June 8, 2015 Chris Gangnes

Why the Patient Experience?

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated – McKinsey
The patient experience is about 3 key business concepts: Converting prospects, Creating loyal patients and Building referrals.  Increasing your practice’s effectiveness in these key areas results in a dramatic improvement in your return on investment for all your marketing expenditures.  Your membership to My Patient Experience will provide you access to resources focused on improving your patient experience throughout every interaction.

“Little things done in concert create BIG results.” Chris Gangnes

 
 
 
Convert Prospects
A practice will never grow if is not able to bring new patients through the door.  Every practice loses patients so in order to grow you have to gain more new patients than you lose.  Converting prospective patients is not an easy thing to do.  It requires a highly trained and knowledgeable staff that understands the importance of their role in creating the patient experience.  They also need to have an effective strategy in place in order to convert phone calls into paying patients.

Imagine getting a second chance to convert every lost opportunity.

Consult photoMy Patient Experience memberships provide the guidance and tools to help build a team that will fully understand the importance of their role and be able to convert phone calls into consultations and ensure an outstanding experience from phone call to follow up.
With the Team Results membership your call tracking and assessment service will provide you with peace of mind knowing exactly how many of your inbound calls are converting to appointments and giving you a second chance to convert every lost opportunity.  Click here to learn more about the membership levels.
Create Loyal Patients
A satisfied patient is more likely to stick with the practice.  But it’s not enough to have just satisfied patients.

Customers who rate you 5 on a scale from 1 to 5 are six times more likely to buy from you again, as to if they ‘only’ gave you a score of 4.8. – TeleFaction data research

 
In order to create loyal patients you need to create a WOW service, which is easy to say but what is it that creates the WOW?  Unfortunately it is much more than one, a couple, or even several things.  It is the culmination of every interaction a patient has with a practice and its the little things that make the biggest difference, the cookies in the lobby, staff that asks about the wedding they are preparing for or the extra phone call after hours to check on the patient.  Things that you are completely unaware of make a big difference to your patients.

 The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% – Marketing Metrics

Build Patient Referrals

Patient Referral GroupPatient referrals are the most important source of new patients to any practice.  An outstanding experience creates patients that want to sing your praises to all their friends.

83% of consumers are willing to refer after a positive experience—yet only 29% actually do – Texas Tech

How you deliver your experience and encourage referrals will dramatically impact the number of patients that take the extra step to tell their friends about you.

People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend – Nielsen

 
Return On Investment

AccountabilityImproving the patient experience isn’t just about making the office a better place for your patients.  Your efforts result in improvements in all aspects of your business.  When patients receive better service on the phone they are more confident in the practice’s ability to care for them and are more likely to schedule an appointment.  It is not enough just to have a friendly voice on the phone.  A prospect needs to trust the organization and people require knowledgeable, compassionate staff members to answer questions, explore motivations, and distinguish your practice as the best choice to spend their money.  The more calls that your staff is able to book, the greater your return for your patient acquisition investments.

Improvements in the patient experience don’t just impact the phone conversion rate.  The same concepts improve the experience before consultation, during consultation, at the time of procedure, and follow up. This improved phone experience starts the process of patient care and a good experience on the phone makes each of the next steps of patient care easier.

A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10% – Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy

With each great experience the likelihood of your prospects becoming patients and your patients referral sources increases.  So not only are you improving your conversion ratios but also helping to create more patients through patient discussions about their experience with friends, family, coworkers, and anyone else who will listen.  More patient referrals allow you to decrease your marketing expenses and create a prospect population that will be easier to transition into patients, are more loyal to your prospects and more likely to refer addition prospects.

It costs 6 – 7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one – Bain & Company

Click here to learn about the membership programs..