Practice managers typically battle three things:
- What the business owner wants to happen.
- What the business owner thinks is happening.
- What is actually happening.
Perception can seem like reality. Many consider themselves a premium practice. But if you’re not delivering a premium experience, you can’t expect patients to pay top dollar. In fact, data shows 63% of practice providers feel they are delivering a great experience, but 75% of frequent healthcare consumers report they’re frustrated by their experience.
Clearly there is a disconnect. What most often happens is managers are so busy with day to day operations, managing their staff, and technology – on top of re-opening safely – they’re not able to evaluate performance data on a regular basis.
In order to ensure your planning and execution translates into performance, you need to take have established measurements and key performance metrics (KPIs) at each step in the patient journey. You will want to regularly and possibly adjust key performance metrics as time goes on.
Measuring Marketing & Inbound Leads
Impressions, click through rate, cost per lead, and ROI are all fundamental measurements that you can routinely inspect to gain insights on how your marketing initiatives are driving leads. These are usually readily available or easy to calculate based on performance data from each channel. From there, it’s important to understand goals for each channel – maybe some are used to drive awareness at a low cost per impression, while others are focused on driving leads. Evaluate regularly whether each are performing well based on their intended goal.
Ultimately, all your efforts should assist in driving a user’s action – whether that’s a phone call or a web lead. You’ll want to pay attention to how these inbound leads are handled. The average practice today loses 40% of their phone leads, and converts only 40-50% of phone inquiries into consultations. Practice administrators and owners tend to think their practice is performing above average, until we start analyzing their patient recorded calls through our “Mystery Shop” Program. They’re stunned to find performance may even fall below average. Why? Let’s address:
Phone Calls
Staff who are required to answer the phone and wear several other hats, may be too overwhelmed to answer every call. This can be a huge downfall because it means the marketing efforts and budget used to drive a phone call are a complete waste. No call should ever go unanswered. So you’ll want to evaluate:
- Number of calls
- Missed Calls
- Call Conversion – or the amount of calls that actually lead to booked appointments.
This can be tough to measure manually which is why OptiCall’s First Contact program tracks all call activity and whether the call converts to an appointment.
Web Leads
Practices often think web leads don’t require an immediate response. That’s another area where they can fail. Web leads should be responded to fairly quickly if they are submitted during office hours. If outside of office hours, they should be responded to first thing the following day. From a measurement perspective, you’ll want to regularly assess:
- Number of web leads
- Time to respond to web leads
- Web conversions – amount of leads that converted to booked appointments.
You might find web leads may not convert as high as phone calls. In that case, we recommend a process like our Capture program that complements rapid response with lead nurturing, to maximize ensure prospects eventually book an appointment.
Measuring Customer Service Performance
Experience has shown time and again that when real calls are recorded and reviewed, the doctor and administrator’s preconception of their skill on the phone doesn’t match up to their reality. In actuality, phones are often answered by unprepared, uninformed, un-enthused and often uncaring staff.
Unlike other areas of your business that have concrete data, measuring customer service can be a little tricky.
- Is your staff following a script in order to stay consistent?
- What is their general tone?
- Would most customers say your employee helped them in their decision-making process?
Without doing a practice assessment, you may never where you need to improve.
Is a practice assessment right for you?
Our experience with placing thousands of mystery shop calls over the years allows us to follow to a proven formula for processing and scoring each call on our proprietary rating scale. With each call, our goal is to assess the level of customer service that staff members provide, their ability to create rapport, and to properly educate the caller while enticing them to visit the practice.
Your goal as a leader in your organization should be to always stand out as exceptional. There are no second chances to make a good first impression.
To start identifying your blind spots and focus on key improvements for your practice, contact us for a free practice assessment.
