of what they do.

MH:Looking ahead, what do you anticipate we are going to be doing in the future to elevate that patient experience and do you see any sort of trends coming along that you think are going to have a bigger impact?

BO: Trends? I don't know if I'm honest. However, I do think that practices that really focus on improving every element of the patient journey will be stronger, more robust and more financially sound than those that don't. As I said earlier, it's not about the dentistry, although that's important. What's most important is the customer journey. So, you need to have good dentistry but that isn't enough. It's a great patient experience that really stands out along with reputation, brand and values. Our values of integrity, honesty and transparency.

So, a trend may be that people become more focused on the patient journey. If you look at the dentistry shows, the focus is on the latest treatment. What's next in what we can do to patients and it's less about what we can do with patients and for patients. And I think maybe the trend will begin to swing. There are always going to be technological innovations such as new treatments and new modalities, but the thing that doesn't change is the personal interaction. We're not going to be replaced yet by AI and robots. And so, I would love there to be a trend all about patient care and experience. ◆

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