I enjoy watching "referral moments" happen in my daily life. I had that pleasure today.
I was supposed to get my teeth cleaned at noon. Unfortunately, my son's school play was cancelled last week due to a snowstorm and rescheduled for today at 1:00 p.m. There was no way I could make both. And the dentist's office policy is that if you cancel on the day of the appointment, you still have to pay for the visit. My day was about to get a lot more expensive.
I called the dentist's office and told the scheduler my situation, confirming that indeed, the normal policy would be that I'd have to pay if I cancelled. But then, just as I was resigning myself to a double-whammy bill, she lowered her voice and said in a confidential tone, "Can you make it tomorrow at 10?" "Sure thing!" I said. "Ok," she continued conspiratorially, "you just come in then." Clearly, she had just bent the rules and was not going to charge me for the switch.
It wasn't half an hour before I was telling this story to a coworker--because she'd just mentioned to me that SHE was about to cancel a dentist appointment for tomorrow. Imagine what might have happened if, say, she'd been having trouble with her dentist, or if they gave her a hard time about rescheduling? "Hey, Miriam, who's that dentist you were just telling me about?"
In fact, she wouldn't even have had to ask. I was feeling so warm and fuzzy at that moment that I would have offered the referral on my own volition, if my colleague had said even so much as, "My dentist doesn't have Reader's Digest in his waiting room."
Now, don't get me wrong. I would not have held it against my dentist if they'd held to their policy. But I wouldn't have become a raving fan (free registration required), either.
Do you go above and beyond for your clients (free registration required)? Have you empowered your assistant and others who work with you to do whatever it takes to make clients feel that they come first? Because the first step in getting more referrals is converting clients into raving fans.
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