3 Top Methods To Boost Your Patient Experience

• David Richards
• 17 October, 2023

Manage Patient Experience (PX) and Grow Revenue

Ensuring that patients have a good experience with your dental brand is the path to success. Done right, it will provide a greater revenue stream, strengthen your dental practice's image, and improve your stability.

A good patient experience can do wonders for a dental business. It builds strong relationships with patients and creates a lasting impression; it’s a sure-fire way to build patient loyalty and boost revenue. By managing the patient experience, practices can achieve service-driven growth. Stop and think: Is there any very popular brand today that has poor customer satisfaction? The answer is probably, no. In this competitive dental business world, the key to success is to provide the best patient experience and service.

 

Dental Patient Experience Defined

Patient experience includes the opinions that people form during and after interacting with the dental brand. It is measured from the start of the patient journey and can be impacted at any stage.

 

Why is Patient Experience Important?

If you stop and think about the companies you've used or bought from, you know whether you like them or not. You know exactly what you like about their offering, their customer service, and where you think they could improve.

When we interact with brands, we form feelings about those brands. Some of them start when we interact with them. They are based on first impressions. Others are related to the quality of the products or services, the support we receive, etc.

Small things like practice greeting, enquiry response time on various channels, treatment coordination and more can affect our overall patient experience. Every slight area of the patient journey adds to the experience. For instance, a poor experience with reception can damage the overall patient satisfaction and significantly diminish the odds of impressing a valuable patient.

The power of social proof can have an incredible impact on your practice’s image, success, as well as your revenue. Only a satisfied patient will happily become loyal to your dental practice. Satisfied patients will use you exclusively for all their dental needs, which will boost your revenue. Patients that are really happy with what you offer will spread the word around, becoming your practice advocates.

 

3 Top Methods To Boost Your Patient Experience & Improve The Patient Journey

1. Understand Your Patient’s Needs

When we talk about understanding your patients, we mean learning just about all you can learn about them. When you need to improve a practice or a service, the first thing to always do is gain a better understanding of your patient. You not only need to know their needs, but also how urgently their need occurs, what alternatives they have in the market, the expectations they have set, etc.

2. Collect Patient Feedback

It's impossible to understand your patients if you don't do research. The best way to understand patient journeys and their overall experience is directly from them. Whether you do this by analysing their testimonials or asking them via a form or survey is up to you.

3. Be Available When Needed

A quality dental practice brand is always available to its patients. If you make the contact process too complicated or too lengthy, this can ruin their entire experience and the quality of your service won’t even matter.

4. Use the Multi-channel Approach

If you want patients to repeat the same conversation every time they talk to your reception, you're not doing much for their patient experience. This is a common problem that blemishes the patient journey. To deal with this situation, you should opt for multi-channel support. When a patient contacts reception, the receptionist will be able to view previous conversations and handle their questions more efficiently.

 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, to fine tune your practice’s patient experience and increase your practice’s bottom line in the process, Invest in educating and training your existing staff and add value to your practice.

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