When a System Becomes an Annoyance

Yesterday a person from my dentist’s office called me. “You are due for a cleaning,” she stated. “Would you like to schedule that?”

“Yes, I am,” I replied, irritated. “Even more, I need to replace my temporary bridge with a permanent one, but I don’t have time to attend to either right now.”

“Okay,” she meekly said. “Let us know when you are ready.”

Evidently, she passed along my irritated reply because the next morning I received an e-mail detailing what I had to do to get the temporary bridge replaced. “We will need about seventy minutes to take an impression and then three weeks later you will need an appointment for one hour to seat the bridge.”

As I read the e-mail, my irritation turned to annoyance. At the beginning of the bridge process, I had had an impression made at the insistence of the dentist. I had had to rearrange my schedule so that I could make a special appointment just to have the impression made. Even worse, I had feared that the impression would make me toothless because the lose crown might fall out during the process and not be replaceable. To my knowledge, that impression had never been used, which I asked in my e-mail reply. The response did not address my question but stated that a new impression needed to be made because the tissue may have healed in a different shape.

Realizing that I look at situations too much from the customer’s point of view and at times become more irritated because of doing so, mentally I took a step back. “Why am I irritated?” I wondered.

First of all, I was upset at their system. A system which ought to work for my benefit and theirs had broken down. The hygienist normally scheduled my next cleaning immediately after I had had one, but she could not do that due to the temporary bridge. The person who called for cleanings did so without any knowledge as to what the customer might have in progress. Therefore, she could not help move me forward with my bridge situation. Neither of these parts of the system were working to my benefit nor to theirs.

Furthermore, the dentist had suggested that I call when I was ready to put in the permanent bridge. Well, I readily admit that if I am given an open-ended option such as that, particularly concerning the dentist, I will delay and delay. After all, in my daily schedule getting the bridge finalized is not urgent. Since there is no pain, it also does not seem to be important. The fact that they left the appointment scheduling up to me irritated me because I knew that I would wait. Had they held my feet to the fire by telling me what needed to be done and scheduling the appointment, both of us would have been much better off. They would have had business, and I would have had the work completed.

Instead, neither has happened.

Systems are a tremendous marketing tool and a helpful customer service. However, systems must be set up so that those working the system have access to all the information on the customer. If that is not available, the person contacting the customer leaves the impression that the company is not paying attention to the customer as an individual. By not checking my file, the person calling about the cleaning made me feel that she was not focusing on me. I was just a number to call to drum up more business because the office was slow. In that case, the system left a negative impression instead of a positive one.

Check your system to make certain that your company is not making the same mistake.