How Does a Little “Oops” Become a Big “Goof-up”?

By Mary Field

While I was standing in line at the bank the other day a woman ahead in the line, who was wearing a very stylish pair of glasses, kept looking back at me. I thought she’d probably noticed my own very fashionable orange and purple rimless frames and felt she’d found a kindred spirit. As we inched forward in the line the woman started an eyeglass conversation, which was joined by other people. I complimented her on her specs but oddly, she was a little disappointed with them even though all our line buddies agreed with me that she looked pretty spiffy.

As she told her tale of woe I was reminded that although dispensing has become increasingly more sophisticated and polished, when you add up the monthly figures, it all comes back to good people skills, diligent organization and above all, making your clients feel you care about them.

It was a little thing that had soured my new friend’s experience. She’d been a customer at the same dispensary for many years. She’d seen many staff people come and go but retained a loyalty to the company through many pairs of glasses. So when she needed to pick out new frames she naturally returned expecting the same great service she’d always had. The frame she selected was not immediately available in the colour she wanted so she was told the frame would be ordered and she would be called. But… she wasn’t.

As time wore on and still no word about her frame, the woman called the dispensary for an update and was told there was no word on a delivery date. More time passed and it became apparent, at least to the woman, that nobody cared about her order. So she bought a new pair of glasses elsewhere – a pair she really didn’t like.

You can most likely empathize with the store owner and maybe even accurately describe several possible scenarios that explain what happened to the order. It could have been an unavoidable back-order. It could have been that somebody forgot to order the frame causing a front-end delay. You can think of many other explanations but in the end it amounts to… OOPS!

But it really doesn’t matter what or who hindered the prompt delivery of the frame. The customer believed she’d been neglected… cast aside. She wanted to be pro-active and it didn’t seem that her phone call to the dispensary had triggered any activity. She did the only thing she thought she could do… she went somewhere else and spent her money. And her original dispensary doesn’t even realize they’ve lost her.

It may seem like we’ve taken a winding road to get to the point of this article but on the other hand, it was a winding road that led to the loss of this client. And how many more OOPS’es might it take before a dispensing business loses its credibility in the community?

The “goof-up” here might have been avoided with a well-organized order system, proper oversight of that system and a better customer relations follow-up policy. In other words, that situation was a management “goof-up”. It’s difficult in a busy dispensary to keep on top of the orders, back-orders and in-coming stock, and often impossible to prevent customer disappointment if there is a back-order. But a good manager will develop a menu of strategies for all these procedures and will have a back-up plan when there is a breakdown in one of the links of the delivery chain.

In a typical dispensary, ordering frames is the job of the front line staff. The optician who is responsible for the dispensing intake, orders the necessary components to complete the job. The key here is the word “responsible”. Follow through should also be the mantra of a professional. The optician needs to take ownership of the job and assume responsibility for seeing that it is completed according to the terms of the original dispensing transaction. Consequently, the person who agreed to order the frame for my friend from the bank line should have processed the order him/herself or at least checked within 24 hours to make sure the frame had been ordered. If there was a back-order status or some other difficulty identified at the outset, the woman should have been called with an update and perhaps a suggestion of alternative choices. When you take the initiative to call, even with bad news, you not only show clients that they are important to you, but you also take control of the situation.

In the real world opticians don’t always have the luxury of following a job through from start to finish because of rotating shifts. This is why it’s important to have an ordering system and a supportive follow-up procedure in place. And ultimately it’s the responsibility of the owner or manager to monitor the system and the orders flowing through the system. This is true for frame orders as well as for orders that are in process at a lab whether that lab is onsite or offsite. It’s also a good public relations move for the manager to call customers a week or two after an order has been dispensed to find out if there are any questions the customer would like answered. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Wouldn’t you feel special if you got a call from a business where you’d just spend several hundred dollars asking you for feedback?

If you’re still stuck in a paper world you might want to think about a software package like the Eyesistant distributed by MedicLINK. In its current iteration Eyesistant provides a compact, easy-to-use practice management package. Its five portals take you from scheduling, to ordering, inventory control, marketing and invoicing. With very few keystrokes you can access billing and payment history, manage inventory, evaluate marketing, develop reports and much more. As a new feature, MedicLINK will be including an order-tracking component in the next edition of Eyesistant, available in Spring 2007. With this feature there will be a quick view “in” box and an “out” box. In this way the manager or anybody who is responsible for a job, can easily see the list of outstanding orders and… follow up on them.

But whether ordering is done manually or using some form of software, what ultimately makes or breaks the transaction falls on the shoulders of people. The most sophisticated system will flounder if routine is not followed implicitly, if outcomes are not monitored and if follow-up does not take place. It’s hard enough to make a “go” of it in business today without unwittingly losing formerly loyal customers. Give your order and delivery system the SWOT analysis: what are its strengths, its weaknesses, the opportunities presented by those strengths and what threats do you face from its weaknesses?