Posted on 2011-01-17 12:53:45
As your practice and dental website marketing develops, you'll find that you will not be able to always field the common calls, questions, and complaints that will happen with your office. You will be dependent more on your hygienist and receptionist. You'll also be traveling at times and want to trust that things are being taken care of.
There are two areas you need to master in order to have a powerful support steam. The first is training. You can create a guidebook or wiki to help your team know how to handle common situations. Your team should know what to do if someone is 30 minutes late for an appointment or if a child protests that the Tooth Fairy won't honor her trade agreement if a tooth has a filling.
However, there will be less common situations that your manual or wiki will not cover. Your staff needs to feel empowered to make these decisions on their own, or there will be a paralysis of analysis when you're gone. The best way to help with this is to encourage them to make their own decisions while you're present. This will boost their confidence in how they manage the office. Their confidence is also boosted by you conveying that you trust their judgment.
A caveat to this is that you have to allow some room for error because your staff will not always get it right. There is a fuzzy line between reasonable and unreasonable error, and you'll have to use discretion to tell the difference. You'll learn this with time as your practice grows with your dental website.