Customer Relationship Management Hack: Being Accessible
You may be familiar with the 80-20 rule: 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your customers. This often holds true, and it means that if you aren’t making sure your existing customers are happy, 80% of your revenue could be at stake.
For too many healthcare practices and other businesses, the only relationship management they do with their patients is responding to negative reviews when they appear. If you truly want to make your strategy successful, though, there’s an important job you’re overlooking: being accessible to hear customers’ complaints or preventing them from happening in the first place.
Why Being Accessible is Rule #1 for Customer Relationship Management
In customer relationship management, responding to negative reviews is the “treatment” for a problem. Negative reviews will always tarnish your online reputation to some degree, and responses merely cut down on the damage. Being accessible and resolving patients’ issues from the start, though, is the “preventative approach” so it can allow you to avoid most of those bad reviews altogether.
In fact, our team has seen patients post five-star reviews because they initially had a negative experience but were so impressed with how well it was handled. In that way, being accessible to patients might not only decrease your bad reviews but increase your good reviews too.
Tips for Being Accessible for Patient Relationship Management
Learning the benefits of patient accessibility is step one. Step two is learning how to put it into action. Use these tips to make yourself available and start resolving patients’ complaints before they post a negative review online.
- Appoint a Primary Point of Contact for Problems
Choose someone on your leadership team to be the chief point of contact for patients who are upset. It needs to be someone who has enough authority to make compromises when necessary, like offering a discount or changing the practice’s policies.
Once you’ve decided who that patient relationship management czar is, make sure everyone is on the same page. Train your staff members (not only front desk staff but everyone) that if a patient has a concern that they can’t resolve, they should refer the patient to that point of contact. You could even post signs in your lobby to tell patients how to reach out and to whom if they have a comment or concern.
- Keep Tabs on Your Social Media
It has become more and more common for patients to reach out to their healthcare practices (and other businesses, for that matter) through comments or direct messages on social media. Whether or not you want this to be an available means of communication, patients will use it.
Keep an eye on your social media throughout each workday and respond to those patients promptly. If you prefer to use HIPAA-friendly tools, it’s fine to simply respond by asking the person to reach out to you through email.
- Offer Multiple Means of Communication
Different patients are more comfortable using different means of communication, and you want to be amenable to them. If you only want patients to contact you on the phone and you have a patient who is uncomfortable talking on the phone, chances are that they’ll skip the call and post a negative review online instead.
Ultimately, it’s important to offer at least two forms of communication: one verbal and one written. This lets each patient contact you in a way that makes them feel comfortable while also making you accessible to patients with various disabilities.
At the end of the day, every healthcare practice has the goal of seeing every patient walk out the door feeling satisfied. That might not be realistic, but you can put policies in place that allow you to resolve patients’ complaints quickly and efficiently, and accessibility is one of them. Along with using the tips above, contact McCauley Marketing Services today to put together a comprehensive and effective patient relationship management strategy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more top tips.