Eye Care Excellence: Elevating Customer Service in Optometry

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: You can’t have a patient-centric culture in a patient-centered practice. If you don’t treat your team the same way and I think that it comes down from the way that you interact with your people, and that will empower them to feel good about the way they’re treating their patients.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I’m Bethany Fishbein the CEO of The Power Practice and Host of the Power Hour Optometry Podcast and today I am talking customer service with my guests. Dr. Jennifer Stewart, Jennifer’s the Editor of Independent Strong, Jobson Publication. She’s a Founder of OD Perspective, which is a Consulting firm for companies in the eye care industry. And she’s also Co-Founder and Chief Vision Officer of Performance 2020, a sports vision training company. She speaks and writes on a variety of topics. She’s passionate about a lot of things, service being one of them, and I’m excited to see where our conversation goes today. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: Thanks for having me. This is very exciting. 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: It’s exciting for me to because we’ve discussed our similar workflow habits and it’s exciting to be at the beginning of something when you don’t know exactly where it’s going to end up, but it’s going to end up in a good place. So cool. 

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: Absolutely. 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Yeah. So one of the things that I’ve seen from reading the articles that you’ve written and posted, is you’re really passionate about bringing lessons from other industries into what people can learn in optometry. What got you hooked on that?

Dr. Jennifer Stewart:Oh, boy. Well, there’s two big ones that I love to bring into optometry and both are huge passions of mine. One is Disney. I’m a huge Disney fan. I love going to Disney World. I love everything about the experience. So I’ve done a lot of writing and speaking on what we can bring from Theme Parks into our practice, not necessarily that we’re going to build Space Mountain in our practice, but what lessons can we learn from the way that Disney treats the cast members and their guests, and my other is the hospitality industry. My first job out of college was working at Mohonk Mountain House which is a high-end resort in New Paltz, New York, which is my hometown. So I always say think Mohonk think a cross between the shining and dirty dancing, and you get a really good, really good picture of the resort, but I think my first job really gave me the love of treating people in a different way and thinking about every interaction, and really bringing that to practices has been so fun for me.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I follow a lot of optometry conversations on social media and email lists and I feel like service doesn’t get talked about anymore. It used to 15 years ago, 20 years ago, that’s what people were talking about. And they were doing the Disney courses and the Ritz Carlton, how can we upper service level and I feel like there’s been a shift that people are talking more now about how do I make my practice work for me, rather than how do I make it better for my patients? Do you see that?

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: I do and I think if we make it better for our patients, then we make it better for our staff, which is something we’re all struggling with. And then it also makes it a better place for us as well. So I think that we maybe have gotten away from that a little bit. I always say that I think everyone needs to have a job in the service industry at some point in their life because I really think the experience and the values and the lessons you learn in that job can’t help but translate into the way you treat people. Whether it’s when I go on vacation or I’m in the restaurant or the way I treat my staff or the way I treat my patients. I think learning it so young was such an important lesson. For me and being taught well Mohonk really did a great job in teaching us from the moment we were hired in our new hire orientation, how to speak to people, how to interact with them, what hand gestures to use, and I think there is a loss of that. I don’t think that we’re being taught that as well. I think I didn’t have a cell phone then. So I’m sure it’s a little different now but we’re so engrossed in kind of our own world that I think we sometimes forget about that.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: It’s interesting that you mentioned cell phones and being engrossed in your own world. I hadn’t thought about that as something that could impact people’s interest in service, but I know that you say it, I think okay, maybe you’re right like you talked about Disney and waiting in line at Disney 25 years. ago was a completely different experience. That required a different level of attention from Disney, than waiting in line now when everybody has an anti-boredom entertainment device in their own pocket, but misses out on what’s going on in the rest. of the world outside of the device. So have you talk a little bit more about it. I’m interested to hear your take on how this technology has impacted the service world.

