While you have many marketing tools at your disposal nowadays, the ultimate one is customer experience. Customer experience outweighs online ads, social media, mailers, magazine ads, billboards, or any other type of marketing you utilize. In fact, studies indicate that by 2020, a majority of purchase decisions will be based on customer experience, not price.
This all means that your customers need to have an exceptional experience with you and your audiology practice. While you may traditionally think of the customer experience as the patient’s visits to your office, it includes every interaction and touchpoint with your business.
This begins with the moment they find your practice (whether is from an online search, seeing your practice on the street, or hearing your name from a friend). It includes their experience on your website and social media pages, their calls to your office, their experience scheduling appointments, their actual appointments, and all follow-up interactions and appointments.
The key is to provide a customer experience that sets you apart from your competition and closes the gap between what your customers want and what you are providing. Three key points to remember that your customers want in their interactions are ease, speed, and accuracy.
Here are four simple ways you can improve your customer’s experience with your practice, so they’ll choose your practice and keep coming back:
- Provide personalized interactions.
This should be simple for in-person or telephone interactions – address the patient by name, take their individual needs and concerns into consideration, and focus on them. Online, this means providing the relevant information they need. This is easier if you have website pages tailored to specific issues, questions, or treatments so the customer can easily find exactly what they need.
- Offer clear paths to resolution.
If a patient has a problem, the last thing they want from your practice is “the runaround,” where they’re directed from one team member to another or given one solution after another that takes them further down a road leading nowhere. The first engagement the patient has should be enough to provide them with a clear, simple path to resolution. This may mean reevaluating and streamlining some of your office practices, but it will be worth it to improve the customer experience.
- Always remember your patients.
You may think this is simple as it applies to in-person interactions – you always remember your individual patients when they come in. That’s great! But in addition to remembering them and their preferences then they visit your office, you also need to remember them online. If they submit a question, review, or complaint online, address them personally. And if any problems arise with the patient, be sure you update each team member who interacts with them, so the patient never has to repeat themselves or their problem.
- Don’t neglect your customers on social media.
Many customers now turn to social media when they want to interact with companies. Make sure you are monitoring your audiology practice’s social media pages, never letting any comments, questions, or reviews go unanswered.
With these four simple, actionable steps, you are well on your way to enhancing the customer experience, drawing in new patients, and keeping your existing ones. For more information about the importance of customer experience and how you can improve yours, please contact us at AudiologyPlus today.
