A revolving door practice is one that seems to be losing their patients or clients almost as fast as they are attracting them. They are acquiring new patients but have a weak retention rate and lose them back out the door.
Typically a practice will have a heavy focus on getting new patients or clients in the front door and will often spend a lot of money generating these. While it is correct to work on attracting new people to your practice, it is also important to retain those you have worked so hard to get into the practice. The value of a patient or client is mainly determined by how long you retain them.
Therefore, a considerable amount of focus should be put onto continuing to look after and care for these new patients as well as your existing clientele in order to improve their loyalty and longevity in your practice. In actual fact, your repeat business typically represents the biggest portion of your revenue.
Here are some tips for increasing retention:
Tips to Keep Your Patients or Clients
- Treat your patients or clients like friends and well-loved family members. Be warm, fuzzy, personal and caring. Showing a strong interest in them is very key. Make them feel comfortable and important. Ensure that they are free to say or ask you anything and know that you are glad to answer them.
- Maintain regular communication with them when they are NOT at your practice. Apparently, about 72% of the people who leave your practice for good do so because of lack of consistent communication with your practice. So don’t be afraid to communicate with your clientele in between visits. Many practices send birthday and anniversary cards. Collecting every person’s email address for reminders can have a secondary benefit in that you can also send them a once a month help column or newsletter with snippets of interesting facts about new products or services as well as contests, trivia about your profession, etc.
- Ensure that your patients or clients do not leave your practice without their next appointment and a full understanding of WHY they need to come back.
- You must have an effective recall, recare or reminder system that keeps track of patients and doesn’t lose or forget them. People often fall into the cracks of recall systems and you then have to reactivate them back into the practice.
Final Note
It is far easier and a lot less expensive to reactivate patients or clients back into the practice than it is to acquire to new ones. So once you have them, hold onto them by giving them the full care you and your team are capable of. Ensure they receive all the service they deserve to have.
For an effective Recall/Reactivation System give us a call
416-466-6217 or click here