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: I think we are so focused on efficiency and giving patients rightfully so the the experience of you know everything at their fingertips, giving them the ability to schedule on their phones to do all their paperwork on their phones, to pay from their phones. So I think we’re focused so much on that and just like Disney is focused on you know, now the app has games that people can play and things you can do while you’re waiting in line but you miss the bigger picture and you missed picking your phone, your head up for your phone and looking around at the things that they’ve done for you to look at while you’re waiting in line. You know what’s on the walls, what’s part of the queue as you’re walking through. So are we forgetting that in our practices are we so focused on really being efficient or even maybe not even being efficient? But how do we get these patients through as quick as possible that we’ve lost sight of the big picture? What are our offices look like? What what do our staff look like? How are we greeting people? What does it smell like? And what I love to do is talk about when you enter your office in the morning, do you come in a back door? Or do you walk in the front door? Just as a patient does? Do you see what a patient experiences when they walk in? Or are you walking in with your face and your phone answering text messages or reading your email? What’s the first impression that your practice has? So I’m guilty of it too. I mean, I’ve got my phone right next to me it’s on vibrate or silent so it doesn’t distract me. But I really think you know, picking our heads up and looking at our practice from the eyes of a patient or the eyes of our guests and seeing what they see just like if we were in Disney or Mohawk and looking what’s on the walls, what does it smell like? What does it feel like? I think there’s a lot that we can do there to really change the patient experience in our practice.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I’ve given a lot of thought to how COVID changed expectations of service because you used it as a as an opposite of the good things you’re talking about. But you know, we’re so focused on efficiency, get them in and get them out during COVID. That was good service. Like great service was get somebody in get them through the office limit their contact with as many people as you can have them sit in one seat if they don’t need anything, brush them out the door back to the safety of their car. And I’ve seen it in practices that we consult with that because that happened and it happened at the time of staff turnover. So a lot of people came into what used to be a service industry and their first months were training on how to limit contact with patients that we have to have as little face-to-face time as possible. And now we’re just starting not just but depending on where your practice is we’re starting to see that shift back to like wait but you said you know if you said if we could get them in and out without having to sit down in the optical department that was one less chair we had to clean and now we want them to sit down and have a cup of coffee and look at some glasses. It’s an interesting shift that’s happened.

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: I think people crave that too. People are starting to crave that connection again and they’re starting. I mean they’re going on vacation, they’re going to hotel so they’re they’re back in that hospitality mindset. So I think the practices that can start adding that in, in their own comfort, you know, as being mindful of your comfort and your team’s comfort, but starting to add those touches and that little hospitality feel. I think that will start to differentiate us right? We’re always looking for ways to differentiate our practice from our competitors from an online vendor or online competitors or whoever that might be. But I think kind of shifting back to putting in quotes, the old days or the pre-COVID days of the way that we really focused on that patient experience, the better we can do that. I think the better that we’re going to position ourselves as being a place that patients want to go and want to have that. That touch maybe not physically, but that high-end field no matter what you have in your office but that hospitality feel of remembering the patient’s name or greeting them with a warm hello instead of just having them call from the parking lot having a locked door rushing them in and rushing them out. But really taking the time and welcoming them back and saying I’m so glad you’re back. I’m glad you’re here. We’re excited to see you and let’s make this a great experience.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So talk about some of the training from the hotel, the hospitality industry. It’s interesting what you said, you know, when I started, I received training in how to talk to people, what gestures to make, and it’s pretty rare to find that kind of training or that level of training in an optometry practice. So talk a little bit about what that sounded like and what kind of things you learned and were taught.

