On August 10^th we are changing our name from RevaHealth.com to WhatClinic.com.

The reasons behind the change are very straightforward. WhatClinic.com is easier to remember, easier to spell, and it does a much better job of explaining what the website does.

These reasons are important because each of them helps increase the traffic to our website, which now stands at over 500,000 people per month, up from 190,000 at the start of the year.

We really want these visitors to remember the name of “that really useful website with all the clinics on it” so they can come back and use us again in the future, helping us to cement a solid user base over time.

Once our visitors can remember our name then they can also recommend us to their friends, and that means even more traffic. With such a simple name there should also be no confusion over the spelling, maximising the effect of any word of mouth recommendations.

For new visitors the name gives a really good indication that the website provides a choice of clinics, which will lead to even higher organic click through from search engine users and help us continue to grow our traffic in yet another way.

In the three years since RevaHealth.com launched we have made fantastic progress towards providing comprehensive information about English speaking health clinics in the UK, Ireland and further afield. As WhatClinic.com we will be taking on that challenge on a global scale.

We’d really like to know what you think about our main website RevaHealth.com, so we’ve set up a short survey about the site. If you take a look at the top right hand corner of your screen you should see a small banner that says “Take Our Survey“. Just click on it and away you go.

One lucky respondent will become the proud owner of a brand new Apple iPad!

Win one of these!

We’ll announce the winner here in June and please feel free to pass on a link to this post to anyone else you know who has used RevaHealth.com in the past. There is one important thing to remember though:

If you want to win the iPad, you have to fill in your email address in the last question of the survey.

You need to give us permission to email you or else we can’t tell you that you’ve won!

Best of luck, and thanks in advance for the feedback.

“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.

The old search results

We deployed an updated version of the RevaHealth.com website last night that focused upon the usability of our main search pages. The goal of these changes is to make it easier for users to refine their search results and increase their engagement with the site.

We are closely monitoring the performance of this change and are expecting to see a noticeable increase in the number of pages viewed by the average visitor. We also expect to see a drop in our bounce rate, however we expect this to be slight. If the test succeeds the next goal will be to convert the increased engagement with the site into delivering value to both the visitor and the clinics featured on the site.

1. We reduced the prominence of the search functionality. While the search boxes are still visible and constantly available we have discovered that the vast majority of our visitors are either interested in further refining their search or broadening it. It is rare that they want to jump into different categories or locations. Eye tracking analysis tells us that putting the search box on the right hand side of the page means that most visitors simply won’t notice it. This works as long as the page is relevant to the visitor, however some users will always land on the wrong page and having the search function available is still important.
2. 

   The new search results

   We logically grouped all of the search functionality into one cohesive unit by putting a white background behind it. Previously the search functionality comprised of three separate items that needed to be tied together into one function by the visitor. Now by strongly visually linking them we hope to have simplified this.
3. We changed the filtering mechanism from tick boxes and radio buttons, replacing them with drop down lists. While we don’t feel the new interface is as elegant or visually appealing as the previous filtering, it is more standard and occupies less real estate. We expect that by adopting the more common practice of drop downs and not forcing our users into learning a relatively unique UI that we will increase the use of this feature. This will give the visitor better and more relevant search results.
4. We increased the size of the title on the page and spaced it out more so that visitors who land on page for the first time can instantly see what the page is about.
5. We added the number of clinics that are returned by a search. So instead of saying ‘All Dentists in XXXX’ we now say ‘All 212 Dentists in XXXX’
6. We have added breadcrumbs into the header of the page for visitors that want to broaden their search criteria. We are not 100% sure about this feature and we expect to do further tests on their placement on the page.

