People talking about you when you’re not around is a good thing – as long as what they’re saying is positive.
If your patients are saying good things about you ‘behind your back’, that is often the best advertising you can wish for. With the bonus that it is completely free!
Patients who sing your praises and refer family and friends to you, become advocates for your brand and are a great way to grow your patient list with minimal investment.
But, of course, they will only cross the line from patient to advocate if you give them a positive experience.
You need to treat them in such a way that will make it worthy of starting a conversation.
Create memorable experiences
Often the key to that is doing something out of the ordinary, and providing them with a memorable experience.
This generally means that it falls outside of the clinical treatment – a patient probably won’t spark up a conversation about the great filling they had or how their check-up went.
It’s usually about those added little extras that they weren’t expecting, feeling like they were treated as a valued individual and that they were listened to.
If you think about the most frustrating experiences you have, whether it’s in a healthcare setting, a hotel, or a shop, the pain-point often comes from feeling like no one is paying attention to your needs and understanding what you want.
Referral-worthy moments
As a practice, you can help to create positive referral-worthy moments by making sure that every member of your team knows what you stand for as a practice and their role in bringing it to life to enhance the patient’s experience so that it becomes worthy of talking about.
You can create those magic moments by doing things like making a note of anything particularly interesting or eventful that the patient mentions and passing it onto relevant members of the team.
For example, if they mention to the receptionist that they have a big birthday coming up or that they are heading off on the holiday of a lifetime, this information could be passed to their clinician who can then make conversation about it. You can even go a step further and send them a birthday card/flowers. And don’t forget to follow up by asking how it went when they come back for their next appointment.
These little, relatively simple, actions will make your patients feel special and that you have gone above and beyond.
It is that feeling that will inspire them to tell others about you.
