Jun 17, 2022
A day in the life of the Gentle Dental Reception team
A lot of people will assume that receptionists sit all day, filing their nails, flicking through the latest glossy or chatting to their co-workers……….. That’s what I thought to when I accepted the job at Gentle Dental 28 months ago! Coming from a background of senior management and compliance I thought, yes, I’ll have some of that! How wrong I was to make those assumptions.
So, I am sure you have all met all of us over your visits at Gentle Dental. I’m Lucy, we also have in the team Jodie, Taryn and of course Patricia.
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As you can see some of us are professional, some like a bevy (never me!) and some are more camera shy than others.
I thought it would be nice to give you a little insight in to what we do as ‘receptionists’ at Gentle Dental, and I can assure you, and you will see for yourselves, we certainly do not have time to file our nails!
We generally arrive at work around 7.15am, bright eyed and bushy tailed of course. I mean who isn’t at that time in the morning!
One of our first jobs is to check the emails and answer machine to make sure no one needs to talk to us urgently. Rob then brings us all a nice cup of tea (normally the only hot one we get a chance to have in the day) and we have a meeting together with the whole team. This is where we discuss everyone who is in that day and anything we need to share or know about the appointments coming up, if you have had an 8am appointment you would have been greeted by all of us smiling at you from behind the desk (and behind our masks)
It is from there that generally our feet don’t touch the ground again until 5.15pm. In between managing phone calls and checking you lovely lot in and seeing you out, we will be calling people to follow up on a whole series of things. This includes speaking to consultants to arrange appointments, making sure Rob, Niamh and Karenn are working as hard as they can (I mean we can’t have them filing their nails if we can’t!), preparing client notes for upcoming appointments and generally ensuring all of the things that keep the practice running smoothly from an administration point of view, as well as those that ensure we give a first-class customer experience to all of our clients, are up together.
Now that there are three clinics running every day, we are on the go even more than before. We had to make a choice of either growing another set of hands each, or taking someone new on to join the team. Fortunately, we opted for the latter, and Laura has survived her first few weeks with us and is settling in well.
Myself and Jodie were having a giggle the other day because, she had been on holiday and I covered her hours, then I went on holiday and she covered mine. We both felt we needed another holiday to recover from covering each other. Oh well, they do say there is no rest for the wicked!
We are like a little family here at Gentle Dental and support each other every step of the way, even though sometimes we don’t even find a moment to have a chat. We do however have a very lively WhatsApp group, which is full of jokes and banter most of the time. Poor Rob, the only male amongst 9 women! Here’s a few pics of our recent night out. We love a good social here at Gentle Dental.
Enjoy your weekend.
Lucy and the Gentle Dental team