First Impressions Last: Turn your Patients Into Advocates

Every physician knows that when patients are happy they are likely to become their most loyal advocates. Making your patients happy is important not just because it affects patient retention and clinical outcomes but because they also need emotional support and care at every stage of the treatment. Right from the time when patients enter your facility to the day they return home, it is your facility’s responsibility to offer assistance and care for leaving a lasting impression.

Especially with the influx of people visiting hospitals amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, taking care of each and every patient, may it be a Suspected Case, Probable Case or a Confirmed patient are all equally crucial. These people are not only looking for diagnosis and treatment but are also seeking assurance that they can overcome the novel virus.

When a healthcare provider leaves an excellent first impression on patients, they can promote their services through word of mouth or social media channels. 

Thanks to these new and unique platforms, health practitioners can enjoy steady growth. Today’s businesses can expand their services through social media marketing and promotional campaigns both online and offline. However, that does not undermine the role their patients play in promoting their services.

Word of mouth promotion and testimonials work better than ads because people pay more attention to the experiences of their friends and relatives. That’s one of the reasons why this type of promotion yields consistent and profitable outcomes.

When your happy customers become your most prominent and most influential advocates, they convince their friends, family, and network connections to try out your services at least once.

In addition to providing quality services to your patients, here are some of the most useful tips through which your customers can become your strongest advocates.

Outsource Patient Concierge

The amount of patient inquiries, appointment setting, medical history taking, organizing patient’s records up to medical claims and billing coming in on a regular day is already in large volumes. But during health crises these numbers spiral up to twice the expected figure. When you outsource patient concierge, you work with specialists who assist patients during their first or 100th interaction with a medical facility taking care of not just medical claims but also assist patients with other medical related concerns.

Outsourcing companies can offer flexible and customized solutions to optimize your business. Whether you need a small or large team of healthcare specialists such as Patient Concierge Specialists, Nurse Triage Experts, Clinical Abstractors, Medical Review Specialists, Medical Billers and Coders among others can take care of many operations from telemedicine to medical billing and claims management up to appointment setting. By taking care of your patients you can then focus on improving your core services. 

These qualified professionals answer the inquiries and concerns of your patients and facilitate them in completing their check-in processes. Partnering with a company who builds great teams of patient concierge specialists can help you provide an ultimate patient experience to your expanding business.

Engage New Patients

Do not lose the opportunity of making a new patient your brand ambassador. Whenever a new patient walks into your clinic, facility, or hospital, make sure you leave a lasting impression. Greeting your patients the right way also plays a crucial part in making a new customer happy. Make some effort to know them better so you can provide a more personalized treatment plan.

A hospital’s management or staff performs various tests and tasks on every patient and the best approach your staff should take is to explain each step of the way. This technique helps patients to relax, and they do not feel uncomfortable during any aspect of the treatment.

Generally, it is the little comments and small gestures that go a long way to make your patients feel safe and happy. Whenever a doctor or a staff member is discussing any health conditions, he/she should make eye contact with the patient. Remember to put yourself in their place. How would you feel, and what would you expect out of healthcare providers and medical treatment you ought to receive?

Foster Relationships

Our emphasis should be on fostering and nurturing patient-clinician relationships. Caring for patients when they need it the most helps medical facilities to create and retain patients. During the treatment, medical professionals may need to break the bad news to the patient or his family. Showing empathy and care can help patients cope up better and value your services even more.

Create Targeted Content on Social Media

When you interact with your patients online, remember to provide correct, useful, and unbiased information. Focus on producing the most relevant and only high-quality content for your audience. Research the standard terms and keywords that a large part of your audience uses to search every day. Use these keywords as a guideline to create tips, messages, articles, blogs, and posts for educating your patients.

Creating a social media calendar will help you post different types of content throughout the year. When you offer valuable content to your patients, it builds your credibility. Your audience awaits your posts and shares your content within their network.

Share Tweets and Posts  

Apart from creating your unique content, your team should carefully choose success stories and your patients’ experiences online. You can also encourage your satisfied and happy patients to spread the word by sharing their experiences on your pages.

Sharing content that your patients create is digital gold. This type of content is authentic, generates leads, and promises organic traffic to your business website. Testimonials on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other channels and sharing uplifting stories grab the attention of potential customers.

Offer Excellent Services

No tweets, likes and posts will offer long-term results if you do not provide excellent services. Your patients will never become your advocates if you fail to diagnose their symptoms or mistreat (reword – positive) your patients.

A great team works because every team member shares the same goals and visions to achieve targets. If you want to be a household name, your team must work with an open-minded approach for improving and offering transparent services. Remember that customer advocacy is rooted in patient satisfaction and the best services.

When you provide state-of-the-art services to your patients, they automatically become your biggest cheerleaders.

Take Pleasure in Your work

Take the history of any successful healthcare provider or hospital, and you will find one thing in common. They all love serving humanity. Although practicing medicine and/or running a medical facility is a type of business, you will be challenged to accomplish any long-term goals if you don’t do it with all your heart.

Providing care is the top priority of any healthcare facility. It contributes to a positive patient recovery experience for improving the mental and physical quality of life for patients with various health conditions. Having the right team to work on non-care related tasks will allow you to focus on offering personalized care that can help patients overcome anxieties and their natural fears.

Acknowledge Negative Feedback

We all make mistakes at some point. The best way to rectify a mistake is to acknowledge it as soon as possible and make amendments if possible. Never cover up an error or place the blame of any wrongdoings on your patient.

In many cases, social media becomes a warzone for nasty comments. Avoid confrontations, be kind always and request all online users to file a complaint offline so that your management can look into the matter. Partnering with professionals who know how to respond to such comments is the best way to avoid creating any problems because they know how to resolve a conflict without offending not just the patients, but their visitors as well. 

When your goal is to have an easy and wonderful experience with your patients, you must make every effort to create a great first impression and follow-through with that. Acknowledging a delay or a full reception room will only make your customers value your credibility more.

Final Thoughts

Exceptional patient service, an unwavering commitment to provide the best medical health facilities, fostering relationships, a peaceful environment and creating a wonderful experience can turn your customers into your advocates. 

Outsourcing patient concierge services can help you focus on providing an outstanding patient experience all the while saving up to 70% on operational cost. Also, in any unforeseen events such as calamities and health crises, partnering with an outsourcing company ensures a continued flow of business. You can consider it as your business continuity plan. When you pay attention to all the factors that contribute to your growth, you generate not only more revenue but happy customers who can promote your business.

At Infinit-O, we understand how important relationships are in any business. A bad complaint from one patient can affect your reputation if not addressed quickly and effectively.

By offering to build you a great customer service team, we assure you that your patients will not only have the best experience at your facility but your healthcare staff will be able to focus solely on patient-care. 

Infinit-O is the trusted customer-centric and sustainable leader in Business Process Optimization to Small and Medium businesses in the Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology sectors by delivering continuous improvement through technology, data and people.

Let’s work together to Build a Great Patient Experience Team.

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