Telephone sales performance amongst European Private Clinics

We are newly revitalised after presenting our full-day healthcare marketing course at the European Society for Cataract and Refractive Surgery (ESCRS). It was a full-house crowd on Saturday, the 17th of September in Vienna and we’re really looking forward to helping many of you grow your practices in the upcoming months.

At last year’s ESCRS, we presented some original research we conducted, that demonstrated the differences amongst a sample of 30 European private refractive surgery clinics across 7 countries. So, we thought it fitting to share this unpublished study as a reminder of one of the reasons we feel that telephone sales is a weakness in healthcare clinics. Using our 3-Act Telephone Sales Evaluation, we mystery called the 30 clinics, recorded the calls, and summarised the results against the ideal that we teach in our healthcare telephone training courses.

How we chose the 30 clinics to be mystery called

We wanted clinics that were processing a significant amount of enquiries through their phones. So, we did searches on Google for each country’s category leaders (top 1-3 search engine results), verified that they were indeed private clinics in the specialty, and called them. Then, we compared these 21 continental clinics with the 7 clinics that we regularly monitor in the UK.

Using our 3-Act Telephone Sales Evaluation, we mystery called the 30 clinics, recorded the calls, and summarised the results against the ideal that we teach in our healthcare telephone training courses.

Summary of the results from 2010

Clinics from Spain, where refractive surgery has higher adoption rates than anywhere else in Europe, led the pack as can be seen in this chart. England, sat in the middle at 57% (trailing Spain, Portugal and France):

What our mystery callers evaluated when they recorded the calls

• in how many rings the phone was answered
• the quality of the initial greeting
• how the telephone receptionist qualified the caller
• how well the receptionist gathered enquiry information
• the quality of their introduction
• whether they asked the caller for an appointment
• and whether they asked the questions we feel are necessary when getting information from prospects on the phone

How the 30 Private Clinics performed

Here are the detailed findings in a Slideshare presentation. In the charts that follow, the green bars represent the ideal score, and the tan-coloured bars represent the performance across the 30 clinics we evaluated.

If you’re getting this blog post by email – first, thanks for subscribing! Second, here is the link to this post on the web, so you can see the presentation. Hint: you can expand the size of the presentation by clicking the X shaped button on the bottom right of the presentation box:

Next steps

We plan to repeat the survey this year and share the results in this blog. Watch this space. More importantly, we’ve been thinking about WHY we are seeing such poor performance amongst European Clinics. For our answers to that question, read our next post.