Dental Practice Advice and Avoiding Buyer’s Remorse
In my dental practice advice I tell my clients that we need a checklist and proper systems in place so we never have an unhappy patient.
We’ve all been there. You perform some treatment that is clinically acceptable, ethically within reason, and functioning properly and now months later the patient is unhappy and says “I wished I’d never decided to do this.”
Nothing you can try or do will change their mind. It’s classic buyer’s remorse.
There are reasons to reduce or prevent buyer’s remorse in just about every industry. However, in a healing profession it is even more the case because unlike a consumer product, which is quickly forgotten, your treatment will live on for many years and the patient’s story retold to countless others will make their remorse live on to be endlessly spread.
There are a lot of factors that can reduce or eliminate buyer’s remorse. There are also steps grounded in behavioral psychology that can be built into a selling process to greatly reduce the chance of this human behavior occurring no matter how great in size the treatment plan is and no matter what the treatment is. Those steps of course have been built into The McAnally Selling System. The tips and systems and dental practice advice within the system will help you diminish this situation for good.
I would also like to give you one tool to help prevent buyer’s remorse today.
One very basic yet major way to reduce buyer’s remorse is to make sure you adequately allow a patient a chance to back-out of treatment. If the patient ever feels like they’ve been “rail-roaded” and had no chance to back-out, you can be assured the chance of buyer’s remorse is high.
Another common reason why buyer’s remorse occurs is because some compromise related to a treatment option or a clinical condition was known to the doctor but was never honestly discussed with the patient. Usually this is out of “fear” that treatment (or the case) won’t go forward. Later, when the compromise comes to light post-treatment (bam!) buyer’s remorse is upon us.
As part of treatment discussions, don’t attempt to glaze over known compromises. If you review compromises that exist in their clinical situation or in treatment options and do it in heart-felt fashion it not only reduces buyer’s remorse, no matter what happens due to the compromise, but enhances credibility which ultimately increases the likelihood the patient will decide in favor of treatment. To read more about how to present treatment options check out my #1 best selling book on Amazon.
