[music] Welcome to the Double Your Production Podcast with the Team Training Institute. The one place designed for dentists and their staff who want to grow their practices by following in the footsteps of those that have done it, who were in the trenches, who know exactly what you’re going through. And now your leaders, the stars of the podcast, Dr. John Meis and Wendy Briggs. [music]
Hey, listeners. Welcome to the Double Your Production Podcast today. We have an awesome episode for you where we have taken a lecture that Wendy has recently gave in our most recent summit meeting. This meeting was based in Orlando, Florida and had a Disney theme. So it really was such a fun meeting. We had a lot of energy in the room and had heard previously already from a few Disney speakers, a few dental speakers, so you'll hear her refer to some of those in her lecture today. But I'm excited for you to get a little glimpse into what our meetings are like. So like I said, this was about an hour, a little over an hour-long lecture. And Wendy lets us in on five steps to creating Disney magic in our offices. And so we catch the first two or three steps here in this podcast. We've trimmed it down to be about a half an hour for you. So I hope you enjoy the little piece of Disney magic that we get to experience here today. If you'd like to learn more about these meetings, how you can be involved in the meetings or even within our own coaching systems, find us at www.theteamtraininginstitute.com/podcast. There you can find all of our most recent podcasts as well as information on the Team Training Institute on Wendy and Dr. John, and how you can get involved with these awesome meetings. So I hope you enjoy today. I did leave some audio of the videos that she shows, so it's a little bit more of lecture style where you'll just be listening in. But I hope that it's not too patchy and you can enjoy this lecture from Wendy. It really has a lot of good tidbits. So I'll turn the time over to her, and we look forward to seeing you at our next podcast. Thanks so much.
So I love all things Disney. You may be disneyed out if there is such a thing, but I really don't care. We're going to keep going, okay? Like I said, we love creating patient delight. And I'm so grateful for all the lessons that we've already learned here about ways we can do that. So now, we're going to get into more tactical practical ways we can implement some of the things that [inaudible] shared as well as some of the other lessons we can learn from Disney. So love having a Disney feel. I've loved that this entire weekend, okay? So we're going to go over these five lessons. So here is a picture of delight on my grandson Tom's face the first time he ever saw Mickey Mouse in person, okay? So we love all things Disney, right? Here's just a few of the family. It's my husband, Travis. We'll have been married 28 years this summer. Tom is an infant. I mean, does it get any better than that? Oh, I've got news for you. It does because we needed a princess.
Oh.
So this is baby Jane. I mean, come on. Are you serious? Right? So you know what I've realized this weekend? Coming to Orlando without the babies is not a good idea, right? We missed them. We want to create some magic. And we will soon. So here's the
thing, so many wonderful lessons we just learned. And I showed this video yesterday. When people think of the Disney experience, I think this commercial does has a wonderful way of summarizing expectations and connecting on an emotional level in just a few seconds. So I'm going to play this video again, and I want you just to think of maybe one word that you feel, one emotion that you feel when you watch this video, okay? Okay, so what do you feel? What does it make you feel? Magic. What else? Excitement.
Anticipation.
Anticipation. Relaxed. Anticipation. Nostalgia. I think, think of memories? Right? Memories and also, it's a fun thing. So are there times when you go to the park and it doesn't quite measure up to what you expect or what you hoped it would be? Yes. And that does happen. So here's another perspective of sometimes what you truly experience instead of the magical experience you had planned. Okay?
We made it to the happiest place on earth. It's 9:00 AM. I got to schedule every minute of our day until 9:00 PM. Pay attention and stay close. I just flew my family halfway across America to visit Disney and all my homeschool kids want to do is visit the Hall of Presidents? We need a map. $45 for bedazzled mouse ears, baby? You want these or you want to go to college? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's 9:30 in the morning. It's too early to get wet. We're not waiting an hour and a half for Impressions of France, okay? Eat a baguette and lose a world war. That's my impression of France. Let's go to Space Mountain. No, I'm not going to push him in a stroller, okay? He's four. No, that's not right. The Splash Mountain is this way. No, you cannot have Goofy shaped chicken nuggets. Sit down. Your mother brought ham sandwiches. Oh, for heaven's sakes. Pick up your garbage and throw it away. This isn't Six Flags. Listen, Rebecca. She's not coming out today, okay? That dream to meet Elsa, you better let it go.