All online enquiries deserve a personalized email response; however your business processes should also include an automated email that is sent immediately once the online enquiry has been submitted.  A well thought out response should include the following five pieces of information:

1. Confirmation that you have received the enquiry.  This reassures the consumer that their enquiry hasn’t fallen into a black hole and your systems are working correctly.  An automated email is standard practice on the internet and the consumer expects it. If you don’t send one then you won’t be meeting their expectations and reducing the chance that they will ever visit your practice for treatment.
2. A time and date when they can expect a personalised response. This allows you to set the consumer’s expectations so that you can then subsequently meet them. If you don’t tell them when they can expect a response then they will create their own expectations, which will probably be unrealistic. If you say in the automated response that you will contact them within the next two days it is critical that you actually do contact them – even if it is only to apologize that there is a delay. If you do delay the response make sure you inform them of when they should expect the new response.
3. Some further information on the clinic. Give the consumer something to read and to think about. Focus on the best aspects of your clinic such as accreditations, specialities, equipment, training, etc.
4. Include two of three real testimonials with full names.  Credibility is absolutely critical here and if your testimonials have been published on 3^rd party sites you should include that fact.
5. Contact Information. A lot of people use email as a crude tool for organizing their life – when they want to contact you in the future they will remember that you emailed them and will search their email. Putting all of your contact information in this mail will maximise the chance that they will contact you in the future even if they don’t come for treatment immediately.

It is nice to be able to personalize the email response to include the patients name and the treatment that they are looking for. This is not critical but if your technology easily allows it then it is a good idea.

Sample Email

Dear [insert the patients name here]

Thanks for your enquiry regarding [insert treatment here] with [insert your clinic name here]

We are currently reviewing your enquiry and will contact you in the next two days.

Clinic Overview
Describe your doctors or dentists experience, qualifications and specialisations- Take this information from your staff listings and add more detail as you like.

Procedures.
Describe the procedures your clinic performs. You should let them know how long the procedure normally takes, the recovery time and the number of visits required. You can include before and after pictures if you have them.

Testimonial 1

“I was very pleased with the treatment and also I was very pleased with the way I was looked after on my visit to the clinic.”  – Alison Benson, Surrey, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)

Testimonial 2

“Despite having been to the dentist every 6 months all my life, I discovered, when I had my first appointment in Budapest, that none of the caps and facades I’d had put on locally fitted properly and my teeth had been quietly rotting away for years (the dentist gave me a mirror so I could see for myself, and I was horrified to see that the teeth underneath were black). Consequently I needed a lot of work. I’d had an estimate in a local clinic of 8 hours and 1300 Euro for just one tooth. The dentist in Budapest did the preparation work on 19 teeth in six and a half hours and the whole thing, including the most expensive crowns available (which are metal-free and therefore look like real teeth) cost around 5000 Euro. The most impressive thing was that because the dentist was so gentle and sympathetic, six and a half hours in the dentist’s chair really wasn’t that bad. It was tiring though and I felt fragile afterwards so the fact that Access Smile then drove me back to where I was staying (and ferried me back and forth to all subsequent appointments) really made a huge difference.” – Daniel Smith, London, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)

Contact information.
The patient may wish to contact you. Give them email, phone and website information for your clinic. Tell them the hours of business for your clinic and don’t forget to include the time zone – tell them hours before or after GMT.

Patient Coordinators Full Name

A lot of sales experts are going to tell you that the goal of any sales process should be to maximise the number of prospects you can move from one level of the sales funnel to the next. At RevaHealth.com we find that this goal can result in clinics using their limited resources inefficiently, and effort being wasted on enquiries that are never going to result in business.

At every stage of the sales funnel you are going to have prospects that are never going to convert into business. This could be for any number of reasons, including: they can’t afford the treatment, they aren’t suitable for the treatment, they are a competitor researching your clinic, they live too far away, etc. A clinic’s business process needs to maximise the number of prospects that can result in business while excluding the prospects that will never result in business.

There are three key ways in which to achieve this:

1. Exceed or meet the prospect expectations
2. Provide them with sufficient information to allow them to exclude themselves
3. Ask questions so that you can exclude unsuitable prospects

Converting Website Visitors into Online Enquiries

Visitors to your website are expecting to be able to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily. They are not expecting site originality or artistic flair, they have come for information; give it to them as quickly as possible without cluttering your site. You should try and follow standard web conventions in the design and structure of your website and make it easy for the visitor to get to the following information:

• Phone number and contact form
• Opening hours
• Address
• Map
• Prices
• Testimonials

Your goal is to give the visitor this information while also building trust. Trust can be built in two ways through a website: transparency and personal information. Transparency can be provided with clear pricing information and candid descriptions of your core specialities. It can also be useful to mention the services you do not provide to avoid any confusion. Personal information can be provided through staff profiles and the use of pictures.