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: It has to be pretty impactful because that was 1999 and I still forgive them for it. It’s embarrassing to say I’ll just say I was maybe 10 when I started just kidding, but it was my dream job and everyone in my hometown. Mohonk Mountain House is a beautiful place and I couldn’t wait to turn 18 to work there at the time. You’re going to be 18 And as soon as I turned 18 that summer I applied and got my first job in the gift shop which was making milkshakes, making coffee. It was pre the coffee, kind of excitement. I think we just had pots of coffee there. I remember when flavors came in. And also it was a gift shop you know, magnets and sweatshirts and T-shirts and high-end jewelry and kind of a one-stop shop. But everybody when they started had an orientation no matter you if you were, you know the person out there maintaining the trails to the CEO of the company. We all started in an orientation together and it was a full day. And we learned everything from the history of the hotel which has an unbelievable history. Going back to the 1800s really amazing I have every book ever kind of written about Mohawk because I feel so fortunate to have worked there. Lots of presidents have been there, some great treaties have been signed. So we learned all of this the first day and it really empowered us to be proud of where we worked and to be proud of the history that we were now part of. So that’s one of the things that I love teaching or talking to staff and offices about is first, if you were to pull your staff, does everyone know what year the practice was started? And when I asked this question live, I get kind of a mix of kind of looking sideways each other going from not sure. And I think that’s a big way to start is to start with where you, you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you came from. So really teaching everybody where the practice started. How long you’ve been in practice, if you’re a cold start, that’s easier. When was the practice started? How many owners have there been? how many locations? be proud of the growth of that practice and share that with patients and share that with with patients who have been there for 50 years or patients who are new. You know, here’s the story of where we work, and I’m really proud to be part of this. So I think that was the first thing I learned was to be proud of where I worked and to know what it not that I was expected to answer every question that a guest had. But to have that feeling of a sense of knowing something about where I worked was really important.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: And that’s surprisingly doable for optometrists to do this is a couple of months ago and one of my partners had asked me to do some training with two new staff people who had started around the same time. And his idea was, you know, I want them to hang out with you and learn about the practice culture and that those kinds of things. So the day of that came and I had screwed up my schedule and kind of forgot that was happening. Hopefully they’re not listening and I’m thinking what am I going to do with them? And what I ended up doing was, I said, You guys are up for a field trip. And they’re new employees so they don’t know and they’re like, Okay, so they go in the car, and we did like a driving tour. We went to the first location of our practice and without realizing it, I wasn’t doing it intentionally but I gave them exactly what you’re talking about. Here’s where we had worked before. Here’s how we made the decision to open. Here’s how we picked this location. When we started there was nothing here there was just gravel on the ground. And then you know talked about the growth of the business. We showed them the second location and then we merge those into the office. They’re working now and we did this little driving tour. And I didn’t realize at the time the impact that was going to have and they talk about it and now other people are jealous and why didn’t they get to go on it we’re talking about do we have a video crew come in make a video of the history tour, so that we can share that with any new employee who comes on so it doesn’t have to be something fancy with video production, you know, to commit to doing it with a new team member or even to record something on your phone and have that history to show I love.

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: Having on the website. You know if it’s a practice, that’s third generation, you’re having maybe a timeline on the website of where we’ve come from and where we are now. And to celebrate that and to celebrate the growth we also moved we had a small 1100 square foot space that we had been in for years and moved to a 3300 square foot space and before our old space got we’re in the same building but before our old space was taken, when it was still vacant. Anytime I had a new staff member start We’d sneak downstairs and it was empty but I take them through and you know they’d stand there we go, Oh my gosh, this is so small, and every time and I bring my current team down to hope. Do you remember where we came from? They’re like, yes, we remember cramming into this space, but I think it’s something just to know none of my new staff had ever been in that space. So it gave them a sense of pride to see where we came from. Like you said, it doesn’t have to be inexpensive. It doesn’t take much time. It just might take a little digging and if you’re not quite sure, but I think it also just brings the team together and shows them a sense of pride of working together to show where they’ve come from. So that’s something I’m still proud of, of Mohonk every time I see it’s a very trendy place now so anytime I see it come up on Instagram or somebody shares if they’re staying there, I still have this pride go on. I work there. I mean, it was a long time 20 years ago, but I walked those trails and I worked there and I was part of that experience that people are having now so I think that for me was one of the biggest things that I didn’t realize at the time, you know, as an 18 year old college student, I wasn’t sitting there going wow, I’m really proud of the history of where I work. But now I see it and I’m glad that I had that that they felt that way. And the other I think the biggest takeaway I took from working there and from my orientation was how to interact with people, which is great as an 18-year-old to learn that but especially now I mean, I hear the way my kids talk. So I want to send them there for some for some training but just to be to be formal, in a way that’s not stuffy but it’s polite and respectful. So they empowered us to take care of any guests anytime. We’re no matter where we were. The guests always came first and it didn’t have to be our department and I think this is something that optometry can benefit from my, my one of my least there’s a couple of phrases I can’t stand and one of them is it’s not my job. And in the service industry and in the hospitality industry. It’s everyone’s job to make the patient or the guests happy. So for us when they were empowered if we were walking in the hallway to do something and a guest asked us a question. We were you know, to stop answer that question, and instead of pointing them where they wanted to go, if they said oh, you know, where’s the lake instead of I’m pointing you know, it’s over there. We were instead, I’m on that way. I’m actually walking that way now. May I accompany you or I’m happy to show you the way let’s go together. But and then obviously in our office, we’re not going to do that. But I think it really it shows a team approach to say, maybe I can answer that question for you, but I’m going to help you find the person that can I’m not just going to put you into their voicemail box or tell you I don’t know the answer. So it’s about communication and really thinking of the patient first and doing everything in our power to get them the right answer as quickly as possible.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Talk a little bit about if you remember what that training looked like because one of the things we run into is that an owner or a manager will have expectations and isn’t able to communicate them clearly enough to the team member that when a person on the team doesn’t do it and we start to question expectations. The practice owner or manager will say, I told them they’re expected to act professionally with patients. But to some professionally, maybe. “Oh hey Jen”, and to someone else professional might be “Welcome. Dr. Stewart” or you know, you don’t know what professional is or what business casual is or what appropriate dress is.

