If you’re going to communicate with your customers via email you’ve got to pay attention to the service you use. You’ve got to know how it supports your brand and how the messages “feel” to the recipients. You’ve got to assess readability and the process it triggers whether that is intended to be a selling cycle, a data collection process, or managing appointments.
While many large businesses get this kind of communication mostly right, many professionals, such as dentists, don’t know what they’re getting into particularly when they use a third party messaging service from industry service providers to communicate with their clients.
What made me think about this was an email I just got from my dentist, Phil.
I love my dentist. He’s the first dentist that I’ve had since I was about 8 years old who I actually trust. You see, way back then I had a dentist who I believe was ex-military. Prior to that guy, I’d go to sleep in the chair pretty much every time but after the ex-military guy got his hands on my teeth, I had a real phobia about dentists. I have no idea what this dentist did but it must have left a big psychic scar because after that I had a real phobia about going to the dentist.
I could go for something as innocuous as check up and I’d be sweating and fidgety, anticipating pain to the extent that even if there was no discomfort I’d come out with aching muscles from the tension.
I know, totally ridiculous, but trying to persuade your brain that everything is OK when your brain is convinced that doom is right around the corner is incredibly difficult as anyone with a real phobia knows.
So, while I’ve had a number of good dentists over the years it’s only my current dentist who has managed to dispel my fears, hopefully for good.
It is, I believe, a combination of things: He doesn’t rush, he explains everything, he warns you about what might happen … in short, he has a great “jaw side” manner.
But while Phil is a really smart guy in how he runs his practice, when it comes to using a third-party service for appointment reminders, he and his staff obviously aren’t that knowledgeable. And that’s not unreasonable because becoming skilled in online communications and marketing is a huge time sink for anyone and Phil’s a busy guy.
So, I suspect that when Dentrix Dental Systems, which is part of Henry Schein, a dental industry services provider, pitched their eServices Communications Manager which provides, among other things, automated email appointment reminders that parallel their snail mail product, Phil and his people liked the concept.
But the results are pretty poor: The reminder I just received is downright ugly and I am a firm believer that ugly is as ugly does.
My message took a long time to render under Gmail because of the included images and what appears to be a slow server at Dentrix’ end. Outlook completely failed to load the images!
The message featured a large picture of a serene lake (the image is selected by the practice) at the top of a panel with a dark blue background.
On a slightly lighter blue background, the appointment details were displayed followed by “Please SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS EMAIL AND CLICK ‘CONFIRM’ or call (xxx) xxx-xxxx”.
Here was a big problem: The telephone number under Gmail was unreadable because it was styled in dark blue! Gmail tries to interpret phone numbers for Google Voice and turns them into links that get styled according to the browser and Gmail defaults. Apparently the vendor has never tested its service with Gmail.
Looking at the HTML that underlies the message is depressing as the document structure is completely messed up:
How that coding ever got that way amazes me and pretty much guarantees problems when the content is rendered.
At the foot of the blue block are my dentist’s contact details rendered in black text on the blue background so they are pretty much unreadable and the practice’s Web site URL has an extra “http://” prepended so it reads “http://http://domain.com”!
Now, some of the issues may be the result of user choices but any well-engineered system would not allow a naïve user to make such bad formatting decisions … I mean black text on dark blue! Really?!
Finally, I clicked on the confirm appointment button at the end of the message. OMG! A Web page was opened and ugly is the only word! Obviously designed by an engineer with no visual design skills, this is horrendous!
And the process here is horribly conceived of: I’m confirming an appointment but this landing page says “Thank you for confirming your appointment. To save time in the waiting room, you may complete your appointment forms online. Please log in with your username & password and you can start immediately.” And should I not have a name and password, I can apparently register. But why? What do I need to register for? It’s not my dentist’s site! It’s not got his branding on it, so why would I do such a thing?
I applaud Phil for being on the leading edge of practice management and customer communications in his market but this provider, Dentrix, is not doing Phil any favors. The company is providing a poorly conceived of, poorly designed, poorly executed, naïve service that will most likely not work and or confuse many of Phil’s patients and Dentrix is doing nothing to support his branding.
According to the Dentrix rep I spoke to, the cost of unlimited email reminders as an add-on to the other Communication Manager services is $100 per month.
I feel sorry for all of the dentists who are using this service because it is simply not good enough.
All the same, despite the problems, the reminder worked and I’m off to see Phil next week. I need to talk to him about his reminder service … which will be hard with a mouth full of dental tools.
