May 20, 2015 03:12 PM
10117 Views
Yesterday I had taken leave from office, since I had a confirmed appointment with MyDentist at 4pm. At the time of taking the appointment itself I had mentioned that one of the fillings in my tooth had come out and needs to be re-filled.
I reached the place at 3:50pm itself and found three other patients waiting. At 4pm I enquired about my confirmed appointment at the counter and the lady asked me wait as the other three patients had to be cleared! I asked what went wrong? Why is there a backlog? Did all the others have appointments earlier than mine? In that case, obviously someone or many others possibly had overshot their appointment slots and as an end result I am being made to wait.
Eventually well past 5pm I was called in. The dentist seemed to be a very inexperienced and junior girl - she checked the tooth, took an x-ray, and declared that my tooth can be refilled. I said okay, but she said a fresh appointment had to be booked for another day for that!
Shocked, I said "I know my tooth needs a refilling - I had taken the appointment for that purpose - why can't it be done today?" To which she unconvincingly answered that the job cannot be completed in a short time! I said okay what is the proper time required to complete a filling - she said around 25 minutes!
Either I have to find another dentist or take one more day of leave for this bloody purpose! How callous and insensitive of the dentists at MyDentist. I know there are good dentists at MyDentist and also that I should not allow a one-off incident by this lady to stigmatize the entire staff at MyDentist. But here is definitely a case of a dentist needing urgent customer sensitization and customer-orientation.
Being fresh out of college I would imagine that they would be put through some such orientation by any company employing them! All companies do that - as grads coming out of college they need to be taught a lot of inter-personal skills and tact and diplomacy to perform in a customer-facing role.
Normally anyone else in my position would have turned violent - but being very mild mannered by nature - even I was livid - you made me wait over an hour and hardly spent 5 minutes with me and did not want to complete a job that took just 25 minutes?
It is very clear that MyDentist urgently needs to impart a customer-orientation workshop to their entire staff - there might be exceptions - but the vast majority surely needs it.
The irony of the whole thing is that the previous filling that had come off was also done at MyDentist by another lady dentist! Here is a double whammy - being punished twice at the same place!
