The John Griff Column: Service - with a smile?

Last week gave me cause to think about some of the values I learned to live by long before a broadcasting career beckoned. Those values are still very much part of my character I think – but I wonder if they are inherently part of us all. Equally, I wonder if they are values which we would all claim to support, but perhaps employ only when it suits us to do so. 

I started my working life at one of what was then the ‘Big Four’ high street banks. I started at the bottom, making the tea, folding statements and embossing cheque books for customers who requested them. In the seventeen years that followed I moved through working for the bank’s national sales team, managed a small team of data analysts, became a sales and service trainer and finally returned to the sharp end of banking as a private banking relationship manager. Those years taught me the majority of what I needed to offer a broadcaster – including the art of the interview. Asking someone why they were in excess of their overdraft limit provided great practice and training in posing questions before listening carefully to the answer and evaluating whether I believed the replies. 

It was as a sales and service trainer that I began to understand the practices and values of the wider business and how far they were part of me. I’ve always understood that if you’re going to sell anything to anyone, you first sell yourself. Inevitably perhaps, that takes an amount of time, depending on how you get on with the decision maker buying your service. In reality you get to know them first and earn their trust before taking another step. I do not like the hard sell approach and recoil from it if anyone tries it on me. ‘People buy people, first’ is one of the truest phrases to be found in sales I think and is a phrase which has never let me down. It’s why last week I was disappointed by the way I was handled as a customer of decades. 

The time had arrived for my dental checkup. For decades I had been looked after by the same dentist – a real character who had looked after me from my early 20s. Like me, he liked fast cars and progressive rock. He knew what was going on in my life as much as what was going on in my mouth and joked that if I was coming in for a checkup he would catch up time because I had one of the best sets of teeth in his practice. Even when I needed a first (and so far, an only) crown, he joked that I had earned the time to make and fit it properly. 

With time having passed though, I had been unaware that my dentist had retired. Called to attend by text, I duly made an appointment, only to find that the practice had passed to a larger business with multiple surgeries. I was later informed that as an NHS client, no advice of change in the business was needed because my NHS contract was still intact – even if handled by a different provider. 

My treatment was much changed too. Gone was any kind of recognition of ‘me’. I was now just a mouth to be checked and assessed. The dentist saw me for all of five minutes, asked a few questions, took a couple of x-rays and pronounced that he wasn’t going to ‘go after’ anything in my buccal cavity. Instead, I was told to make an appointment to have a consultation with the hygienist. In his day, my dentist had carried out the roles of both dentist AND hygienist – so it was clear that my costs were about to increase. An NHS contract had no effect - the work of a hygienist is classed as private. And, as it turned out, more than that of the dentist!                                        

 A fortnight later and for the first time, I sat in front of a hygienist. As she prepared to dive into my mouth she offered me the opportunity to pause her service by raising my left hand. Professional and uniformed, she went to work on me, probing, investigating  and digging with a remarkably invasive ultrasonic tool. Hovering alongside her, a practice nurse sucked out a mixture of sluice water, plaque recovered from my teeth and, as it turned out, blood. 

After about five minutes of invasion and two pauses caused by sharp pains shooting through my gums, I had had enough. Remonstrating over the amount of pain and blood that had been inflicted I cancelled the rest of the appointment and retired, hurt, paying my bill on the way out. Not once had there been any kind of acknowledgement of me as a person, no apology for causing pain, no use of my name or anything else with recognised me as firstly a patient, and secondly, a client paying for service. Instead I felt almost scolded for the state of my teeth and that everything I had just encountered was both perfectly normal and necessary. 

I’m not sure if I’ll return to the practice – I need to do an amount of research first. Maybe it’s me, but if I’m going to lie back with my mouth open to the machinery of dentistry and my wallet open to its cash register, I want to at least feel as though I’m being recognised as being a person – not just a patient number and invoice.