It’s always nice to hear from happy customers. Shi Karim from the Church Road Dental Practice in Cheadle Hulme in England recently contacted us about his own experience since registering his clinic with RevaHealth.com, so we asked if we could share his thoughts with you. Here’s what he had to say:
“12 months ago I took over Church Road Dental Practice and I am continually looking for new ways to market it and attract new patients. We happened across the RevaHealth.com website on the internet and decided to register the practice for a free listing.
We were so happy with the referrals being sent that we emailed to ask how we could be top of their list. We upgraded to a pro listing for the practice which has increased the number of referrals four fold. We have treated 3 Invisalign patients alone within the last 4 months from RevaHealth.com, which speaks for itself.
I would definitely say that this is a great return on investment. We now get five or six referrals a week from new patients enquiring about our clinic and I am amazed at how user-friendly the RevaHealth.com system is once you’ve logged in to it. You have total control over what is written and which images are shown for your practice.”
If you want to know more about how RevaHealth.com can help your clinic attract more patients just drop me an email to ocooney@revahealth.com or give me a call on +353 1 6520 522.
About the author
Owen Cooney
Owen Cooney is a senior sales executive at WhatClinic.com.
When you login to Revahealth.com, the page you land on is your Patient Enquiries page. On this page, you can view and manage enquiries from people who are interested in treatment at your clinic. You can also reach this page after you are logged in, by clicking on the “Patient Enquiries” tab in your control panel.
1. Overview of a patient enquiry
Let’s take a look at the layout of a patient enquiry.
In the summary view, you can see the following information:
The person’s name, phone number and email address.
A description of the treatment they require
Outstanding tasks for this enquiry, and
The Actions menu, which is explained below.
If you click on a person’s name, a detailed view of the enquiry opens up.
In the detailed view of the enquiry, you can see the following additional information
In ‘Contact Details’, you can see the person’s location
In ‘History’ you can see the keywords and path this person used to find you on Revahealth.com
In ‘Other Information’ you can see the status of the enquiry, the date the enquiry was made, the source of the enquiry, the cost of the enquiry, any feedback from the person enquiring such as whether they have been contacted yet or not, and if a review was posted by the person enquiring.
2. The Actions Menu
The Actions menu is your key tool for managing patient enquiries. The actions on this menu can be broken into two parts:
2.1 Current Status: The first three actions enable you to tag the person’s current status:
Booked – you tag a person as booked if they have booked an appointment with you.
Archive – you tag a person as archived if you have no further plans to follow up with this person
Active – people who are not booked or archived are tagged as active. If you have previously tagged someone as booked or archived and something changes such as they cancel their booking or the express a renewed interest in booking an appointment, you can change their status back to active.
2.2 Add and Request Information: The next five actions enable you to add or request information relevant to the booking.
Add a note: opens a box where you can add a note of your conversation.
View Full details: this does the same thing as clicking on the person’s name: it opens up the detailed view of the enquiry.
Edit Contact details: opens up the persons contact details. If you get another number to call them on or you want to add their address etc.
Open task: opens up a box where you can set yourself a task and add a date on which to contact this person or take an action. Your tasks appear in the To Do section in the grey area on the right hand side of your screen.
Request review: opens up an email which you can edit and send to past patient in order to get them to review you on Revahealth.com. Increasing the number of reviews for your clinic is a great way to help new people who are looking for the treatment s you provide find out more about your clinic.
3. Navigating Your Patient Enquiries
This list is ordered with the most recent enquiries at the top.
You may also choose to filter the list based on the enquiry status. You can choose to show your patient enquiries as “All”, “Active and New”, “Active”, “Booked”, “Archived”, and “All with Tasks”
Active and new: enquiries that are “Active and new” are displayed as the default, when you enter the patient enquiries section of your control panel.
New: These are enquiries that you have not read yet.
Active: These areenquiries which you have read, and which are not been yet booked or archived.
Booked: These are from people who have booked an appointment with your clinic. For enquiries to appear as booked, you must mark them as booked using the actions menu, which we will come to in a minute.
Archived: You archive an enquiry when you have no further plans to follow up with this person.
“All Enquiries”: are shown all enquiries, in the order in which they have been created – the most recently created at the top.
“All with tasks:”
You can search by the person’s name or email address.
4. Adding enquiries from other sources
On the top right of the page you have the following options: add an enquiry, export, import, integrate.
Add an enquiry: Helps you keep track of all of your enquiries from one place. You add the source of the enquiries: did it come from your website etc, the date the enquiry was made, the contact details of the enquirer and the details of the enquiry.
Export: you can export the files in csv format. Choose the dates. Choose the status of enquiries.
Import: You can also import enquiries. This is still in early stage of development. If you would like to import enquiries please contact support@revahealth.com and we can go through this with you.
Integrate: You can also integrate an enquiry form on your website. Simply copy the following text and paste it into the appropriate page on your website. Alternatively contact your webmaster and he can help you to implement this form. This will send all your enquiries into your revahealth.com enquiry management system and also send you an email with the enquiry.
About the author
Owen Cooney
Owen Cooney is a senior sales executive at WhatClinic.com.
The internet is changing the way healthcare providers deal with customers. As the internet increasingly becomes the first point of contact with new customers, healthcare providers need a process for turning website visitors into bookings.
In this first post in our series on winning healthcare customers online, we discuss online contact methods and the customer funnel.
Online Contact Methods
The essential part of your online strategy is how easily customers can contact you. There are two basic contact methods that every healthcare provider needs to emphasize online, an enquiry form and your phone number.
Some people believe this can be accomplished by simply putting your phone number and email on a website or directory, and letting interested people call you directly. While doing this is an important first step, this alone is not an effective method for winning new business online.
