The Art of Follow Up

In order to maximise your appointment book and develop amazing relationships with your patients your team need to master the art of follow up.

Follow up is something I cannot impress enough upon my team and my clients.  I strongly believe that there should always be a next step and you should be the one in control.  Success does not just happen it is something that takes hard work and dedication.

Every patient whether new or existing should be part of a system and everyone in the practice should know where they are in this system.  A traditional recall system is not sufficient to maximise patient retention and it does not demonstrate first class level service to your patients.  A robust follow up system is necessary to capture every step of your patient journey and ensure no-body falls through the cracks.

A multi-level follow up system captures patients from the moment they get in touch until the moment they leave your practice for good (which is hopefully never!).

A follow up system is a fundamental part of good practice management and will ultimately lead to higher performance and productivity as well as amazing client relationships.

With an effective follow up system patients feel important, cared for and that you really do have their best interest at heart.

I recommended you identify the key follow up points in your patient journey for example enquiries that have not yielded bookings should always be followed up, as should patients who have cancelled and not re-booked an appointment. 

Having a good system is only the first step the most important part of making a follow up system work is ensuring everyone in the practice knows HOW it works.  Follow up communications are worthless when the message is wrong, in fact they can be worse than worthless they can be harmful, patients can feel hounded and harassed and this impression will not help patient retention.  Your team need to know how to communicate effectively to ensure patients understand the nature of the follow up communication and that it is intended as a tool for improved customer service and efficiency rather than to ‘fill the book’.  It is vitally important to know and respect the patients contact preference, many patients don’t like phone calls they may prefer to communicate by email where possible and it is so important to offer a method of communication that the patient is comfortable with.

Scripting is an effective way to ensure your message is being received, identify with your team the need for a follow up system, examine your patient journey to determine appropriate points for follow up and agree a system.  You can then work together to create procedures, scripts and even email or letter templates to assist in the process.  Make sure your team is on board with the new system and practice with each other (yes the dreaded role play that we all love so much, but it really does work!) after all practice makes perfect.

If you’d like to find out more about evaluating and improving your administrative systems and increase productivity please contactinfo@practice-perfection.co.uk or visit www.practice-perfection.co.uk