Staff Management

Optician Training: Ensure Your Practice Profitability

By Mitchell H. Albers, OD

July 22, 2015

SYNOPSIS

Your optical provides most of your revenues. How well you train new hires and veteran opticians is the profit-making difference.

ACTION POINTS

CREATE TRAINING CHECKLIST. Create a checklist that itemizes all the key tasks an optician must learn to do his or her job.

MENTOR & SHADOW.A seasoned optician can mentor a newly hired optician; shadowing reinforces key responsibilities.

USE ONLINE TRAINING, SPEAKERS & FIELD TRIPS. Use vendor online universities like HOYA University and Essilor’s ECP University, invite speakers and travel to successful retailers.

The optical dispensary in most OD practices accounts for roughly half of the revenues generated in the practice. In addition to the contribution to practice profitability, the optical is where your patients are provided with the products you prescribed. Not only can a well-trained optical team capture eyewear sales; they also are responsible for helping patients fill the doctor’s prescription. Here is how our seven-OD, three-location, 16-optician practice trains our optical staff to ensure our patients leave with the eyewear they need.

We probably have an average 10-15 percent staff turnover. We have two full-time “float” employees, who minimize the effect of staff turnover, as well as cover vacation time. One float is trained in optical and reception and the other float is trained in clinical assisting and optical. We do annual employee reviews where goals are set for the individual for a given year and tools are provided to help them improve in their career, such as providing them with classes or learning aids to achieve further levels of ABO certification.

Dr. Albers’ practice’s optical dispensary. Dr. Albers says it’s important to systematically, and thoroughly, train opticians, so they fully understand the merchandise you sell–and how to sell it. Some of the ways the practice does that is with job shadowing, online training from vendors, and “field trips” to successful retailers, among other resources.

Create Checklist to Ensure Key Lessons Are Learned

Develop a training checklist that must be completed prior to allowing a newly hired optician to serve a patient without team member assistance. Then expand on that to include scripting for the hand-off, lifestyle questioning, discussing the technical aspects of lenses, as well as how to properly thank the patient for their trust in the practice for servicing their visual needs.

Establish Skill Level Willing to Hire

We have many opticians who come ABO-certified, but we also have had some success training people with very limited or no experience. Generally speaking, we try to hire opticians with experience, as we prescribe technologically advanced lenses and the learning curve can be difficult for some without any optical background.

That said, if an applicant has an outgoing personality and experience with providing high-level customer service, we will train them. We have developed a training program to assist with this.

Use Mentoring & Job Shadowing

Mentoring from a seasoned optician who has excellent frame styling skills is one way to train. Shadowing is critical to the training process. Our goal is for an optician to train for 60 days before being allowed to function completely independently, but when necessary, that time frame may get reduced.

Tasks a new optician should know how to do, or learn, includes how to properly receive the patient hand-off from the doctor, how to engage the patient and how to efficiently manage the flow of the sale from start to finish. The new hire also needs to understand the practice culture and patient service standards, in addition to the technical tasks of proper documentation in the practice management software and accurately obtaining patient eyewear measurements through advanced technology such as Optikam.

All this training aids in converting a sale in general, as well as a likelihood that the sale is a premium product. Our lenses-per-exam capture rate is 69 percent, our revenue-per-eyewear unit is $527 and our anti-reflective percentage is 82 percent.

Visit Retailers Known for Great Customer Service

We also encourage field trips to smaller clothing boutiques, or well known stores, that provide a high-level of fashion and service like Nordstrom. On these “field trips,” we point out what the retailer is doing right, and then ask the employee to think of ways we could do something similar in our office. For example, if we notice on a visit to a store that the sales staff greets customers as soon as they walk in the door, and then acts as style consultant, we would think about how an optician could do the same.

Tie in Additional Resources Online & From Trade Journals

There are many great articles in print and online trade journals that provide insight into how to improve optical sales skills, as well as books focusing on customer service and sales. We also bring in speakers both from within and outside the optical industry. Staff can become quite engaged if you bring in a dynamic speaker. It can be costly to bring in such speakers, but the investment is well worth it when you consider the limited amount of additional sales you would need to generate to pay off this investment. In addition, we created proprietary PowerPoint training modules with a small group of other optometrists.

Send Opticians to Major Optical Conferences

We send our opticians to local conferences and national conferences, such as Vision Expo West. They learn about the latest trends in eyewear and unique frame lines that may be just launching in the USA, so we can capture that uniqueness ahead of our competitors. They also can network with their peers and gain new insight and ideas from classes they attend.We typically send opticians with the main purpose of finding new and unique frame lines that our patients will not be able to find at our competitors. CE classes, as well as Compulink (our practice management classes), are attended as time permits.

Use Online Vendor Universities

Vendors like HOYA and Essilor offer online universities for ECPs and their staffs. We make use of complimentary training through our vendor, HOYA University, but such training also is available from Essilor’s ECP University.

Mitchell H. Albers, OD, is a partner of Eye Care Center in Fridley, Maplewood and Maple Grove, Minn. To contact him: Mitch.Albers@eyecarecenters.net

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