Clinic growth expert Neil Osborne explains how the combination of customer experience, psychology and persuasion can drive your clinic’s growth.
Hardly a day goes by without talk of the demise of yet another business. Established clinics, brands and retailers are losing market share as they struggle to stay relevant. For practice managers, the challenge of achieving profitable growth feels like an uphill battle, especially for those seeking to build client loyalty, referrals and social advocacy amongst customers.
While some clinics have seen modest increases in revenue and lifetime value from their initiatives (mostly using social media), investments in satisfaction-driven initiatives have been few and far between. By ignoring a fundamental aspect of customer value – the vital aspect of ‘emotional connection’ – they’ve overlooked how a person instinctively connects to a brand, service or the business that delivers it. They’ve forgotten the role that emotion plays in decision making.
It’s the businesses that use behavioural science, persuasion and psychology to create emotional connections that are growing.
By tapping into the experiential marketing methods that the so-called ‘Experience Economy’ uses, you too can leverage those connections and fuel sustainable growth in your clinic.
The Experience Economy: a powerful driver of growth
“People spend money where and when they feel good.”
— Walt Disney
The Experience Economy was first mentioned in a Harvard Business Review article in 1998, where it was defined by its co-authors, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, as being a business that ‘…intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event’. Their 1998 seminal book ‘The Experience Economy’ followed, and the economic movement it started continues to this day.
Fundamentally, the ‘Experience Economy’ is where goods and services are combined, sold and delivered to create a memorable experience that leaves a positive impression. That positive experience triggers an emotional connection with the provider, and both psychologists and behavioural scientists have long noted that emotion is a powerful driver of buying behaviour.
Over the past two decades, social media turned the Experience Economy into a powerful growth lever. Why? Because social media lets you glimpse into other people’s lives. You aspire to be like that person. You want to create those memories for yourself. So much so, that the Experience Economy and social proof now work hand in hand.
Tapping into this, breakout businesses are combining customer experience (CX) with persuasive communication to create a powerful growth strategy. In the aesthetics industry, clinics are successfully leveraging emotional connection, and their efforts are delivering extraordinary results in spending, lifetime value, loyalty and brand advocacy.
Sounds too good to be true? Here’s the proof. A specialist in predictive intelligence on customer motivations, Motista Inc, conducted a two-year study of the impact of emotional connection on consumer behaviour. Overall, the data showed that ‘…emotionally connected customers are more valuable than those who are highly satisfied, or even those who perceive a brand to be differentiated.’
These emotionally connected customers:
- Spend up to 2x or more with their preferred retailer
- Have 306% higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Stay with a brand for an average of 5.1 years vs. 3.4 years
- Recommend brands at much higher rates: 30.2% vs. 7.6%
A study by Harris Group found that 72% of Millennials (who now outnumber Baby Boomers as America’s largest adult generation) spend more money on experiences than on material things. Their spending is based on three clear motivators:
- What they can do with the experience they had
- What they can tell others about the experience
- What having that experience says about them.
That sounds like a recipe for happy clinic clients, who book time-and-again, are spending more each time, and who share their experience with others. Let’s explore how your clinic can ride the Experience Economy to greater growth.
Understand why people take their money elsewhere
Imagine your clinic being renowned for its memory-making customer experience (in a wonderful way), not just great customer service. But first, what’s the difference, and how do you make the move from one to the other?
- Customer service (CS) is a longstanding stalwart of retail and service businesses. It’s centred on what you offer, how and when it’s offered, plus the means of delivery. Generally, customer service is all about ‘the business’.
- Customer experience (CX) shifts the focus to your clients and looks at the experience from their perspective. Memorable CX is made up of multiple touch points, or micro-experiences, that stretch throughout each client’s individual journey of getting to know you (pre-treatment), like and trust you (in-clinic), right through to post treatment delights you deliver.
Memorable customer experiences deliver on the promises your business makes (both literal and figurative) to its customers. But meaningful ones go beyond the mere mechanics – they also create an emotional connection – and it’s here where the little things are as important as the big ones.
So, how do you build an experience journey that stands out from the crowd? By purposefully building ‘client moments’ that are shared at various touch points throughout their journey. These moments should capture the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes you want your clients to experience, as well as confirm the congruence between your clients’ expectations and the reality of what’s delivered.
Delivering defining client moments that are meaningful and memorable
For a human being, moments are the thing. They’re what we remember and cherish.
In their book ‘The Power of Moments’, brother-authors Chip and Dan Heath talk about the importance of delivering ‘defining moments’. These moments spark positive emotion. Creating them requires you to adopt the habit of ‘moment-spotting’ to understand:
- When your clients need special moments
- Why they emotionally need those moments, and
- When they’re worthy of investment.
To make meaningful emotional connections, find and create moments that deserve to be punctuated – and that punch above their weight in impact.
