Polished Lens Edges: Friend or Foe?

By Johnna Dukes, ABOC

Finishing lenses for semi-rimless and drilled rimless frames presents a unique issue. As an optician, you are caught between choosing to polish or not to polish your lens edges, but have you stopped to consider both of your choices?

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Lenses & Trek

By Barry Santini, ABOM

From its humble origins as a way to simply facilitate order entry, electronic lens ordering (ELO) has evolved to a highly advanced level. As a data aggregator, ELO has no peer, with personalized snapshots of lens material, design and treatment usage all available at your fingertips. As a lens catalogue and compatibility checker, ELO can quickly help determine if a prospective job is overall doable or not.

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Compute the Benefits of an In-Office Finishing Lab

An in-office finishing lab provides the advantages of lens finishing with a faster turnaround time, lower cost, fewer redoes and better control over quality. Keys to success: Maintain a lens inventory large enough to service 80 percent of single-vision jobs within an hour and employ a full-time lab technician. An in-house finishing lab is not for every practice.

Calculate if In-House Lens Finishing Is Cost-Effective
The volume of jobs that are required to support in-office lens finishing is a calculation that must be made on an office-to-office basis. Consider the following factors.

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Communicating Price Levels

By Barbara L. Wright, CID

Use one-glance, merchandising techniques, to give clear visual cues to price levels. One glance into your optical dispensary should tell the patient where they could find a frame in their desired price range or quality level.

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Your Glasses Are Ready: 'Come get us!'

Day after day, week after week, month after month, we make the donuts... um... glasses. And when they're done, we put them into their case and send them with the patient file to the front desk for notification—aka—to be called.

"Hello? Yes, this is XYZ Optical. Your glasses are ready for pickup."

What's wrong with this scenario? It's boring. Have other ECPs noticed this? Often, when you leave a voicemail on a person's cell phone, they don't listen to it. They just call you back and ask why you've called.

One day, acting completely impulsively, I began the text with, "This is Barry from LI Opticians" and followed long-windedly with the notification, our hours and phone number. When they came in for their glasses, I asked if they liked getting the text in place of the call or voicemail, and they all responded with an emphatic "Yes!" I continued texting people when:

• Their glasses were ready.
• There was a delay.
• A frame or sunglass they were interested in arrived.

I began asking in advance if a client would be ok with being texted when their glasses were ready. The universal response? YES!

—Barry Santini, ABOM

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