Dental blogging…

I spent three amazing hours this morning with Jeffrey A Spence, D.D.S and his assistant Becky while they carefully removed the remains of a cracked tooth and built me a temporary bridge.

What impressed me most, even more than their technical mastery, was their impeccable customer service. They actually stayed in communication with me almost all of the time I was in the chair.

If you have to have serious dental work done, you want to get the work done by expert friends, rather than by cold clock-watchers who race from room to room frantically trying to maximize the number of patients in the chairs at once.

I have written before about the critical role that superlative customer service plays in establishing trust. When your mouth is full of screaming machinery, you want to trust the people who are operating it. Dr Spence and his team establish trust by staying in good communication with patients.

This is in stark contrast to those dental professionals who try to fake an interest in their patients. Whenever I hear a brightly mechanical, "How are we doing today?" I groan inside. Especially, when this is followed by a flurry of Novocain injections and everybody disappears down the hall where I hear the same greeting repeated again and again before anyone returns to look in my mouth for the next act.

This is the dental equivalent of the hospital getting you into a nightgown, packing you onto a cold gurney, and then stacking you in a busy hallway for hours so hordes of visitors can inspect you while you wait for an operating room to open up.

But, I digress. Dr Spence and Becky provide great service, the kind that you want all members of your family to experience: Intelligent conversation, answers to my incessant questions, and effortless skill in performing demanding dental work.

Hey, they even liked my new book! And, they laughed at the right places.

Lake Monticello, VA is extremely fortunate to have the services of this capable dentist. Dr Spence does not even live at the Lake. He commutes every day from Charlottesville and I, for one, am very glad he does.