For you and your team to deliver this level of CX, your clients must feel your humanity. It begins with training and empowering team members to deliver authentic, contextual and personal experiences. It also means teaching them how to deeply listen, ask empathetic questions, know how to gently unblock any fears or hesitations and helpfully persuade, not push, as the client journeys along their path to a decision.
How to win the experience wars: be or feel more human
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou, American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist
The aesthetics industry generally acknowledges that their teams are clinically focused, and patient care is of the utmost importance. This oftentimes negatively impacts the ability of team members to journey the clients from recommendation through to introducing new treatments, handling objections and reaching agreement. In most cases, these behaviours are generally referred to within the industry as ‘selling’ and considered a negative attribute.
Unsurprisingly then, most clinicians admit they don’t like to sell. However, the days of pressuring patients and clients into booking new or additional treatments have passed. Patients now look for guidance.
Post-pandemic patients and clients are looking for a caring, respectful and empathetic encounter that’s characterised as a 5-star customer experience. The key is moving from a simple customer service focus. By adding empathetic engagement, genuine conversation, and delightful client moments, your team can comfortably begin to create memorable and remarkable client experiences.
Client experience differentiates your clinic
Since most decisions are subconscious, people don’t know the real reasons behind why they did (or bought) something, but the days when clinics could solely rely on the power of name recognition for growth are a distant memory.
“Today, 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010. But while 80% of companies believe they deliver ‘super experiences’, only 8% of customers agree. In other words, companies have a long way to go. And that means there is tremendous opportunity to disrupt a competitor or gain market share in an industry.”
— Forbes Magazine
It’s been proven that in competitive markets, CX is what now keeps you in business, and when applied consistently, it produces results.
- Forrester Consulting research has shown that companies who prioritise customer experience enjoy ‘1.6x higher brand awareness, 1.5x higher employee satisfaction, 1.9x higher average order value, 1.7x higher customer retention, 1.9x return on spend, and 1.6x higher customer satisfaction rates.’
- Customers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 13% (and as high as 18%) for luxury and indulgence services, simply by receiving a great customer experience, according to research from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC).
- Combining customer experience and persuasion to influence on- the-spot purchasing produces 49% of buyers making impulse purchases after receiving a more personalised experience.
With customer experience now being the battleground to differentiate your clinic’s offering and position in the market, leading clinics are shifting from being ‘Customer focused’ to ‘Customer committed’. They’re engaged in supporting and satisfying clients by modifying the style of language used, and the moments when questions are asked and answered. This deliberate transformation requires a fundamental change in how practice managers and their team think, act and communicate, as well as understanding who’s ready and who isn’t.
Which clients are ready?
Once you start layering psychology, behavioural science and persuasion across your clients’ journey, your customer experience efforts can better respond to why customers do what they do, when they do it, and understand how to change it.
That said, it’s well known that not all people are ready to buy or book at every touch point. In fact, only 50% of them are considering saying ‘Yes’, and just 30% of that 50% group are open to buying either now or during the next 30-60-90 days. These clients are what’s known as the ‘low hanging fruit’ and they’re also where clinics who focus on price offers congregate.
The remaining 70% of the (50%) ‘Yes’ group are your existing and potential new clients who want to say ‘Yes’, but not quite yet. These clients most likely circle back and buy over the next 6-12-24 months because they’re what’s termed ‘considered purchasers’. Generally speaking, they’re not always price-driven, however they are strongly influenced by your customer experience approach and the overall journey you take them on through their period of ‘consideration’.
Best of all, these considered purchasers are prepared (as noted above by Forrester research) to spend 1.9x higher and enjoy a 1.6x times higher satisfaction rate.
So how do you cater to their desires and needs while they’re pondering their purchase? By retraining your team to build emotional connections, breaking down your client’s overall journey and creating memorable client moments (as they move from awareness to consideration, and on to making a purchase) by applying the science of behavioural bias (mental shortcuts) that everyone uses to make decisions.
Once you begin to take a drone view of your customer experience, you’ll see ways and places to punctuate the journey with moments that utilise behavioral science, psychology and persuasion to engage your clients.
Then, you’ll be well and truly leveraging the Experience Economy in your business. AMP
Neil Osborne is a master trainer, business coach and entrepreneur. He has worked exclusively in the salon, clinic and aesthetic markets for over three decades, teaching businesses and brands how to be profitable and commercially clever.
Created by Neil, the Spendsuasion® method blends ‘spending’ with ‘persuasion’. It’s specifically created for cosmetic physicians, practice owners, nurses, dermal therapists and injectors – giving them the exact words, and when to say them, to create persuasive conversations with patients.
As a business coach, he’s grown hundreds of service-based brands and businesses, using industry-specific methods that grow their revenue, develop their consultation and persuasion skills, and multiply their turnover. Contact Neil on +61 419 233 439 or at www.spendsuasion.com.au
