I’ve saved the best for last. Whether you get five patients a month or 100+, doesn’t matter. Only two things matter: first, how much treatment did they do and second, are they still your patient today.
For our specialists, who are turning over patients without means for long term relationship, the point is keeping referral sources retained and patients referring.
Otherwise, in any practice you are going to win the most by building relationships with your patients and keeping them inside the four walls of your practice.
No treatment gets cultivated
No big cases get nurtured
No referrals get made
No testimonials will happen
… if you do not keep your patients.
The bottom line of our whole business is about retention, whatever method that means for you. You must be as aggressive on defense when it comes to patient retention as you are on offense when it comes to creating and closing treatment.
Most neglect the retention side and the patients feel it.
Retention can be as simple as hand written cards or follow-up phone calls regardless of whether treatment was accepted. It can be movement into your perio program. It can be holiday cards and gifts. It can be in the form of many different touch points.
Getting patients to give you testimonials is a secret strategy for retention because they can’t leave the place they have bragged about publicly.
More importantly, retention defense is about knowledge of what is actually going on. It’s about communication between team members and “departments” – it is about making sure that everyone knows where every patient is and taking a true assessment of the outcomes.
You have three tiers of retention…
1. New and Emergency Patients: how many did treatment and how many moved into hygiene.
2. Hygiene Patients: how many appointments for this month/quarter and how many are now inactive based on your hygiene protocol.
3. Long Term Patients: those who have not had comprehensive exams and are therefore expired (even if they are wiggling their way through hygiene, they should be cycled back through your comprehensive exam process like a new patient from time to time).
Obviously the more you keep a patient engaged in your practice (especially in the beginning), the faster you will cultivate their treatment. But, if you then lose them on the back end whether that is one, two, three years or longer then all that work and relationship was for nothing.
Someone should be paying attention to this. Usually there is no defense at all. We focus on a new patient as long as they say yes. If they don’t accept, they wander off never to be seen again. We get the patients who show up in the schedule and that’s about it.
If you want to score points on defense – this is the most untouched area of opportunity in your practice. Practices can double and at the very least have substantial increases just by closing the back door and working reactivation as a retention strategy.
Don’t just be in the ‘new patient’ business be in the ‘every patient’ business. Make sure you are playing defense by not losing people in the first place because it’s a lot harder to get them back once they are gone.
Think about that when you realize how hard you are working to get to your goals every month.
By the way, I’m going to do a special training all about this topic: Keeping Patients and Cultivating Treatment. I will focus on closing the back door and taking care of your patients in and out of your practice so you can start compounding your growth without needing only new patients to do it.
Attend the Live Webcast and Master Patient Retention >>>