Dr. Jennifer Stewart: Especially now.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Right, Especially now so, you know, the whole leggings as pants to be how do you train a bunch of 18-year-olds on how to speak to someone the Mohonk way or whatever, and, and have them do it?

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: I think formal training first and I know we’re busy, but instead of I agree with you, instead of just saying, well, here you go, Sally, it’s your first day answering the phone and be professional and they’re like, Okay, I don’t know what that means. I think having specific guidelines and have them written down and have it. I think having a formal orientation first is important. And not just, and it’s going to look different for everybody but not having you know, somebody starts and it’s just go shadow, our best person and they’ll teach you everything but having a planned orientation and training process in place that might take time before your new employee launches into the world. Our orientation started before we set foot in our job. We couldn’t start our job until we did orientation. We weren’t working and then they said, Well, you’ve been here two weeks. So now let’s train you so I think really having a set way to do that and a set training plan in place. And that might be videos, it might be that you record videos, and so it doesn’t take one on one time. Maybe it is a video. You could turn on Zoom or turn on your phone and record. Here’s the way that Mohonk Eyecare answers the phone and it’s specific and it is detailed, and there’s no question about how you want it done. And it’s scripted and we use scripting a lot. Our office and scripting I know can be polarizing. We would use scripting not so that somebody would read the script, but so they would know what needed to be said and then use their own way to do it. So here’s the things that come in. When you’re answering the phone. You don’t just pick up the phone and go “hey”, everyone laughs but I’m sure there’s offices that happens. But here’s the script when we answer the phone and that’s what you say. And I always I always say when we were training somebody I said, the first thing you do before you pick up the phone is you put a smile on your face, and then you answer the phone because somebody can hear that they can hear if you answer. “Thanks for calling. How can I help you?” or a smile “Thanks for calling. I’m so glad to talk to you. What can I do?” And yes, it sounds silly, but it’s really impactful. And I can bet that at the Four Seasons or the Ritz Carlton that they’re they’re smiling when they pick up the phone. So I think having a formal process in place when you bring somebody in, that’s both written and maybe video and a formal training program. So that exactly they don’t say when a patient comes in, “hey”, it’s “Welcome to our office. My name is Jen. I’m going to be taking care of you today”. Whatever that script is, but the more it’s done and the more that it’s done in the correct order and its practice it becomes second nature doesn’t become a script anymore.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: But another thing on that training that I think is important it makes a big difference is to really separate that from the actual day-to-day patient care. You said we had orientation before we could start our jobs which makes me think that it was at least in a different room or a different place with different people different dress code, something that you do that and I see it in so many offices where day one is exactly as you said, This is Jen, she’s really good on the phone, just sit next to her and maybe you knew they were coming maybe you didn’t you know.

