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How important is it to strategically design your chiropractic office (the look and feel) and script-out – from A-Z – your interactions with prospective patients?
Despite how most chiropractors approach this aspect of their practice, it’s extremely important.
Strategically designing your office and scripting your interactions with prospective patients from beginning to end is one of the most important elements of consistent practice growth.
Why?
Because prospective patients have expectations about their office visit with you. And, if their experience doesn’t match-up with, or exceed, their expectations, psychologically they’ll have a hard time justifying becoming a paying patient. (Or, they’ll experience the pain of ‘buyer’s remorse’ afterward, if they do become a patient. Aesop illustrated this in his famous fable The Fox and The Grapes.)
When the actual experience in your office clashes with the expectations prospective patients have, they experience what social psychologists refer to as Cognitive Dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance, as defined in Wikipedia, is: the uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. And, even though it often occurs sub-consciously, it causes a level of mental discomfort – something you certainly don’t want occurring with a prospective new patient.
For many chiropractors, this Cognitive Dissonance can be worsened by the initial exposure to their chiropractic advertisement.
Let me give you an example:
Mary Jane has been suffering with carpal tunnel syndrome for almost 8 months now. She’s in pain everyday as she works on her computer for 6 hours a day as a computer programmer for Microsoft.
One day, over lunch, she’s sorting her mail and comes across a 4-color, glossy 8 1/2 x 6 postcard from a local chiropractor. The postcard not only looks “professional” and shows a chiropractor adjusting a patient while wearing a lab coat, the tagline for the office is, “Chiropractic Care for the Patient Seeking Skilled Medical Care”.
Mary Jane decides this is what she needs. She picks up her iPhone, calls the office, and books a 1PM appointment for the next day.
Upon arrival the next afternoon, Mary Jane is greeted by an inattentive person behind the front desk. She’s quickly handed a clipboard and told to sit down and fill out some paper work. Once completed, Mary Jane is greeted by a middle-aged man wearing a Hawaiian button-down shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a pair of Sanuk flip-flops. He says, “Hi, Mary Jane. I’m Dr. Bob Smith. Come on back with me.”
I could go on with this example and talk about the items hanging on the wall, the reading material in the waiting area, the decor in the exam rooms, the Report of Findings process, and so on.
But, we don’t even need to go there.
You see, if Mary Jane was expecting to meet with a doctor – and she’s had experiences with other doctors – upon being greeted by a chiropractor who doesn’t look the part, she will immediately begin to experience Cognitive Dissonance.
Quite simply: her experience will clash with her expectations.
And, as Media Inc. says in their article titled, “Expectations vs. Reality: Managing The Customer Experience”:
“If there is too wide a gap between expectations and reality the result can range from customer turnover to public mockery.”
For many prospective chiropractic patients their initial office visit often falls short.
Dan Kennedy, marketer extraordinaire, often says:
“The first impression is where a lot of destruction happens.”
Ensuring this doesn’t happen during the initial visit of a prospective patient is crucial to, both, the conversion process and the long-term viability of the patient.
This is why it’s critical that you, as a chiropractor, strategically design your office and script the entire prospective patient visit from beginning to end.
First, you want to make sure your office meets, or exceeds, the expectations prospective patients have. This not only includes the physical layout, design, and look and feel of the office. It also includes the dress of the staff, the greeting, and the entire process of welcoming and orientating a new patient in your office.
Second, you want to design a scripted (choreographed) process prospective patients go through from the moment they walk in the door through the report of findings process, all the way to the starting of their chiropractic care plan.
This process should never be done haphazardly or willy-nilly. It should be designed, practiced, drilled into the staff, and adhered to with every single prospective patient – from beginning to end. This is the only way, you as a chiropractor, will experience consistent and predictable results with your conversion process of prospective patients into paying patients.
Think of it like this:
The job of your chiropractic marketing is to get prospective patients in the office.
The job of your ‘sales process’ – everything that happens from the moment a prospective patient walks in the door – is to turn them into a paying patient. And, if you’re spending a nice chunk of change and investing a serious amount of time and labor designing your marketing process(s), doesn’t it make sense to place the same level of priority (if not more) on the sales process?
(As a side-note: the job of the care and service you deliver to paying patients is to retain them and grow their lifetime value to your practice.)
Simply put: make sure the experience prospective patients have in your office matches or exceeds their expectations.
Please give this some serious thought.
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