New Vet Reception

EDUCATED
PROFESSIONAL
55%
55% 75+%
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Information for Conversion:
How Hard Facts Can Help You Grow Your Practice
Article by Dr. Chris Phelps, Concept to Practice
Do you want your veterinary veterinary to grow? For a veterinary practice, growth comes from new clients. If you want to see growth, you must understand how new clients find your practice, what makes them schedule appointments and how you can ensure they show up for those appointments. You may think you understand the processes that take a new client from spotting an ad to showing up at your office, but unless you have hard data to back up your assumptions, you may be wasting marketing dollars and losing potential clients.
Most veterinary practices suffer from a lack of hard data. In my work, I’ve discovered several key areas where more data can spotlight problems and drive practice growth.
Where do new clients come from?
Most veterinary practices use a range of marketing tools. They put ads in newspapers and magazines, advertise on television or radio, run a web page and even sponsor community events to connect with new clients. Do you know which ads bring in new clients and how much those new clients are worth?
To get detailed marketing data, you can’t just track calls to the office. An advertisement isn’t working for you if it doesn’t bring in clients who actually make appointments and bring in revenue. To track the actual return on investment of your marketing campaigns, you need detailed information on whether the people who respond to an advertisement end up as clients in your office and where they actually heard about your office.
When I ask doctors if they are asking clients, “How How did you hear about us?,” most tell me they are. However, they are often asking the clients the question when they come in for the appointment. The challenge with asking weeks after the clients have scheduled is that they have likely forgotten the true source of the information. They will give you an answer such as “a friend” or “the Internet,” but it may not be accurate. Another mistake is asking the clients if they found the office as a result of a specific campaign. The team may say, “Did you hear about us from our new TV commercial?,” and the clients will agree they did even if they didn’t.
You will get the most accurate information if you ask the question during the scheduling call. As soon as you figure out there is a new client on the line, ask them how they he or she heard about your office; it
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will be fresh in their his or her mind and likely true.
When do you miss calls?
Did you know that 87 percent of new clients won’t leave a message or call back if their calls get are sent to voicemail? That means for every 10 calls that go to voicemail, you’re only getting one potential new client to leave a voicemail message. Those few clients who do leave you a message are likely referrals, willing to go the extra mile because their friend told them to call. The fact is this: Potential new clients do not leave messages.
Another fact is they will then be Googling the dentist down the street if you don’t return a call within seven minutes. That is a tight window of opportunity and requires someone to be paying full attention. Unanswered calls are a costly missed opportunity to for your practice. Nationwide, the data coming out of Call Tracker ROI reports that the average veterinary office is not answering 33 percent of its marketing marketing-based, potential new client appointment opportunity phone calls. That’s one-third of the calls they spent good money on to generate new client leads!
How often do calls go to voicemail? If you ask your staff, they’ll say rarely. That’s because calls go to voicemail when the office staff doesn’t notice them. If the new client doesn’t leave a message, it’s as if the call never happened. You can’t reduce missed calls if you don’t know that they exist.
Once offices start tracking missed calls, they will begin to see patterns. Many offices miss calls during
or immediately after the daily lunch break, on Fridays and on weekends. Other offices miss calls during peak hours. They don’t have the front-office staff and phones to deal with client intake, billing, insurance and client check-out while also paying attention to incoming calls. Data on missed calls can help practices streamline procedures or add phones to deal with peak times.
If you still don’t think you are missing calls, think about this age age-old conflict:
No one is more important than the new client calling the office, BUT no one is more important than the client standing in front of you trying to make an appointment.
We know the caller likely won’t leave a message so what does your team member do? They will honor the person standing in front of them—a hard choice and a missed opportunity.
If you have the hard data on calls missed and the data justifies the expense, you can choose to stagger lunches or rotate team members so the phones are always covered. Some smart offices get the office staff a cell phone for insurance queries to keep the land line phones open. Others have different team members with a cell phone on Fridays ready to answer client calls. Again, if the data justifies the expense, it is 100 percent worth it.
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Does your staff know how to turn a new client contact into a scheduled appointment? Only about 5 percent of veterinary offices train their support staff in answering the phone, dealing with insurance queries and scheduling appointments. While some of your office staff members may have a natural talent for handling new clients, most need training. You need data that tells you what happens when someone calls your office, how each staff member responds to difficult questions and how often each staff member manages to convert a new client phone call into an appointment. In addition, if they are struggling to convert calls into appointments, you need to the data on why this is occurring. Research I conducted through Call Tracker ROI shows 34 percent of potential new client calls are not converted into appointments. So if we are missing 33 to 35 percent of calls altogether and then 34 percent of the ones we do talk to don’t turn into appointments, we miss the opportunity to schedule 76 out of 100 people that who call our office. That’s a lot of lost opportunity that could be costing you tens of thousands of dollars every month.
To get in-depth data on staff/new client interactions, you’ll need to record calls and track results. Each month, schedule a meeting to go over the previous month’s data with your office staff and respect the challenges they face on the telephone. Schedule training sessions to teach them how to respond to questions about insurance networks, emergency appointments and scheduled appointments. If you do not have the time or capacity to record and go through calls by hand, services such as Call Tracker ROI will do it for you and provide detailed analytics showing exactly what is happening––invaluable information for offices that want to see growth. It is imperative to find out what challenges the team members experience that prevent the calls from being converted. That answer will change everything.
Small changes can make a big difference in how many new clients make it into the office. For instance, a subtle change in the scheduling dialogue can virtually eliminate noshows.
Research in the restaurant industry found that changing the scheduling dialogue from “Please call if you need to cancel or reschedule” to “Will you please call us if you need to cancel or reschedule? (Pause for answer.) Great! I’ll let everyone up here know that you’re going to call us if you need to cancel
or reschedule” dropped no-show rates from 50 percent of reservations to 5 percent of reservations. Veterinary offices that employ this tactic have seen a similar drop in no-shows.
Slight modifications in office management and advertising practices can lead to big gains in income and new client retention. If you don’t have data, you can’t make smart decisions about marketing, staffing and office routines. With detailed data, you can spot problems and craft solutions that will help your practice grow and thrive.
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The Masters of Marketing Administration is an educational advancement for training of business owners and their administrative and support staff on the Viva System—a system that puts in place the
ideal residual business model for consumer
acquisition, loyalty and retention.
Copyright © 2016 by Gregory Hughes, Viva Concepts, LLC. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America. First Printing, 2016