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: And on that side it also takes Jen away from doing her job. You know, we usually give somebody, I’ve learned this from my friend Kayla Ashlee at Spexy who does training. I’ve heard her speak about this that we usually give the new person to our very best person. So now you’re taking that very best person off of doing their job. So now you’re, you’re way behind. You’re probably an understaffed office already if you’re looking to hire and now you’ve pulled another good person off the floor. But if you can do some sort of orientation and yes, I still remember mine. We’re in a room and we’re I can’t remember what room we’re in but, but we also had lunch in the main dining room so that was part of it. It was part of the experience, experience the life of a guest and I’ll never forget that either. We didn’t have bag lunches in you know, some small room they brought us into the main dining room and close that to guests. They invested that time and money into showing us okay, here’s where the guests eat. This is what an experience for them is like and then let’s go back and learn that so we had a first hand knowledge of that. So maybe that involves having your what we would do also for our staff, it’s very early on probably not the first day to overwhelm them, but they had an eye exam pretty early on and they went from start to finish to they had to fill out the paperwork and we scheduled them into the schedule and they were pre-tested and I did an exam or one of my associates as though they were a patient so that they could see the whole office philosophy and experience as a patient. And then really start learning as an employee.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: The things at the beginning of an interaction are things that you can script. You can say I want you to answer the phone this way. I want you to take this information. How is problem solving taught when someone has a complaint? When something doesn’t go according to plan when something gets screwed up? And you can’t script every potential scenario because there are 1000s of ways we can screw something up and probably will roll our way through most of them. How do you teach somebody to handle a negative situation or handle a problematic situation in a way that’s going to get the desired result? You talked before about being empowered to fix it, but like how do you teach somebody how to fix it?

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: I think first hiring for hiring the right person, you know hiring for personality and training for skill goes a long way. So I think if you’re when you’re hiring you’re hopefully getting a person who is the right fit and maybe doesn’t know optical or optometry but is a person who’s ready to learn. And then actually I was just having a conversation about this with somebody actually on Facebook about managing an office and do you have an office manager does the optometrist do it all? And I think you know, a lot of us want to do everything ourselves and we like to run most of it and kind of micromanage that but having your staff be empowered to make decisions and do things that they think are right and giving them the space to make mistakes is okay. One of the hotels and now I’m blanking if it’s the Ritz Carlton, of course, I can’t remember off top my head. They empower each of their team to fix a problem for our guests and give them up to $2,000 no questions asked. Fix it. You have up to $2,000 You don’t have to ask the manager you don’t have to ask permission. You don’t have to stop and make a phone call or send an email or tell the guests to get back to them. In the moment you have 2000 hours to make that problem go away in the manner you think that needs to be done. And that’s what we’re empowering you to do. And I think that helps staff feel that they can make decisions and feel good about what choices they’re making. So maybe that’s something in our practices we do. Obviously most of us are not going to say here’s $2,000 Do what you want. But can the staff feel empowered to not have to wait for the doctor or manager to say “I’m sorry that your frame broke? I’m going to order your placement. It’s going to be here tomorrow, and we’re going to fix that” or “I’m sorry, the lab scratched your lenses. I’m going to give you a discount on a second pair” or whatever it might be that they have the power to make that patient happy. In the moment. And of course that comes with some guidance and some maybe you know some traverse it comes back to training. Can we have a training where you empower them to spend up to a certain amount of money without asking permission and just fixing the problem? When people can complain or people have a problem, the number one thing that they want is to be heard. They just want somebody to listen to them. And I think if we can just stop what we’re doing and listen and have a solution that the person is empowered to do in the moment. A lot of those problems will go away but mostly people just want to be heard and they want to feel listened to they want to feel that somebody is listening to them and helping and that’s mostly why they’re complaining.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I’ll head to that. They want to feel that their concern or their complaint is really important to the person that they’re talking to I didn’t save it and I wish I had it was from a TikTok which is clearly where I get all of my business management advice or most of it all. Yeah. So wish I had it I sure I’ve mentioned it before but the TikTok said like they’re in any conflict. There are two, two sides. One who thinks it’s a really, really, really big deal and the other side who doesn’t? And so when a patient brings a complaint to someone in the office, if the person in the office takes the role of the person who thinks it’s a really big deal, then that pushes the patient into the role of no, no, no, it’s not that big a deal. Don’t worry about it, right? Where if the patient brings a complaint, and the person that they’re speaking to in the office is like, okay, whatever I mean, we’ll take it, you know, like no biggie. Then they’re going to just keep repeating and make it a bigger and bigger deal. Because the person doesn’t think it’s a big enough deal. So that’s something that we train now is in conflict resolution. Because once I heard that, I’ve had people say to me, like how do you always know how to deal with these kinds of situations? And it’s, I didn’t realize I was doing it but it’s, you’re unhappy. This is a huge deal to me. Like let me apologize profusely. Let me figure out how to fix it. Let me take care of it right now. Let me make this my top priority. And patients. No, no, it’s okay like apologizing to me. Right for having the problem right where somebody else that doesn’t do that escalates the situation. So that was a good one for me.

