What are your challenges in increasing patient retention? Surprisingly, patient retention often depends on creating frequent and meaningful touch points for your patients. A touch point is any point of contact you have with your patents, for example: when they receive a text, read an email, talk on the phone, or greet you in the office. The success of these touch points can highly impact if your patient will return for their next appointment.
Here are 5 strategies you can use to increase your patient retention:
Improve Your Communication with Current Patients
Under-communication is a significant mistake made by dental offices. It can often lead to decreased patient retention, increased no-shows, and last-minute cancellations. The key is to be authentic and timely. We recommend creating customized communications with automated delivery to show your patients that you care about their dental health.
Watch this video to learn how to create an email campaign.
Decrease Wait Times
Long wait times have been shown to have a negative effect on patients’ satisfaction. Many offices are leaning on virtual check-in strategies to decrease wait time and increase patient satisfaction. We recommend implementing digital forms and text messaging to increase your efficiency at check-in.
Read this article to learn how to set up a virtual waiting room.
Use Automated Appointment Reminders
Underutilizing appointment reminders often leads to increased no-shows. Before blaming your patients, we recommend looking at your reminders. Are you sending reminders? Are they effective? We recommend using automated text, email, and voice reminders to help your patients remember their upcoming appointments without overwhelming their inbox.
Watch this video to learn how to set up appointment reminders.
Take Patient Satisfaction Seriously
As we mentioned earlier, positive experiences can encourage patients to want to return to your practice. As you focus on the patient experience, we recommend inviting patients to leave reviews. Patient reviews will improve your online presence and give your patients a chance to reaffirm their positive experience.
Read this article to learn how to get your patients to leave positive reviews.
Simplify Appointment Scheduling
A 2021 survey showed that 94 percent of patients prefer booking online so much that they would switch to a new provider if they were offered this solution. This suggests that if you’re still relying solely on your phone system to book appointments, you could risk losing patients. Therefore, we recommend simplifying the appointment scheduling process by offering online booking.
Watch this video to learn more about online booking.
Conclusion
As you focus on improving your patient experience, remember that your patients are human and need help staying on top of their dental health. Your office staff is also human, and it can be challenging for them to keep on top of everything in addition to focusing on creating an exceptional in-office patient experience. We recommend that you lean on Patient Engage to automate the consistent messaging that your patients need so that you can focus more fully on the human experience!
Learn More
For additional information, see the following resources: