How can medical office staff training help your practice?

Medical office staff training can have a tremendous impact on your business. Many prospective clients of ours come to us to generate leads, which is great; you need leads, you need to have people coming in, phoning, booking online appointments, taking self-tests, all of which is supremely important. What happens when they go into the clinic and need to meet with you to decide whether or not you’re right for them, to take them on a journey towards where it is, that they want to go?

It’s not just a clinical journey – but an emotional one too

We find that practices can achieve some of the most significant impacts by simply training your staff to receive patients well. Training your staff to invite your patients into an emotional journey – not just a clinical one – but a journey that understands who they are, their motivations, and what they’re hoping to achieve. Training your staff to present themselves as a choreography of handoffs between patient liaisons and healthcare technicians and optometrists, and then finally surgeons, possibly.

And that whole choreography ends up leading to an inevitable conclusion, which is the patient has no other option than to choose you because you’ve treated them so well, you’ve understood what their needs are, and you have told them when you’re going to meet those needs.

What more could they want?

So training is what allows you to do all of that within 90 minutes efficiently and repeatedly so that you can generate predictable conversion rates and sales as a result. So it can have a considerable impact. So definitely don’t ignore the value you have within your clinic to generate massive improvements in your business.

How training your staff can help you double your practice revenue

Medical office staff training is a fantastic opportunity for clinics to explore if you are trying to double your business. We don’t care where your practice is based, be it in France, the US, New Zealand, and so on. We’ve worked with practices worldwide, and this is by far one of the best levers you can pull.

When we assess a clinic, we take our clinics through a five-step process to say, “where are the problems in the clinic, where are we leaving money on the table?”

All things considered, if you have the same number of leads, i.e. a hundred leads coming into a clinic and you notice that’s in this clinic over here, 25 of those leads are going on to have a consultation, but in that clinic over there, 65 are going on to have a consultation.

Well, that’s more than double. So, you’re going to double the business if you improve that conversion rate on the telephone. And then if you take it even further, let’s say, I’m going to use a hundred again, let’s say you have a hundred consultations in the clinic and one clinic is converting 40 of those into patients, and another clinic is converting 60, 70, 80, (and these are very typical differences between clinics that we see) again, you’re doubling the business without spending any more money on marketing.

So if you feel like you have your marketing dialed in, or even if you don’t, this can be a way to generate more out of what you already have.

What’s the biggest problem you have with your telephone staff?

A key problem with office teams in medical clinics is that you’ve created this really lovely rapport with your marketing, you’ve set an expectation that you understand people, you’re very warm and friendly and emotional, and then somebody calls you and they say, “well, how much is it?”, and the person says, well it’s 3000, and then they hang up.

You just spent $500 potentially to get that phone to ring and that conversation didn’t go anywhere, and that is an actual loss to a practice. You can turn that question, from “how much does it cost” into an emotional masterpiece of connection where you understand why that person is calling, what it is that they’re hoping to achieve out of the surgery, and using that as a conversation, to determine with them if it is or isn’t for them. You’re trying to help them see that you’re on their side to help get what it is that they want. So training your team is a massive and integral part of your marketing journey.

What’s the biggest problem you have with your in-office staff?

One of the key fault lines that you’ll see in the clinic is the front reception desk. So often, what happens is that person is stretched thin. Through no fault of their own, they have way too much to do. You don’t realise that by not having that person present and performing an essential role in your marketing function. That function is to greet people, make them feel welcome and heard, and continue what we call brand scent (the message from your marketing into your clinic). So, you’re dropping things down a level. You’ve already started to underperform on the promise you’ve started in your marketing.

What kind of conversion rates should you expect on the phone and after first appointments?

And if you keep that promise up and keep what we call the excitement level up, and we have a stage called excite in our marketing funnel, if you keep that up and then you roll right into a conversion conversation, you will see clinics going from 40 to 60%, for example, the close rate at the consultation if they’re untrained to a 60 to 80% close rate at a consultation. So that can dramatically impact your business again without changing what you spend on marketing.

And on the telephone side, you can go from a 15% up to, let’s say a 30% conversion rate on the telephone if somebody is untrained anywhere up to 50, 60, and above for more boutique clinics that have a very, very high-value proposition. So it depends on the type of clinic you are in. But that shift, even a 5% change, even going from a 25% close rate on the telephone to a 30%, can dramatically impact your bottom line. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands.

So looking at this as an essential function of fixing what we call the marketing net is critical. And if you think about going fishing and drawing fishes into a net, if you’re drawing fishes into a net with marketing, and yet at the other end you’ve got holes in your net from people on your telephones and at the consultation letting the fishes out, there’s no point doing that marketing. So we always suggest checking your net, your phone calls, your consultation, how are you converting?