A phone number is an essential but only partial solution for being accessible online. Firstly interested people will be on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However your clinic may only be open during normal business hours of say 09:00-18:00. The difficulty with only being contactable during normal business hours is that your customers are also at work and the last thing they want is to have a phone conversation about private health treatments amidst their colleagues in the office. For the most part, people will not leave private matters on your voicemail, also because of privacy concerns. Even if people are looking at your website during normal business hours, they may be more comfortable writing to you via an online enquiry form. This is often the case for private procedures like cosmetic or fertility treatment.
With an online enquiry form, interested visitors can contact you directly whenever they want to. The beauty of the internet is its 24/7 always-on accessibility. Therefore to get the most from your internet presence, your clinic also needs to be always-on. Also from the clinic’s perspective, written enquiries allows you to keep a record of the customer’s initial enquiry. For these reasons, we would advise you put the emphasis on the online enquiry form over the phone number on your website. Why an online enquiry form and not simply an email address? The online enquiry form makes life easier for the customer. With an email the question arises of “what do I write?” With an online enquiry form, you tell your customer what information you need.
Congratulations, with your online enquiry form and your phone number, your contact methods are now internet friendly! However, having the right contact methods in place is the easy part. If you are planning on to win new healthcare customers online you need to ensure that you have a customer management process in place to convert your website visitors to customers. The key to this is the customer funnel.
The Customer Funnel
The customer funnel is simple way of managing new customers. The funnel is broken into 6 key areas. Visitors are people who see your website, some of whom may be interested in purchasing your services, many other will not. The best your website can do is to convert those that are interested into written enquiries. From your email enquiries you hope to convert a sizable percentage to phone calls. The next stage is a face to face meeting and onto treatment. Once you have invested in this relationship it is important to maintain it to achieve repeat business and personal referrals.
The metaphor of the funnel is used because people drop away at each stage of a long enquiry process: For example, many of the people who send you written enquiries may have existing providers with whom they are very satisfied. On other words they are just testing the waters. Others may have requirements which other healthcare providers are better placed to treat. Still others may want to come for treatment, but not have the money to afford the treatment.
The image of the customer funnel is a visual representation of the step-by-step nature of a long enquiry process with this drop away in prospects at each stage.
Your goal at any stage of the funnel is to get the interested person to the next stage. For example when someone is visiting your website, the goal of your website is to get them to submit an online enquiry or to phone you directly.
The more efficient your customer management process is at each individual stage of the funnel the greater a percentage of the interested people will be brought to the next stage. With constant refinement and effort, a simple online presence can be converted to becoming the main source of new patients for a clinic.
About the author
Owen Cooney
Owen Cooney is a senior sales executive at WhatClinic.com.
At RevaHealth.com we help patients from all over the world to contact health clinics. These enquiries are then used by the clinics to generate business. In sales speak, every enquiry is a new lead.
In our experience, some clinics are very good at turning enquiries into paying patients, while others let good business slip away by making simple mistakes. This guide was originally written by Owen Cooney (ocooney@revahealth.com) specifically for health clinics, but it is relevant to any booking business that receives customer enquiries through email or form capture on the web.
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Do you feel that the enquiries you receive through the internet do not produce actual customers? Do you feel that the customer is just shopping around and that dealing with these enquiries is just an extra burden that produces no results? If the answer is yes, this guide is for you.
I will share a proven process for successfully converting online enquiries into paying customers. Innovative sales professionals who are successful in converting online enquiries into actual paying customers do this on a daily basis.
The reward for learning this process is immense. More and more customers are beginning their relationships with their service providers online, and the sales process has definitely entered the internet age.
Online is different
Online patient enquiries require a different approach than dealing with traditional enquiries. We all know how to deal with customers who turn up at our business, or call us to book something.
The difference with online enquiries is that now the initial conversation begins by email instead of face to face or via the phone.
Because the customer has contacted you online and has not talked or interacted with you, they have no real relationship with you yet. This carries a very real risk. If they break an appointment with you or stop answering your calls, this is no big deal for them because they don’t know you.
The Secret
The secret to successfully converting customers who send you online enquiries into paid bookings is to build a relationship with the enquirer. Building this relationship requires discipline.
Successful sales professionals tend to follow a similar process for building a relationship with the customer from that first enquiry through to the paid appointment.
The Process
Fast response to the customers’ email enquiries giving all relevant information on the product or service requested.
Follow up with a phone call within 24 hours of sending the email. In this phone call:
ensure that the customer has received your email
answer any immediate questions the customer has
ask the customer for more information about their needs
ask the customer to make some form of follow up commitment, even if it’s just another phone call
The idea here is twofold; first, to get a better idea about how serious the customer is, and second, to help cement the budding relationship.
This commitment helps establish trust between you and the customer. If they are not willing to make any further commitment, this may indicate that trust has not yet been established. Without trust, it is unlikely that this customer is ready to buy from you.
If the customer needs more time to make a decision, arrange another phone call at a specified time and date. Call at exactly this time and date and try to move things forward again, e.g. confirm a time for a consultation, make a booking etc.
If the customer is unsure, repeat step 3. Research shows that if you give up after the initial contact that you will lose more than 50% of your potential customers.
Once you have some initial commitment, you still have to close the sale. As the old saying goes, “Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched”. For clinics using RevaHealth.com we suggest the following checks:
A week before the patient is coming for treatment, call them to confirm that the dates are still suitable.
24 hours before the treatment, call them again to confirm that everything is fine.
Remember: It takes time and persistence for enquiries to turn into sales. For clinics, if you follow the process above, a good rule of thumb is that for every successful conversion from enquiry to booking that you get within 2 months of the enquiry, you will get a further conversion from enquiry to appointment within 2-6 months.
About the author
Owen Cooney
Owen Cooney is a senior sales executive at WhatClinic.com.
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