Four steps to elevating your patient experience

As the wellness sector continues to boom, how can clinics place a focus on it throughout the patient experience?

Remember that the patient pays your costs and provides your profits, so you have to conduct all business planning from the patient’s point of view. It is amazing how different your clinic can look when seeing it through the patient’s eyes.

Plan the entire process. Design the full patient journey, not just the service. Examine every element of the patient experience from start to end, remembering there is no such thing as a minor detail – all details are major! Standing out from the crowd is important because the customer experience is a competitive battleground, and your patients have a lot of choice. Learn to positively differentiate your business from your competitors – providing outstanding customer service is the key.

What are the essential procedures clinics should have in place to elevate the patient experience?

Create your own ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ (SOP). This is a set of written instruction that describes the step-by-step processes that must be taken to properly perform routine activities, such as your detailed patient service journey.

SOP’s should be followed the exact same way every time to guarantee that the clinic remains consistent with your business standards and in compliance with industry regulations. Standard Operating Procedures provide the policies, processes and standards needed for the clinic to succeed. They can benefit the business by reducing errors, increasing efficiencies and profitability, creating a safe work environment for staff and patients, and producing guidelines for resolving issues and overcoming obstacles.

The manual should be easy to understand and follow, with a focus on how things should be done. For example, to design your Client Service Journey SOP’s, simply list out precisely how you want each stage carried out, such as: how to answer the phone, take an appointment, carry out a consultation, protocols for all services, workstation layout, management of professional stock, timing of services, closing sales, and rebooking patients. SOP’s help a business to evaluate performance, save time and money, while improving communication. 

What are the most effective strategies to ensure a consistent positive experience for patients in your clinic? 

Learn how to maintain quality in your clinic. Quality is the minimum level of service that a business chooses to provide to satisfy its target clientele. At the same time, it is the degree of consistency the business can maintain in providing a predetermined level of service.

Patient surveys are an excellent way to define how satisfied your patients are with the quality of your services. By finding out useable information from your patients, you will be able to recognise shortfalls in the way your patients are being served, allowing you to foresee any problems. The survey is given to patients and asks questions relating to the service they received. It should ask for a rating of the service, so you know how satisfied they were. The ratings should also denote what section of the service may have let them down. This is a fantastic way to sort out your areas of quality control and customer service that need revising, training, and upgrading.

Final tip for a new clinic owner who is trying to implement personalised touches to enhance the client experience

Allocate some set up/working capital for research purposes. Trial as many services, in as many clinics as possible, be the patient. Note all the little touches that would encourage you to return to that business. Build these into your patient service journey.