Oh, you want to go to A Small World all by yourself huh? Well, it's going to turn into a pretty big world when you come outside and can't find your parents. Oh, great. Now my wife wants a photo with Gaston. Perfect. Well, hurry up. Make believe your feet aren't sore. This is Disney. Use your imagination. See these rocks right here, kids? That's what happens when you disobey your parents. You know what I want to ride? A park bench in the shade. One, two, three, four, five. Where is Makenzie? My goodness. I got to fake a leg injury or something. I need one of those scooters. Honestly, how are there possibly so many strollers in here? We have been here for 10 hours. I mean, my love language is quality time but not this much. A four-hour wait for Toy Story? That line is to infinity and beyond. I feel like we're going the wrong direction. Well, is it air conditioned? If not, I don't want to go. Informacion-- no, it's in Portuguese. No wonder this map doesn't make any sense. If you don't get back here by the count of three, I will spank you into Tomorrowland [laughter].
You know why that's so funny? Because we have all been there, right? Some of that is real. Okay? So I love that. The magic. But it's some kind of insane Jedi mind trick because that's not what you remember when you go, right? It's like what we were joking about [inaudible]. [It's just like?] having a baby. You forget. You forget all but the magical moments, right? Of that emotional experience. So again, it's not magic. It's method. And we're going to talk about how we can create patient experiences because just like this example, it doesn't go perfectly all the time at our offices either. We have grand intentions, grand desires. We have systems and processes and sometimes, they don't produce the result we want, right so we're going to study and try to figure out how we can help patients remember what we want them to remember, how we can delight them more often than disappoint them.
Okay, so what do people remember? And how do we take this dream of a seamless magical patient experience and turn it into a reality? A lot of great quotes from Walt Disney this weekend. This has got to be one of my favorite. This has been in our case acceptance presentation for 12 years. And it says you can design and create and build the most wonderful place in the world.ut it takes people to make that dream a reality. So it's our people, our team that has the opportunities to really delight our patients. And we're going to discuss some really compelling ways to do that. So the mission of the Walt Disney Company, I'm not going to read all of this, but you can read about the mission of what is the world Disney Company, one of the world's leading producers and providers of entertainment information. Using our portfolio of brands, which we looked at yesterday, it's grown to be very impressive. To differentiate content services consumer products, we seek to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world. What if we just carve out a piece of that, and relate it to what we may be striving to do when it comes to patient experience? What if we just try and emulate a piece of that statement to say we seek to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable patient experience in the world? Does that piece for us? I think it does. So how do we do that, and who's responsible for these experiences? With such a wide range of consumer touch points to consider, yesterday's delineation of roles is no longer sensible. Patient experience is too broad to be siloed in any single department. So who's responsible for patient experience? Everybody. We talked about in the past, historically, we've viewed patient experiences, what happens when they're in the chair.
And now we know patient experience really encompasses so much more than that. Patient experience begins when the patient decides to look at our website. When they pick up the phone, when they check out any reviews that we may have, or they look at us online, that's when their experience with our company, our brand, our practice begins. And who's responsible for that? Well, it's a team approach, right? But we all play a part and we all have a responsibility to make the magic happen. I loved how Glenn said, "You see this guy, he was a parking attendant. And he's now the vice president." We all have an opportunity and we all are responsible for creating this experience that we talk about. I love this too, Lee Cockerel from creating Disney Magic says, "Get on the bus to get run over by the bus because this is where the bus is going, you're either on or you're going to get run over." And there comes a time where we have to make a decision. This is where we want to go, this is who we want to be and we need the team members to buy in and really help us. One of the amazing things that I heard the other day when all of our Blue Diamond members were talking about their biggest idea was somebody who said, "I don't have to worry about everything anymore, the team is pushing me forward, rather than me being the one to push them." And that's a magical thing when that happens. So we're going to talk about five patient experience lessons from now. We heard lots of lessons, and now we're going to kind of shift that into patient experience lessons, things that we can do and we can take back to create our own magical experiences. And again, it's method. Just like the Disney model, it's method, not magic. But when all of those systems are in place and functioning and we're all doing what we can, it becomes a magical experience.