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: Maybe it will work with my kids. So I’m going to use that it absolutely works for everybody. But I think it comes down to empowering whoever is in your office, whether it could be that you have an office manager and they’re there three days a week and a patient calls on Monday but Sally’s on there till Wednesday and they’re really upset and the way that your office handles that. Is that Sally calls them but the patient on Monday doesn’t want to wait and sits there for three days getting angrier and now is posting on Facebook and Google. But if instead the person who answers the phone takes that approach and said I am so sorry that that happened and I am going to take care of that for you and that person in the moment has the authority to fix that problem. And of course they’re not saying there’s bigger problems that need to be addressed differently, but the majority of them are people that just wants to maybe hear them and to take care of their problem and not wait and I think that alone de-escalate so many of those issues and really help again, like you said, the patient starts to apologize and now you’ve reversed and they’re like “I’m so sorry to bother you I it’s fine. I don’t need this right away.” But I think in a day again now where people have instant places to complain and they want to be heard by so many people that now they’re going to tell everybody their problem and how it was poorly handled when instead it could have been just handled quickly. But it doesn’t happen overnight. And that goes back to training and having a good process in place that your staff are empowered to do that and know that they’re supported. So it also can’t be that that they’re empowered to do it and then we come along and go you did it wrong. You don’t do it that way because now you’ve created this hesitation or discrepancy of that and are they going to make mistakes? Yes, but that becomes a teaching moment and we can’t let them learn or do what they need to do unless we get out of the way and let them make a mistake. what’s the worst that’s gonna happen? The patient’s angry anyway, but I think really giving them the space and the support but the training needed to do this really makes a big difference.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So much this relies on you communicating it to staff you setting the culture where these things are encouraged and expected. And then them taking the torch from there. One thing that you said though, in the very beginning of this when you’re talking about. I think it was Disney are talking about was that you’ve really embraced their treatment of their cast members, as well as their treatment of the guests like you’ve learned about how they treat their teams. And that gets overlooked. Let’s give it a little bit of time here. Because like we’ve always said, treat your team the way you want them to treat your best patients. How does the leader’s interaction with the team affect, how the team is going to interact with the patient or are the customers?

