I was just reading on Quora when I saw this question asked:
“I accidentally put 5W-30 oil in my car when it takes 5W-20. Can I drive it until the next oil change interval without problems?”
The answer was very interesting:
Renan Rezende wrote:
“I’m an engineer who worked for Petronas back in 2016 in the lubricants division. One thing I can tell you is that 99.9% of the population (including mechanics) have no knowledge about lubricants. Everyone has guesses. My first advice is: Don’t trust other people’s guesses.
My division had one of the 5 main labs of the company around the world. You could check every single thing related to the fluids we produced.
Now going back to you question:
If you put a 5W30 instead of 5W20, you won’t notice anything instantly, but it will speed up the wear and tear of the engine system. It will also overload the oil pump, as it was designed to work with the 5W20 oil. The pump will have to work around 40% more to move the oil around.
As I said, you wouldn’t see anything catastrophic happening, but it’s far from ideal. It’s like inflation. If you print tons of money now, you will start to see the consequences in a few years and you might not be able to tell where the problem started. If this was my car, I would replace the oil, especially if you like the car.”
What does this all mean?
It’s like the dental office… the people answering your phones may never ever be trained and could say anything really, and you could spend a bomb on marketing to get your phones to ring, and you have full books in your practice, so who cares about efficiencies and savings and wear and tear on your patients or your staff?
Like the writer said, you can overload your pump by 40% and you may never notice anything in the short term, but in the long term there will be problems and you may not be able to retrace your steps to work out where exactly the problem arose.
Recently we started listening to calls at a practice where we were told that the patients were different and the new callers to the practice were different.
What we found was not that the patients were different…. what we found was that at this practice the patients had been allowed to BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY and were able to get away with this different form of behaviour.
And the different behaviour that existing patients were allowed to display became the suggested behaviours that the practice staff unknowingly mentioned to all new patients… thus creating an unwanted pattern of behaviour in new patients that was never asked for by any new patients in the first place…
At your dental practice…
At your dental practice it is totally acceptable for practice staff to lead your patients graciously to make the choices for themselves that you want them to be making.
And that the patients do actually need to be making [for their own health and their own benefits].
And because you have invested in your team being taught great communication and persuasion skills, the patients are not aware that they are being gently led to make the decisions that the practice wants them to make, which of course are best for them [the patients].
The reason we know this…
The reason we know this is because when we have teams learn and use the language that gives the best results, we see those practices become the best possible versions of themselves.
It’s what I call a Yoda moment… it’s that moment when the team members need to:
“Trust the force”
Because that trust, and the force, are such significant points of difference, that they will set the practice and your team members free….
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Dr. David Moffet BDS FPFA CSP is a certified CX Experience coach. David works with his wife Jayne Bandy to help SME businesses improve their Customer Service Systems to create memorable World Class experiences for their valued clients and customers. Click here to find out how David and Jayne can help your business