So here's the lesson number one, and you heard a little bit of this from Lee. Len. Len. Never let backstage come on stage, okay? So Disney is the happiest place on earth or else. That's one of their leaders actually said that. He said, "You don't have to be happy, but you have to act happy." That's an interesting distinction, isn't it? You don't have to be happy, but when you're front stage, you need to act happy. And isn't that a lot of what we have to do? I mean, we really are putting on a show. We might not think that we are on stage when we're serving patients, but guess what we are on stage when we're serving patients, and our patients have an expectation, right? This is how we expect Cinderella to be, right? Beautiful, welcoming, smiling. And if we could see Cinderella backstage on a smoke break, it really doesn't fit the image, okay? And there are Disney performers and princesses who do go backstage and have a cigarette, but they don't do it front stage, and that's important. Like you said, you'll see the performers run into get behind those doors so they can stop and actually breathe for a minute, okay? So that's part of it. We all have to understand that we are representative of our brand. We are the patient experience that we project. And we often get asked the question, how can we ask our team to bring their A game every day? Isn't it exhausting? And yes, it is. It is exhausting to bring your A game every day. But as leaders, we have to bring ours, right? We have to bring ours. I loved all the images of Walt Disney and the key leaders doing the things in the parks that they asked their team members to do. Every leader is telling a story about what he or she values. And if we are living what we teach, that's really an important element, okay? So we have to bring our A game. We should be mindful of our frontstage behavior, we need to look the part, we really do need to look the part. We need to present what we want our patients to see. And we all are a personal reflection of the brand. We want to treat our patients like valued guests and treat team members the same. We really can't have one level of care and attention for patients and a different or a lower level of care and attention for the team. It needs to be the same. They need to be just as valued as the patients.
Lesson number two, what time is the 3:00 o'clock parade? It's not a stupid question, and they're asked that question every single day. It is not a stupid question because that's not really what they're asking, right? So we need to keep that in mind and we have to recognize it service aptitude is an important quality, and an important characteristic for our team members, and for ourselves. And service aptitude is defined by John De Julius as a person's ability to recognize opportunities to exceed customer expectations, regardless of the circumstance. Some people inherently have a very tuned in and focused service aptitude, other people do not come by that naturally at all. But this is something that can be developed and worked on, and it should because if we don't have a service aptitude and we're part of the dental team, if we're in any role where we're taking care of customers, we may need to rethink our choices. if you don't like people, you may need to find another bus to ride on in reality, right? So we got to be mindful of that. So here's some experience lessons about 3 o'clock, what time [is the?] parade? And how that's not a stupid question. You have to anticipate and try to discern what the real question is. You've got to listen to the question. When someone asks, "What time is the 3 o'clock parade?" what might they really be asking?
[crosstalk].
What time do I need to go find a spot to sit? And maybe what time does the 3 o'clock parade actually come through here? Right? I mean, that could be what they want to know. There's a whole host of things that they could really be asking. And I think the only way that those Disney employees answer that question with a smile day in and day out is by anticipating and trying to identify what the real question actually is. And there's a lot of that in dentistry too, isn't there? Sometimes patients may throw out an objection that's not the true objection. It's just more socially acceptable, or it requires less courage to say, "Just got to check with my insurance covers," than it is to say, "I don't believe you," or, "I don't have the money," okay? So we've got to anticipate and listen. We've got to use our skills to discern the real objection and overcome those objections, help answer those questions, and, if possible, try not to ever say no, okay?
