3 easy ways build loyalty among your patients

Have you ever had a bad product experience, yet stuck with the company you originally bought the item from?

You have even ordering from them again because you felt that they were still a good business.

That is called brand loyalty and it can really help you build your chiropractic practice.

When your patients feel compelled to do business with you and only you, it doesn’t matter how many other chiropractic practices approach them or what they do to “sweeten the deal” to get them to change offices. They’ll continue to come to you for their health care needs, even if they encounter a small hiccup from time to time.

The question is: How do you create that type of patient loyalty, where the people you serve would never consider going anyplace else? There are many options.

1. Focus on customer satisfaction

One Marketing Serpa survey of 2,400 consumers found that 92 percent were either likely or very likely to continue purchasing products and services from a company that they like. Conversely, only 29 percent of those surveyed reported the same if they were unhappy with the brand.

This same group also shared that the number one reason they felt satisfied with a particular company was because they consistently have a good experience when dealing with it. The next reasons were that the company was easy to conduct business with and they didn’t always try to sell them, but worked to provide value instead. The number one reason provided for feeling dissatisfied with a company was when they felt that the company put their own business goals in front of the consumer’s wants and needs.

Incorporating these results into your own practice, increasing your own customer satisfaction levels, involves asking:

• Do we consistently provide our patients with a positive experience?
• In what ways can we go above and beyond to ensure that our patients are happy?
• Do we make it easy for people to do business with us?
• Are our scheduling and payment systems easy to use?
• Do we make remembering and keeping appointments convenient for our patients?
• Do we balance providing information with product and service offerings?

2. Be reliable

Marketing Serpa’s survey also found that customer satisfaction level was heavily tied to how reliable the recipients felt the business was. If the business was consistent and dependable enough to be labelled either reliable or very reliable, 82 percent felt satisfied. If that level of reliability wasn’t there, the number dropped to 18 percent.

Keeping appointments and rarely requesting that the patient changes his or her time to see you is one way to be reliable. Another is to get patients in at their regularly scheduled time so they’re not spending a lot of time waiting to be seen.

A reliable chiropractic practice is also one that the patient knows will work with them to solve any issues they may be having with insurance companies or in handling their health-related concerns. When they know that you’re going to be right there to walk with them through these types of matters, you are reliable and they are more satisfied.

3. Keep in contact, but don’t overwhelm

Another finding of this survey is that customers report that they’ll quickly unsubscribe from your emails if they feel that they’re irrelevant (21 percent) or if you send them too often (19 percent). If you always try to sell them (19 percent) or are sending the same type of content over and over again (17 percent), they are more inclined to unsubscribe then too.

This can be a tough one to balance because you want to keep in contact enough to stay in the forefront of your patients’ mind, but you don’t want to be a pest. To make this matter even more complex, marketing service provider Constant Contact says that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to how often you should be sending emails.

Instead, to determine what is right for your particular practice, they recommend that you consider what your email response rates are currently. If you’re getting good responses and very few people are unsubscribing, you may want to keep your schedule as it is. If you have a high bounce rate or people aren’t sticking with you, then it’s time to try something else.

Also, the more relevant you make the content of your emails, the more likely it is your recipients will want to continue to receive them, building their loyalty as a result. If you’re not sure what they want to know more about, ask them. Take their input and use that to drive your email campaign.

When you are able to build loyalty among your patients, not only will they continue to come to you, but they’ll also likely recommend you to their family and friends. Then you can build patient loyalty with them and on it goes.