Keep your patients coming back by avoiding two major pitfalls in your practice.
A successful cosmetic practice holds onto its clients – and for good reason. The cost of acquiring a new client can be five to 10 times more than retaining an existing one. If you need even more impetus for keeping your patients close, studies also show that repeat customers spend on average 67 percent more.
So how can you hold on to the patients you have and prevent them from walking out the door and going to your colleague down the road?
The two biggest factors that cause patient drop out are poor client engagement and poor operational control. Solve these pitfalls so you get to know your patients’ exact needs today and in the future.
Communicate with your patients
Poor patient communication is one of the most critical factors leading to patient drop out at the various stages of the sales cycle. To be able to effectively communicate with clients, a business needs to be able to tightly define the target recipients of any communications to ensure relevancy and timeliness. Consulting ConneXions works with Vreze Software, which offers a number of tools that help to capture useful client insights, thus enriching their profiles with data that can be used to highly define targeted audiences for any outbound communications.
Traditionally, businesses use only the data stored in their Practice Management Systems (PMS), as the definable fields when creating a target audience. This very general approach to communications often results in engagement levels at only around the 50 percent mark.
When the additional information from the Vreze customer insights is added to the PMS, the definable fields now allow for very highly defined groups. Using these defined target groups, the Vreze outbound communications tools deliver clearer, more relevant, more appealing and timelier outbound communications, which directly impact engagement with patients.
Don’t let patients fall through the cracks
Patient drop out is often simply the result of poor management, allowing patients to ‘fall through the cracks’. These cracks might be the result of a business not having sufficient staff to manage their clients, a lack of patient management processes, or processes to which staff are not adhering.
The first part of the operational solution is to invest in an external consultant to fully understand the issues and environment unique to your practice. Once the analysis is completed, an action plan for change is created, which includes refined processes and control measures to ensure that everything is tracking according to plan.
The second part of the operational solution is to build a set of tools that can automate many traditionally manual processes, thus allowing in-depth operational functionality without the need to increase the number of admin employees.
When a practice addresses and improves both its communication and operational strategies, the compounding effect of these can make a significant change to the patient drop out rates of a practice. This will have a direct effect on the practice’s profitability.
By having more loyal, longer lasting clients, your practice will save money on the cost of marketing and advertising to attract new clients. You can perform more procedures and less low-earning initial consults. Additionally, more engaged, loyal clients will decrease the rates of no-shows and cancellations.
About the author
Avron Rubin is co-founder of Consulting ConneXions and Vreze Software, specifically created for cosmetic practices. He has previously built Max Brenner in Australia from a staff of two to 400 and grown the Facial Rejuvenation Clinic to become one of the largest clinics in the Southern Hemisphere. Avron has an undergraduate degree in Psychology and post-graduate degree in Business from MGSM.
Visit www.consulting-connexions.com.au for more tips on practice management.
