The customer experience can make or break any healthcare business. Happy and satisfied customers will keep returning and are also more likely to leave positive reviews (95% of customers who had a bad experience will tell others about it, too!)
While this is clearly important for all businesses, the customer experience takes on a bigger role for healthcare companies. Here, the entire existence of your business depends on providing customers with the best possible experience, and there are countless ways you can ruin this.
It’s no coincidence that a lot of healthcare businesses receive generally poor reviews across the internet – particularly local health clinics. Barriers regularly exist to make the experience worse for customers, hence the poor reviews. To prevent this from happening in your healthcare business, you need the following simple solutions to heighten customer satisfaction and give people a great experience.
Offer Multiple Booking Options
Healthcare businesses attract a wide range of clientele. You could have young adults coming to your company or you may have people in their golden years. As such, you’re dealing with an audience that has different wants and needs – especially when it comes to booking appointments.
The older generation will prefer to call your company and book over the phone or visit your business in person. The younger generation would much rather book things online, so cater to both!
Offering multiple booking options ensures everyone can choose their preferred method without getting annoyed. More importantly, this helps you attract more customers as you no longer miss out on those who prefer booking in a certain way so look elsewhere. Let people speak to a real person if they wish, or let them book appointments with no human contact at all!
Keep Digital Forms
In the modern era, you can’t afford to keep physical forms in your healthcare business. It presents privacy risks, but it also hampers the customer experience. People don’t like being bombarded with forms that take ages to fill in. Even worse, they hate getting a form posted to them to then post it back or take it in.
Using a digital forms library is a great counter to this. You can keep original physical copies, but all other forms are digitally stored online. This lets you email them to customers for a much easier form-filling process. It speeds up the pre-screening process too; instead of wasting half of their first appointment filling in a form, customers can do so online and email it back. When they arrive, there’s no need to fill in more forms and they can be seen right away.
From an admin standpoint, the customer experience improves further as it takes you less time to sort through records. You can find what you need right away, so customers aren’t left waiting around.
Provide Easy Cancelation Steps
A multi-approach booking system is crucial, but so is an omni-channel cancellation approach. This means you’re giving customers multiple ways to cancel appointments. People hate it when they have to jump through loads of hoops to cancel something – and they despise being asked why they’re canceling.
Implement easy cancelation steps so anyone can cancel their appointment at the click of a button. You may think this makes you lose more customers, but the opposite is true. Someone is more likely to book again if they like your system and don’t feel judged for canceling the first time.
Implement A Realistic Schedule
Lastly, focus on your schedule! The biggest gripe people have with healthcare businesses is spending ages waiting for their appointments. They book a slot at noon and don’t get seen until 12:20. This happens far too often to be a coincidence!
Yes, different customers/clients have different needs, and some of those can be complex. It means you’re likely to run over the allotted time now and then, but this drives people away from your business. Would you keep going to the same place if they constantly saw you 20 or 30 minutes later than scheduled?
Work on developing a realistic work schedule. Provide more time between the end of one appointment and the start of another one in your booking system. This can cover any appointments that overrun and ensure that people are seen as close to the advertised time as possible. It’s never going to be perfect, but good scheduling can be the difference between a 2-minute delay and a 30-minute one.