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: I mean, I think it comes down to if they feel supported and they feel that you have their back. You know, I was just reading on Facebook. Again all my information apparently comes from Facebook too. You know, there’s a post on Facebook about a doctor having a verbally abusive patient in their office, and then not maybe they kicked them out basically and told them that they can no longer come into the office because of the way they treated their staff and the comments were all about that was you know, an empowering thing you did because it shows that you prioritize the culture and your team above one patient. And I don’t think any of this can happen. You can’t have a patient-centric culture in a patient-centered practice. If you don’t treat your team the same way. And I think that it comes down from the way that you interact with your people. And that will empower them to feel good about the way they’re treating their patients in the office. And I think about again, my time at Mohonk we were treated. I mean I was a seasonal summer employee and we were empowered to spend any of our time at the hotel. Anytime that we were not working. We were invited to bring our families to the hotel. We could use the lake we could use the trails, we could play tennis, we could play golf, we could use fitness facilities as long as we you know if I guest needed the facilities we were to stand back but we were treated as family there we were not you know told you can show up for your shift and you have to leave but we were included in a lot of the things and I think that made me feel “wow, I feel like I’m proud to work here” and that has how I’ve translated to working with my staff, I value them if I if they’re not there. I’m not working and I’m not successful. So if my staff are not working at the best efficiency or feeling supportive. Patients feel that and we’ve all gone to offices like that where you walk in and you’re like, “oh my gosh, these people are really unhappy. I don’t know about this”, you know if they’re complaining about the doctor and I can hear that or they’re complaining and they’re chit chatting and it just has a bad vibe and a bad feeling and patients feel that and no matter how much you try and have a good experience, then people feel that vibe. But if you walk into an office and people are smiling and they’re happy, and we used to have patients all the time, come in and they’re going “are you hiring? Because I want to work here”. It just seems like a really fun place to work. And I always took that as the number one compliment that a patient could give me that they’re asking me for a job because they want to you know and they say “Can I just come in and visit?”, “Sure, you come in and hang out you know, whatever you want”, but people wanted to come in because they felt that vibe of that we truly enjoyed to be we truly enjoyed being there. We truly enjoyed working together. I respected my team and they respected me and everyone can feel that and patients will remark on that.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I think that’s kind of what ties everything together a little bit the idea that people are not talking so much about service anymore. But what you’ve described a place where you said I couldn’t wait to turn 18 so that I could work there. This seasonal summer thing that was probably paying minimum wage right like I couldn’t wait to turn old enough so I could be part of it or an office where patients are saying, “Are you hiring?”. While so many people are having trouble now finding people who are willing to even come in and interview they’re, in their offices people saying please let me know when you have a job I want to be part of this is something that is enviable and money saving and time-saving for practices because just like a patient who’s referred by another patient comes in and you’re already friends and they’re probably going to be a really good fit for the practice. Somebody who has chosen to work there and wants to be there because they enjoy the practice vibe and the culture is really unlikely to be a bad hire, you know that they’re already going to fit into what you do as long as they can do the job. So that saves money. And if you’re able to hire, you’re taking good care of your people. You’re having good relationships with them. They’re taking great care of your patients. They’re having good relationships with the patients who are in turn having good relationships with you. You’re going to be happier to go to work and you’re going to be more profitable. So I will close by saying if you’re not thinking about service, you absolutely should be. It’s a priority for profitability for efficiency and for enjoying what you do every day. Jen were speaking at the Northeast Optical Show in a week or two by the time this airs that may have already happened. But it’s interesting where this conversation developed. One of the things I’m talking about is culture and creating a place where people including you want to come to work. So that’s what this is all about taking care of people.

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: I’m giving my pixie dust lecture there too on, How to put some theme park Magic and a little sparkle into our practices. So it’s my favorite lecture to give and, and I love seeing people really kind of think about the things that they could be doing differently from the way they answer the phone to the way that the team members the names that we use for our staff to how we are onstage every time we’re in the office. And to think of it as going on stage and putting ourselves in a role and to think about what goes into that so I’m excited to share that with everybody at the Northeast Optical Show and I really love talking about this and I think it really is something again, you’re right that is not talked about a lot especially lately in the last couple of years. We’ve been talking about a lot of important things, but maybe a step back into thinking, how do we look at what some of the service and hospitality industries do and do well, and I like not reinventing the wheel, and if I can learn a lesson from somebody who does it really well and incorporate that into my practice. I’m happy to do so.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Awesome. I’m looking forward to seeing you there by the time I see you I will have just come back from Animal Kingdom. We’re not doing Disney World but we’re in Orlando for a dance competition and we have one day and Animal Kingdoms the park we’ve never been to so I will have Disney stories. Hopefully to share.

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: Take good notes.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I will. Jen, thank you so much for being here for putting the time in for sharing your passion for service and hospitality to our patients. People want to see more of you. Where do they find you?

Dr.Jennifer Stewart: You can find me on LinkedIn, my website ODPerspectives. I’m on Instagram, I’m occasionally on Twitter,not really but I’m trying so. But I’m everywhere you can catch me at a live, local and national meetings speaking. I really enjoy now that getting back out there in person. It’s fun to see everybody smiling and laughing and enjoying networking and interacting.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Thank you so much. And as always you can find us at www.powerpractice.com Thank you again!