To introduce today’s discussion, a story for you (some names and irrelevant facts have been changed to protect the innocent). Some time ago, I visited a dental office for a cleaning. The service there was less than spectacular. To be more specific, it was terrible. I waited at the front desk a good 5 minutes before being acknowledged by the front desk manager (apparently, there was a new LeBron meme that could not be missed). Upon being acknowledged, I was greeted with all the enthusiasm of someone who wanted to anywhere else than in front of a paying patient.
After an interminable wait, I was taken to the clinical area by another person not in the mood to be at work. Not rude, mind you, but just a tone of communication that conveyed something between boredom and “when it is quitting time?” By contrast, the doctor was extremely friendly, helpful and, to the best of my knowledge, very technically skilled. But before getting to that person, I had to wade through a phalanx of folks who simply did not care about the happiness of the patient.
Some time later, the dentist, struggling with growth, asked me for some help. One of the first questions that I asked was, “What do you think of the way your staff treats patients?” Her response was, “We do very well in that area.” Now, the visit I made may have come on a bad day, but follow up discussions confirmed that there were lots of bad days around there.
Obvious statement: the lifeblood of your business are patients. This comes not just from the patients themselves, but the other patients they might refer. Before you can take steps to make them happy, you have to find out if you are making them happy in the first place and, if you are not, what is making them unhappy.
And yes, there are a number of review sites out there that can give you some feedback from patients like Angie’s List, Heath Grades and Yelp. Those sites are very useful, but only represent the views of those that are willing to take the time to generate a recap of their experience. And they may not answer the all of the questions you might have.
To that end, consider surveying patients yourself. Today, that process is easier than ever. You can go free or almost free with things like Google Forms, Survey Monkey, WuFoo and a host of others. Here, you can ask the questions you want to ask. If just remodeled and want to get a feeling on how the changes are playing, you can ask that. If you want to focus on the treatment of personalities, or fees or your new mascot, you can do that too. Yes, you can bring in a professional to help you design one and have it have statistical significance. Or, you can simply ask a set of questions. In either event, you are probably getting some kind of useful feedback.
Once you design your survey, sending it is rather easy these days. Not only can you simply e-mail a link to the survey, but most systems will allow you to select a subset of patient. For example, for our enterprises, we are anxious to talk to the potential new patients that did not sign up with us and ask them why they elected not to do so.
Most results are compiled into a spreadsheet or database type format which allows you to review the detail or summarize as you see fit. If you have a substantial volume of patients, lots of subsets you want to survey or just need some help processing the data, there are any number of folks who can handle that for you (I would include us in that group as well).
Two questions that come up regularly:
1. Should we offer some benefit to encourage a patient to take a survey. Many words have been written by those more expert on the human condition, but my preference is to offer a small discount on the next treatment as an incentive to take the survey. Not only does this encourage a patient to take the survey, but gives them another reason to visit your office again.
2. Should the survey results be tied to employee compensation? In other words, should a review score of x result in a bonus? Of course, the concern here is that someone pushes patients to fill out surveys a certain way to get a bonus even if that’s not a true reflection of actual performance. Since you, as a practice owner, have a goal of generating profit and not necessarily just good review scores (which should help that profit). As such, I lean toward tying incentives to revenue and/or profit as opposed to components of that.
Of course, if you have any questions about designing a survey or the technical aspects of it, please do not hesitate to contact us by clicking here. We are always available and willing to help.
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