So another lesson is to minimize barriers to positive patient outcomes. [We?] want to minimize those barriers? As I said, try not to say no. Try to provide what patients are wanting, and give patients what they want. It's so amazing that Walt Disney knew what parents wanted before we even knew it ourselves. You remember back in 1953 when he went to the amusement parks, those amusement parks were built just for the kids? Walt Disney wanted to build something for families, and that had never been done before, some place the entire family could have a good time, right? So other lessons, how can we be better? That's a great question to ask yourselves. How can we be better? What are some things that we can do to really listen to our patients and give them what they want? And again, patients versus team, really both, we need to identify how can we be better? How can we take better care? How can we anticipate? How can we listen to our patients and our teams? I love how you said, "Ask your team. They often know what's needed." Okay?
Lesson number three is that little wows add up, little laughs, okay? This is a method. Disney has created a method to create these magical moments. They don't happen by accident. They do it in a variety of ways, and we're going to dig into some of those ways. They are striving to make one-on-one connections because they've learned that if they have a one-on-one connection with a guest, that inspires a higher level of loyalty. We have taught for years how important patient retention is. What inspires a high level of patient retention? Loyalty, so you think we might want to focus on how Disney creates brand loyalty for a lifetime. There's some valuable lessons for us. It's the one-on-one connections. And you see this a lot of times online. You'll say, "Oh my gosh, I go to this office--" and I have people tell me this in my community, "I go to this practice. I know it's old. It was built in the '60s. They really need to remodel and get new equipment, but I just love this person." And it's usually a person in the office, not even the doctor sometimes, that the patient has a connection to. And so they're willing to [of her?] look a lot of deficiencies. And they recognized they are deficiencies because of that personal connection. It inspires loyalty. They learned that on a typical resort stay, guests on average will have over 60 moments of contact with cast members. 60 opportunities for them to create that one-on-one connection. So they also recognized that it's not possible to create that one-on-one connection with every single guest they serve. So they thought, "How could we do a better job of inspiring our team to take the extra steps going above and beyond to make that connection?" And these moments really mean nothing to the guests if it's simply a transaction. And I think this just happens a lot in [inaudible] who were focusing on the transactional part of our jobs and get the insurance card, copy the insurance card, copy the chart. All of those elements we show the give-me-that-moment undercover video. That was the transaction. That was not an emotional connection. There was no attempt made there at all. It could mean anything-- it could mean everything to your patients if any of them are interactions, okay? So transactions versus interactions. There's the big difference.
So how does Disney do this? They do have a vested interest in providing as many opportunities as possible for their cast members to make each individual guest experience special. So the idea of cast members doing something special for the guests have been going on for years as just part of the Disney mantra. But a few years ago, they wanted to improve upon that, okay? So in the 1990s, they actually created a structure and a system for this at Walt Disney World. This structure is now known as Magical Moments. So let me tell you a little bit about it. I'm actually going to show you a magical moment that we experienced with Tom. He wasn't quite two years old. He used to have a look on his face when he saw Mickey Mouse, right? But that was from a distance, okay? Here, he loves Mickey. He watches Mickey. But to a one-year-old, Mickey in real life up close and personal, "Big. Oh my gosh! He looks a lot smaller in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, right?" So I want you to see this magical moment that occurred as Mickey came up. And you might want to adjust the volume down a little bit, Mitch? I don't know how loud it could be. So here he is. Here's Mickey walking out from behind stage. And he sees Tom, who says, "What?" Right? And Mickey's like, "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you." And then he grabs Katie, and he says, "Come over here. And we're going to start the line." This child is going to be the first one to visit with Mickey Mouse. And now, he's actually directing traffic, right? "Everybody else form a line."
[crosstalk].
Come on.
Around the [inaudible]. There you go [inaudible].
