A patient sits down for their annual exam. You finish the refraction, hand back the prescription, and ask if they want to renew their contact lens supply. They shrug and say, "I'll just order them online like last time."
Most front desks defend the practice at this point. They explain the rebate, the warranty, and the convenience of having lenses shipped from the office. The patient nods politely and walks out with the prescription in hand.
There's a different way to start that conversation. Seven words long. It changes who's doing the explaining.
"If I may ask, in the past..."
That's it. Our founder, Dr. Brianna Rhue, picked up the phrase from someone she met at a recent industry event, and she's been using it in every prospect conversation since. The team has been working through versions like:
The phrase does two things at once. It signals respect, which lowers the patient's guard. And it puts them in the position of describing their own behavior rather than defending it.
That's the move. Defending forces a patient to dig in. Describing makes them think out loud. The first conversation is a tug-of-war. The second one is just a conversation.
This is not a new technique. Chris Voss and the rest of the FBI hostage-negotiation school have been teaching versions of it for decades, calling them "calibrated questions" — open-ended prompts that invite the other person to walk you through their reasoning. The same pattern shows up in motivational interviewing in clinical settings. Patients who describe their own habits are far more likely to talk themselves into changing them than patients who are told to change.
The optometry version of this got buried under decades of "objection handling" training that taught staff to memorize comebacks. "If the patient says X, you say Y." That works the same way every internet argument works: nobody changes their mind, and somebody walks away angry.
When a patient says, "I'll order online like last time," the staff member's job is to find out what last time actually looked like: whether the patient knows what they paid, whether the lenses arrived on time, whether the prescription matched, whether they ran out two weeks early, and whether they wore expired lenses. Most patients have a story about ordering online that the practice has never heard, because nobody asked.
Ask, and you find out.
Dr. Rhue has been using the phrase mostly with prospects at trade shows, and our team has started running it on retention calls. The version that may matter most is the chairside one. Every doctor and every front desk staffer can try one of these on Monday and report back what they heard.
1. Annual supply pushback. A patient asks for the prescription so they can "just order them somewhere." Try: "If I may ask, in the past, where have you typically had them filled?" Now you know whether it's online, the warehouse club around the corner, or somewhere they don't actually remember. Each answer leads to a different next sentence.
2. Price comparison. A patient mentions they saw the same brand for a lower price online. Try: "If I may ask, in the past, what did you end up paying once shipping and the rebate were applied?" Half the time, they don't know. The other half, the number they quote is roughly what your practice charges. Either way, the conversation is no longer about price.
3. Premium lens hesitation. A patient is on a basic monthly lens, and a daily disposable would be a clinical upgrade. Try: "If I may ask, in the past, what's bothered you most about wearing your lenses?" Now you have a list of pain points the patient just handed you, all of which a daily disposable solves.
4. New patient with a CL history. A new patient arrives already wearing lenses. Don't ask if they're working. Try: "If I may ask, in the past, what has and hasn't worked about your current setup?" The non-working part is the opening for a refit, a brand change, or a modality change.
5. Staff member resisting a workflow change. Same shape, different room. In the staff meeting where someone says they don't want to learn another system, try: "If I may ask, in the past, what's worked best for you when handling reorders?" The conversation moves from "I don't want to" to "here's what I actually do." That second conversation has somewhere to go.
The phrase works because it's an invitation. The minute you follow the patient's answer with a counter-argument, the invitation is rescinded, and the patient remembers they were supposed to be defending their position.
Stay in the asking lane longer than feels comfortable. After they describe what they did before, ask what they would change. "If you could change one thing about how you handled lenses last year, what would it be?" That second question almost always surfaces a real complaint that the practice can solve.
Only after the patient has named the actual problem should the conversation pivot to your recommendation. The pivot sounds like: "That makes sense. Here's what we can do about that." Not a pitch. A response to something they said.
If the patient names no problem, that's information too. Some patients are genuinely happy with their current setup. Trying to convince them otherwise costs the relationship and rarely changes the order.
Practices that grow fastest are not the ones with the slickest scripts. They're the ones asking better questions. The doctor who learns that a patient has been ordering quarterly because they ran out at the end of every supply cycle now has clinical data that the patient never volunteered. The optical manager who finds out a patient was paying $92 a month online for the same lens the practice sells for $87 has a price story that writes itself.
You can't get any of that by explaining. You only get it by asking.
The phrase is small. The mindset behind it is the harder part. It asks staff to listen to a story they don't already know the ending of, and it asks doctors not to reach for the dispensary brochure the moment a patient says the word "online." The discipline of sitting in the question for one more beat before reaching for an answer is the part that takes the longest to build.
That discipline takes practice. Start with the seven words. The rest follows.
Pick one of the five examples above. Use the phrase exactly as written, three times this week, with three different patients. Write down what you heard back.
By Friday, you'll have three patient stories your practice has never collected, and at least one of them will change how you handle that interaction the next hundred times it happens.
Tell us how it went. We're collecting the lines that actually worked across practices, and we'll share what comes back the next time we write.