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Your customers are the life and blood of your physical therapy clinic. Therefore, the relationship you nurture with them can make or break the success of your clinic. If your patients aren’t finding your services helpful or see any value in them, then they’ll stop paying for them. What’s worse is that they’re likely to choose your competitors over you, looking for the value you couldn’t offer to them.
If your patients aren’t happy, then that’s a problem. But, if you thought you were doing everything right only to discover that your prospects are unsatisfied with your services, then that’s downright terrifying. And, it happens more often than you would imagine. According to one study, 80% of companies believe that they deliver great customer service while only 8% of the customers think the same companies deliver stellar customer support.
Ouch!
But, here’s the good news: you have an advantage in your sleeve that you could use to understand the experience and satisfaction of your patients and make the necessary changes.
Here are the website metrics you should track to measure your patients’ happiness.
Before we jump to the website metrics that you should track, we need to understand the difference between the experiences that help you build a relationship with your patients.
Customer support’s main goal is to help your patients solve issues as they arise. And, we’re not talking about their medical problems here, but the issues they experience when choosing your physical therapy clinic. Example: they were supposed to receive a detailed physical therapy care plan via email, but their doctor forgot to send it so now they have to call your customer support center.
Customer success, on the other hand, is a long-term game that can help you build a lasting relationship with your patients brick by brick. When your patients are constantly amazed by the value your services deliver, they are more likely to tell others about your physical therapy clinic.
Your website metrics can provide valuable insights regarding what your patients need and the support they’re actually getting. Here’s what you should measure:
“Contact us, and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.”
You probably have one of these messages on your PT clinic’s website. But, are you delivering on your promise?
Your patients want you to solve their problems as quickly as possible. If you fail to meet their expectations, then their satisfaction will drop severely.
It goes without saying that your prospects have different expectations for different support channels. They expect a faster response time when they contact you via chat versus via email.
Email: Offering customer support via email can be a bit tricky. Most companies have a response time of 24 to 48 hours. If you want to stand apart and truly impress your patients, you need to strive for better response time, like 60 minutes.
Chat: If you’re going to provide chat support on your PT clinic’s website, then you’d better be prompt. As a rule of thumb, ensure that your response time is less than one minute.
Here’s a statement from Captain Obvious: the longer it takes you to solve a problem, the less happy your patients will be.
How long is too long, you might ask yourself. Well, the math is pretty simple: the ideal number of interactions with an unhappy prospect is one. The patient sends you a complaint, you analyze it, and provide a solution. If it takes more than four interactions to solve a problem, then you have a serious problem on your hands.
Individual interactions are crucial and can make or break your physical therapy clinic’s success. But, it’s just as important to look at the big picture and measure the overall customer satisfaction. Studies have shown that an overall satisfaction of 30% is better than measuring the happiness of your patients after every interaction.
By measuring your patients’ overall satisfaction, you can get an accurate idea of how happy they are with your customer support and what you can do to improve their experience.
Think about it this way: a patient is unlikely to stop coming to your PT clinic if one of his consultations was delayed. But, if you only measure individual experiences, you won’t be able to tell how happy the patient is with the overall services offered by your clinic.
Another excellent way to improve patient satisfaction is to look at your contact volume data and identify the days and hours when you receive the most inquiries. With these metrics at hand, you will be able to tell when you need to focus your attention on customer interactions and prepare your reps.
According to studies, most customers tend to contact support centers early in the morning (8-9 AM) or late in the day (4-5 PM.) That might not be the case for your physical therapy clinic. Look at your contact volume data to determine when your patients are more likely to contact you. For example, track the frequency of emails or support calls to get an accurate idea of when your patients prefer to contact you. More than that, you should also pay attention to the question they usually ask. That way, you can train your team to answer these questions promptly and in a professional manner.
Helping your customers become successful (i.e. solve their health problems) isn’t beneficial just for your patients. It can also help your practice grow. So, here are the website metrics that can help you measure customer success.
Churn rate refers to the percentage of patients who quit your services in a given period. To calculate this metric, you need to divide the number of lost patients by the number of active patients at any given time.
Example: lost patients last quarter: 276; active patients last quarter: 14,392; churn rate = 1.91%
There will always be people who will give up your service after just a few interactions. And, that’s ok. You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t even try to make a goal out of it. Instead, you should focus on providing your patients with the best experience possible.
If, in spite of your efforts, your churn rate is still high, then reach out to your patients and see what’s wrong. Maybe they are not satisfied with your services, or maybe they don’t feel like they’re appreciated enough.
Another great way to reduce your churn rate is to go the extra mile for your patients. Ask yourself, what more could they find useful in addition to your services? Maybe you can offer them a better way to stay in touch with their physicians.
While churn is a metric concerned with what your patients are doing, the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) focuses on how they are feeling.
CSAT is one of the best ways to measure the satisfaction of your patients by asking them to rate their experience after a specific interaction with your clinic.
The simplest way to measure it is to send an automated survey to your patients, asking them to rate their level of satisfaction with the interaction on a scale from “Not at all satisfied” to “Very satisfied.”
The beauty of the CSAT metric comes from its directness. On the flipside, however, the responses can be influenced by the patient’s mood, so this metric’s accuracy isn’t always at 100%.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood that a patient will recommend your PT clinic to someone else. NPS is also a direct reflection of customer loyalty.
The benefit of this metric is that it doesn’t refer to an emotion (how satisfied your patients are with your services) but to an intention (how likely are they to refer your business.)
To calculate your NPS score, subtract the percentage of detractors (people who won’t recommend your PT clinic) from the percentage of promoters (people who are the most likely to recommend your services.) Ignore the passive ones.
Here’s an example. Let’s imagine that 300 customers took your NPS survey. If 165 of them are promoters (55%), 70 are passive (you can ignore them,) and 65 are detractors (21%,) then your NPS is 34% (55% - 121% = 34%.)
You know what you need to measure; but how can you tell if your numbers are too low and you need to work on improving your customer success metrics?
Here are some benchmarks to keep in mind:
In the end, every business is different, and the website metrics you need to track might vary. What you need to remember, though, is that measuring your patients’ happiness shouldn’t be a guessing game. Figure out what data you need to track and use the information to analyze your relationship with your patients and make the necessary tweaks to improve and advance it. That is the best way you can convert your prospects into loyal patients.
Because we know how hard it is to determine what metrics your physical therapy clinics needs to measure customer satisfaction and how difficult it can be to keep track of this data, we’ve developed a reputation management service designed to help you.
Contact us today and learn what we can do for your physical therapy clinic’s
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