If you meet the visitor’s expectations, the next stage is to channel them into creating an email enquiry. This will typically only ever be a small percentage of your visitors, but hopefully will include a large percentage of the visitors who are actually interesting in purchasing a treatment from your clinic.

A common question we are asked is what percentage of visitors you should expect to create an enquiry. Unfortunately this is an impossible question as the single biggest variable is how ‘qualified’ the visitors to your website are. In this instance ‘qualified’ means how interested your typical visitor is in purchasing one of your treatments.

An example we commonly quote is a clinic in London that has written exceptional descriptions of the health problem they treat. These descriptions attract hundreds of visitors per day, however most of these visitors are just looking for information – they are not interested in getting treatment. This clinic converts under 2% of all visitors into online enquiries.

However, as a general guide, if you are not converting at least 5% of your visitors into online enquiries you should look to your website for potential problems.

Email Enquiries

When consumers submit an online enquiry they expect two things. First of all, they expect an automated response that informs them that you have actually received their enquiry and tells them when they can expect a response. It is a good idea to take advantage of this email to highlight the key benefits of your clinic and include contact information. In this way a consumer will always have easy access to this information even if they can’t find your website again.

Secondly, they expect a personal email that directly addresses their query. This second email should be sent no later than one business day after the initial enquiry was received. If this is not possible then an additional email should be sent explaining the delay.

The email that you send to the customer is your first real chance to start building a relationship with them. The key elements in building that relationship are to personalize the email to the consumer (it is vital that you do not sent a stock email) and to be as transparent and candid as possible.

It is easy to enter into an email dialog with the customer at this stage but remember that the goal of this stage in the sales funnel is to get the customer to the next stage. You should always try and progress the email dialog into a phone call. The purpose of this stage is to give the customer sufficient information and trust in your clinic to move them to that stage. At the same time it gives you the opportunity to weed out the time wasters.

If the customer will not engage with you on the phone then there is very little chance that they will visit your clinic. Only in a rare case is it worth expending significant effort on a potential patient that will not schedule a phone conversation. Typically this means that they are not prepared to commit to the next level of relationship.

This could be for any number of reasons – perhaps they were just comparing prices, perhaps they can’t afford it, etc. All personal emails sent to a customer should either be asking for a suitable time to call or setting a time for when you will call.

A Note On Having The Consumer Phone You Directly

A common question that we are asked is: if the goal of an email enquiry is to get the customer to talk to us on the phone, why don’t we skip the email enquiry step and just publish our phone number on our website?

First of all, it is important to put your phone number on the website in case the visitor actually wants to call you. However, it is also vital that you have a contact form and we argue that this is the desired route that you want to encourage your visitors to follow.

The reason for this is that if a consumer calls you they have a reasonable expectation that they will talk to an informed person who will be able to answer their questions. However, the person best qualified to talk to the consumer may well be busy when they call. It is better that you agree a time with the consumer when the right person can speak to them.

In some cases the consumer will get an answering machine (don’t forget your visitors will be on your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). A contact form is always available. It allows you time to research the consumer’s query and be properly prepared to directly address their concerns in a way that exceeds their expectations.

Phone Call

The consumer expects you to call at the specified time, or if they are calling you they expect that the relevant person will be available. They expect the person that they talk to will be able to speak specifically to their personal enquiry. They do not necessarily expect that person to have all the answers, but they do expect them to be knowledgeable, friendly, polite, understanding and non-judgmental.

Once you have succeeded in getting someone to talk to you, you have a real opportunity to start building a relationship. While you might have spent a lot of effort on your website and with the email dialog, all that did was to get the customer on the phone. So, no matter how good your website is, if you don’t manage to build a relationship with them on the phone then they are simply not going to purchase treatment from your clinic.

Face to Face

This is now getting back to your core business. You have brought the potential customer from the online world to the physical world and it is now up to your normal business processes to close the sale.

However, like all of the previous stages of your pipeline, once you have got the person to this stage everything that went before matters very little. Even if you have exceeded the customer’s expectation in all of the previous stages, you must at least meet their expectations at this stage.

