Dental Health Magazine Dental Health Magazine Issue 7 | Page 56

56 Issue #7, September 2017 Issue #7, September2017 Hence an example, if there is a Walk In Patient/ Phone Appointment for an Orthodontic Consult, my front counter would say “allow me to give you an appointment with our Dr X, Dr X is our Consultant Orthodontist that sees more than 100 patients a month. He is a brilliant and gentle dentist, that we have patients flying in from Singapore to see him. I assure you he is a perfectionist, has great clinical skills & experience and you will definitly love him. These words will automatically give Authority to Dr X, and the patient would follow his lead as we have made him the Credible, Knowledgeable, Expert. The impact of this expert introduction led to 20% rise in the number of appointments and a 15% increase of number of new orthodontic patients a month. Not bad for a small change informed from Persuasion Science that was both ethical and costless to implement. Be it a junior dentist or a new general dentist, this authority has to be built. 3. Consistency (People like to be Consistent with the things they have previously said or done) Consistency is activated looking for and asking for small initial commitments that can be made & I don’t mean financials here. Allow me to explain. This Consistency principle is not towards us in this context but toward the patients. eg: Patients would be consistent with things they have previously said or done. An ideal recent study & example that was used in Dr. Robert Cialdini book that could directly be related to our industry is “reduced missed appointments in Health Centers”. In the study there was a significant reduction of 18% of missed appointments in the health care appointment simply by asking the patients rather than the staff to write down appointment details on the future appointment card. That’s a good number. The key of using the “Consistency Principle” is to look for voluntary, active and Public Commitments and ideally gets the commitment in writing. Understanding this principle, we started incorporating this in our daily practice. The appointments cards were given to the Patients to write down their following appointment. This was done very courteously to make them feel the sense of commitment . Before they left, my front counter would say “see you on the date you’ve written mam”. This automatically kicks in the pressure of Commitment and Consistency. We’ve not done a research, but we’re very sure of reduced missed appointments. There is 3 more parts in regards to “Science of persuasion” that will be covered in Part 3 that influences the buying power of our patients to say yes. Allow me to share with you a part of what I do genuinely, that has been very positive towards my practice. Article is written by Dr Bala Saravanan (BDS, MBA) Please do catch the Next Issue (Issue#8) of Dental Health Magazine for Part 3 of the said topic. Please Do let me know your thoughts at [email protected] on how we could do better Psychological based Dentistry. 57