Is a Tour of Your Practice Worth the Time?

When conducting training with practices, I often ask the staff this question:

Does your practice take visitors on a tour of your facility?

The response was the one I usually get: “no, but we used to”.

Which begs the question: is the practice tour worth the trouble? The answer is a no-brainer.

Absolutely – but doing it properly is the key.

While taking appropriate safety measures due to COVID, leading the visiting family on a brief tour does much more than simply show them your practice. It also communicates several important messages, including:

• You value their business enough to show them your workplace.
• You take pride in your facility, your people, and the quality of your work.
• You want them to make a well-informed decision by understanding what you do.

I suspect that practices stop giving tours simply because of the monotony of doing so – after all, to the person giving the tour, this is the most mundane task on the planet. However, let’s not forget the reasons to ensure that a tour is always a part of the visitor experience:

• For your visitors, this is all new. Your office is a foreign and unfamiliar environment.
• You are frequently competing with other practices for the start – and you often don’t realize it.
• Your services are expensive, and you therefore must justify the investment. 
• Seeing other patients being treated helps your visitor to imagine themselves as part of the practice.
• You reduce the need for questions at the end of the consultation.

You might worry that the tour could be perceived as boring or uninteresting. It should never be that way, and there is a simple solution to prevent it. When your tour-giver is taking visitors through your facility, this person should do more than simply execute a walk-around. They should also stop briefly at  relevant points of interest and explain both what the visitor is seeing and why each point is relevant to the decision. Examples:

• (At bios mounted in the reception area): “This is our team, led by Dr. Smith”.
  (Why relevant): “It might interest you to know that she has treated over five thousand local patients, and our staff has an average tenure here of 4.5 years. I mention this because, if you do decide to have treatment here, you will be in the care of a team of experienced professionals”.

• (At scanner): “This is our new scanner, which eliminates the need for us to take impressions of your child’s teeth”.
  (Why relevant): “This is an example of the technology investment that we continually make in our practice, so that our patients get the best quality of care available while getting the best possible result from treatment.”

In closing, remember that an effective tour is not a long one. With the right structure and verbiage, this step will be quick, meaningful, interesting, and a consistently positive influence on the decision to proceed.