Line up. And now, he's going to go back and have this magical moment with Tom. And everybody else, this is-- they're all walking out
[crosstalk].
So how fun, right? So did you know that that's actually scripted and structured? We knew where to be to be the first ones in line because usually, Mickey will have that magical moment with you. Every time they come out, they find a child. They say hello. And they pick one child to walk with them to the front of the line and line up. So because of the-- my son-in-law has history at Disney. He was like, "Okay. We got to be there at this time. This is when the characters walk out. And Mickey-- if we have Tom right there, he might get chosen for that magical moment." Okay? That's an example of what they were talking about. That's a one-on-one connection. Half of us were standing there filming it, we're like, "Oh my gosh. It actually worked. We got it on video, right?" Okay. So fun stuff. That's a magical magical moments. So magical moments might seem spontaneous, but they're actually carefully orchestrated opportunities to have these experiences, these connections to individualize his interaction with Mickey Mouse. That was a magical moment. Okay. There are all sorts of these throughout the parks. Magical moments are planned and scheduled events that create special moments for the guests.
Okay. So certificates, ribbons, stickers, [inaudible], some of that are given to guests to commemorate their moments. So at Animal Kingdom, for example, they may actually have a [inaudible] be a trainer for the day, and they're involved in a show. And they have a special certificate that celebrates that moment and commemorates that moment. Here's some examples of some of those things:</b> the buttons. You've all seen the buttons, the Happy Birthday buttons, the bride and groom buttons, the anniversary buttons, and they do actually commemorate those special moments. So I had a nephew that was 17 months old when he was diagnosed with leukemia. And he fought for his life. And he went through chemo, and later had a bone marrow transplant. But after he got through that first rough patch, nine months of treatment, his family got to experience and make-a-wish trip to Walt Disney World. And they treated little JJ like a king. And he didn't go anywhere in that park without them celebrating him. It was really special. And we didn't get to go, but we saw some of the video. And we'll never forget it because he actually passed away at age four. So his family treasured that, that week that they got with him. It was a real gift.
So those lessons change people's lives. And they're very carefully structured moments that they take to create those connections. So how can we do our own version of this? Well, we teach a concept called secret service. Right? We want to personalize the experience when we capture patient intelligence whenever possible. He mentioned that when he made a reservation, they said, "Are you celebrating anything?" We can't ask that same question, but there's plenty of opportunities when we're interacting with patients on the phone when they're scheduling an appointment. Every new patient, we have an opportunity to gather secret service or patient intelligence to provide secret service. We can say, "Oh, that's great. Are you new to the area, or you just new to our office?" And if they're new to the area, "Where did you move in from?" "I came in from out of state because I've gotten a new job." "Oh, that's amazing. Congratulations. Where will you be working?" These are all opportunities to gather patient intelligence that we can then use as a team to personalize the experience. The happy visits, first visit to the dentist. We suggest you get some certificates, it's not that hard. Celebrate those moments. Doctors, before you leave, take a picture with the child. Commemorate whenever possible. Some of you do a great job of this. You send a birthday video, but you also, "Dr. [inaudible], but don't you guys have hostess cupcakes in the office so if anybody's celebrating a birthday they stick a candlelit it, commemorate the moment, and take a photo?" It's a great idea. It's exactly what we're talking about, personalizing, creating an emotional connection with the patient. Hostess cupcakes don't ever go bad. Do they [laughter]? Just keep them in the package and you should be good, right? Okay.
So these are what we're talking about. We can create systems, methods to create our own version of magical moments. We want to gather that patient intelligence, share it at the morning huddle. How many of you picked up on this similarity that Len talked about? What do they do every time before they start their day?
[inaudible].
They have a communication meeting. They call them track meetings. It's a morning huddle. That's what it is. Who can we celebrate today? What do we need to know? Patient reviews, those types of things. Who has opportunities for treatment? We need to communicate about this at the beginning of the day. Who can we choose to create a magical moment for
