Issue 15 - November 2004

Do you know what your patients are saying? Measure your patients’ loyalty
By Mark Sanna, DC

What do your patients say about you behind your back? Growing your practice depends upon only one thing — what your patients tell their friends about you. If they are less than satisfied, they will say nothing — or worse. But if they are completely satisfied, they will sing their praises of you and your clinic. So, to grow your practice, you have to know what they are saying.

The challenge is to find out what your patients say about you outside of your office walls.

If we remember that patients are customers, we can gain insights about customer satisfaction from the lessons learned by successful corporations.

Recently, in a day-long forum that would help them enhance their customer-loyalty efforts, the chief executives from the Vanguard Group, Chick-fil-A, State Farm Insurance and a half-dozen other leading companies gathered together to listen to Andy Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. He riveted the already marketing-savvy audience members with his message.

Taylor and his senior management team created a highly-effective method to measure and manage customer loyalty. Each month, Enterprise polls its customers, asking just two simple questions:

• “What was the quality of your rental experience?”

• “What is the likelihood that you will rent from our company again?”

This simple process enables the company to rank results from its more than 5,000 locations within a period of days and produce real-time feedback on how the company is doing.

Enterprise then puts consumer survey results to use. It gives its employees an opportunity to learn from the real-time successes of their peers and focuses its employees on the task of stimulating the growth of the company.

The Enterprise survey differs from other customer feedback surveys in one important way. The survey doesn’t count marginally satisfied customers; it counts only those customers who respond with the highest possible ranking!

Taylor told the audience of CEOs that by concentrating only on the most enthusiastic customers, the company focuses on a key driver of profitable growth — customers who recommend Enterprise to their friends.

You can apply Enterprise’s approach to your chiropractic practice by focusing on those of your patients who provide the most enthusiastic responses to a question designed to assess their loyalty. It turns out that the percentage of patients who are enthusiastic enough to refer a friend or family member — perhaps the strongest sign of loyalty to your practice — correlates directly with the growth rate of your practice.

Patient loyalty has a significant effect on the bottom-line profitability of your practice. When a patient chooses to refer to your practice, your new patient acquisition costs are reduced. Patient loyalty also affects the top-line growth of your practice. No practice can grow if it has a leaky “patient bucket”, and loyalty helps eliminate this outflow. Loyal patients raise the water level in your bucket.

Patients who “talk up” your practice to their families, friends and co-workers put themselves at risk. When they act as references, they do more than indicate that they’ve received excellent care at your practice: They put their own reputations on the line. Patients only risk their reputations when and if they feel intense loyalty to your practice.

THE WRONG YARDSTICK

Because patient loyalty is so important to the growth of your practice, measuring and managing it make good sense.

Unfortunately, approaches used in the past have not been very effective. Even the best chiropractic practices tend to focus on patient retention rate measurements such as Patient Visit Average (PVA).

PVA, the measurement of the average number of visits each patient makes to your practice, is merely the best of a mediocre lot. Patient retention rates provide a valuable link to the profitability of your practice, but their relationship to practice growth is tenuous. This is because they basically track patient defections — the degree to which your bucket is emptying rather than filling up.

Implementing a method to accurately measure patient loyalty and satisfaction is extremely important to the growth of your practice.

ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION

How can chiropractors successfully measure patient loyalty? Ask the right question. And that question is: “How likely is it that you would recommend our practice to a friend or colleague?”

Then, by scoring your patients’ responses on a scale 0 to 10, (with 10 indicating “extremely likely” to recommend, 5 meaning “neutral,” and 0 meaning “not at all likely”) you will be able to identify three loyalty types among your patients:

• “Promoters” give ratings of 9 and 10 to the question and are the patients with the highest rates of referrals;

• “Passively satisfied” patients log a 7 or an 8; and

• “Detractors” score their satisfaction from 0 to 6.

To grow your practice, improve your ratio of promoters to detractors.

Once you determine which percentage of your patients are promoters you can create a goal to increase their numbers.

Issue a charge to your practice team members, such as: “We currently have 60 percent promoters, 30 percent neutrals and 10 percent detractors. Our goal within the next 30 days is to increase the number of promoters to 80 percent.)

This goal is clear-cut, actionable and motivating.

Your entire team must know how many of your patients fall in the promoter category and they must have the skills to boost the satisfaction from one level to the next.

Practice growth needs more promoters! Consistently com-municate your promoter number to your entire practice team. This number is the one number you need to grow — it’s that simple and that profound!