The Secret to Patient Retention
Patient retention is just like any other relationship — you must have positive touch points. The collection of touch points in the patient-provider relationship is the determining factor on the likeliness that a patient will return to your dental practice or not.Creating these positive touchpoints isn’t easy, however. You must take a proactive approach to create a solid foundation based on positive interactions — not only that, your strategy must be enough to keep your patients loyal. We’ll be discussing three main ways your practice can have control over patient retention — building retention in your office, your staff, and through patient interactions.
The dynamics of dental care are shifting — the days of purely episodic care are over. As are the days of relying on patient volume to generate profit. Accountability has taken their place; an expectation for service providers to leverage communication, technology, and data relevantly to provide value-based care.
1) One of the best ways to start is with marketing
It’s hard to retain patients you don’t have! Make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward. Focus on positioning yourself as a community resource over heavy sales and promotional materials. Invest in digital marketing and other online channels — when a person successfully searches for a practice online, it results in a phone call almost 70% of the time.
2) Treat Patients/clients respectfully
Don’t count on only making a good impression, every encounter with patients counts. Not only that, but make sure your staff is respectful to other practices that are referral sources, vendors, any suppliers, and insurance company representatives as well. Everyone your business communicates with is the audience for internal marketing of your brand.
Successful practices are successful because they aim to sustain a constant culture of respect — leaving zero room for anyone involved to feel like they are an intrusion to your staff. It is crucial for you and your staff to pay attention to patient’s needs and hear them when they voice their concerns. Just listening to patients and validating them — even if it’s trivial — shows that you’re concerned about them.
3) Provide Excellent Access to Care
One of the biggest challenges for dental practices is getting patient information into their systems efficiently. This means the quality of communication tools used must be a priority for practices. Confirm appointments in advance, reminding people the day before their appointment lets them know that you respect their schedule. It’s not only good office administration; it’s good customer service.
4) Take the Drama Out of Appointment Scheduling
There’s a term thrown around a lot in marketing that applies here — friction. The harder it is for a patient to get from point A to point B — the more ‘friction’ there is, the more likely a patient will get frustrated, have a negative experience, or switch dentists. Your practice is not a place to play hard-to-get! Make sure that appointment-scheduling is efficient and takes no longer than a minute or two.
Confirmation texts will help here, too. Sending an appointment confirmation text is a simple, low-barrier (low friction) way to keep patients on top of their appointments -and- a great opportunity for you to show your appreciation for their business.
Growth Hack: Using automated messaging? Sending from a ten digit phone number will yield a better open rate than a shortcode.
Curogram provides a stellar patient reminder solution for dental practices.
5) Ask Your Patients About How You Can Improve
When evaluating your dental practice’s processes to improve operating capacity, why not go to the front lines and ask the patients themselves? You can send out a free survey using a service like surveymonkey.com and find out what the people you serve have to say.
If you’re ready to grow your business and transform your practice, join Curogram today.
