What are the confrontational areas in your practice? Every practice has them. Yours may be different than mine. They are not necessarily the same as what we have referred to as barriers to care. Barriers are such things as distance, your hours, and the need for appointments. Some you cannot remove. For example, distance is a barrier unless you want to move your office closer to the potential practice member. But that will just put you further away from another! With others, such as your hours, you must decide if you need to make changes to make it more convenient for your practice members. I am open 12 hours each weekday and 4 hours on Saturday. My hours don’t present a barrier. Having a fee system that makes it affordable for most everyone is important. These are barriers to attracting potential practice members to your office and they create choices for you. Barriers need to be reviewed regularly and determined if they need to be removed.
Confrontational areas cannot, or should not, be ignored if you want to build a successful practice and if you want to give your practice members the best possible care. Further, they need to be written in stone as far as your office system is concerned.
From experience, I have come to believe that the two greatest areas of confrontation are the number of visits per week and the need for lifetime chiropractic care. Bringing in the entire family is a third area of confrontation but only for those who have a spouse and children. The first two are for everyone. In the case of the number of visits per week, you need to give your practice members a schedule of care. Never broaching the subject of lifetime care is avoiding confrontation. I believe the best way is to confront the subject straight on, preferably on the first visit.
There are two points to remember:
1. You can be confrontational without being antagonistic. “This is what we expect of our practice members, Mrs. Jones.” Whether or not you want to make it a condition of being a practice member is up to you. I am not going to expect a person to commit to lifetime care on the first visit. If you are going to confront them with the idea of lifetime care, you must give them a good, logical reason. That means your educational program had better be complete. They better understand why they need lifetime care. It has to be sensible and logical to them. We have books and downloadable mp3’s on our website on the subject if you don’t think you can present a compelling argument for lifetime care.
2. Your argument must sound logical and be philosophically correct. Chiropractic is not based upon authority orientation…“You need to come for life because I said so.”… except in the sense that the practice member accepts you as the authority. But after that, you must reach them with logical, sound reasoning and you must touch their heart. I believe the best way to do that is to show how strongly you believe what you are saying and that you are concerned, first and foremost, about them and their well-being.
There are many other aspects of this discussion that can and should be developed. Perhaps some of you could address them.
When one knows what he/she wants in their practice, confrontation is not an issue at all. I do think that many people view the word “confrontation” as a negative thing. However, it is not. Bottom line for me is to just be nice to people and share with them how I use chiropractic for myself and my family. When they see you as a real person (and not just a business person) – this is the shortest path to being satisfied in practice and in helping them “get it”.