Repeat and Referral Business

This is the ultimate goal that you should have for ever visitor to your website. Nothing is more profitable for your business than having a customer return for future treatment. You have already built the relationship with them and do not have to bring them through the sales pipeline again.

New Supplier Site - July 2009

The first thing you are going to notice when you log in is that the colours have changed from light pastel shades to a more solid blues and blacks. The contrast has been increased to aid usability and readability. Over the coming month we will be migrating these colour changes through the consumer site as well in order to achieve a consistent look and feel.

The clinic interface has been radically cleaned up which should make it much easier to navigate. The clinic’s profile is now displayed to the clinic in exactly the same way that it is to the consumer with the exception of additional edit controls. This makes it easier to find a section if you want to edit it and also provides immediate feedback as to how it is going to look to a potential patient.

All of the settings have now been collapsed into a single page which makes it simpler to get to the information that you want.

By far the biggest change to the product is the enquiry management interface. We have been in deep discussion with a number of leading clinics about the problems that they face in dealing effectively with online patient enquiries. There is a recognition that the main purpose of having an online presence is to generate enquiries, however without the tools and processes in place they simply aren’t being dealt with as effectively as they could be.

Now when you log into your RevaHealth.com account you will be brought directly to your enquiry management screen. This lists out all of the enquiries that you have in order of the due date of the task associated with each enquiry. As you complete each task you are prompted to create the next task until the enquiry is either booked or archived. This simple tool provides a lightweight process that helps clinics ensure that they are responding to potential patients in a timely fashion throughout the consultation period.

New Features

1. Get a website. All clinics will now be able to get a website with their own domain name through RevaHealth.com. This is the most cost effective and quickest way for a clinic to get an online presence. The website can then be edited and maintained through the RevaHealth.com interface or for clinics without Internet access by fax. This feature has a promotional price of €350 per year.
2. All clinics will now be able to turn off the contact form and only display their phone number. A lot of clinics do not monitor their email frequently and providing a contact form in these instances only gives the consumer a poor experience as they may have to wait several days for a response.
3. Tasks. All patient enquiries can now have a task with a due date associated with it. Enquiries are displayed by default in the order of when the task is due. This feature is available to all clinics.
4. Import enquiries. Enquiries come from a lot of sources and we realize that providing a management solution for just RevaHealth.com enquires is a partial solution. Therefore all paid accounts will be able to import enquiries into their RevaHealth.com account so that they can manage them all through the one interface.
5. Add a review. Clinics can now add reviews from consumers themselves through the web interface. These reviews are clearly labelled as having been added directly by the clinic. This feature is available to all clinics.
6. Pictures for treatments. All paid accounts can now add pictures to their treatments.
7. Warning and alerts have been introduced into every page, informing you when important information is missing or when something needs your attention.

Features that have been removed

A range of small features have been removed that had very poor adoption rates. The removal of features is vital to any product if it is going to remain usable. We realize that some clinics use these features; however their continued support cannot be justified.

1. The facilities tab has been moved and the information that used to be there has been combined into the details tab.
2. Several fields have been removed from the staff section such as ‘place of birth’. The fields that have been removed are all rarely used (less than 2% adoption).
3. Various lists have been cleared of unused facilities, services and treatments.

This part of the site has stayed much the same for most of this year, but we always felt it was a bit too complicated to use properly. So, we set about reworking it from the ground up, making it easier to use and hopefully more useful too. It will be going live to our suppliers next week all going to schedule.

One new feature we’re going to be offering is giving clinics the ability to create their own website, www.myclinicswebsite.com, without having to go near a computer. These days the majority of people looking up a phone number or an address are turning to the web to find it, yet the majority of clinics don’t have their own web presence. We can solve that problem for clinics with the minimum of fuss.

Full details of both the new supplier site and the new website service will be posted here next week.

The purpose of the Tuesday Push is to “make some noise about ourselves [the small but growing tech community in Ireland] by picking a good example of an Irish Tech Company and highlighting their product(s) every second Tuesday”. It’s a way of increasing the visibility of our sector, one company at a time, and also a way of fostering a community in the industry through honest feedback.

So, let’s get the easy part out of the way. Has being the subject of the Tuesday Push benefited us? Absolutely, but maybe not in the ways that people might have expected. We certainly haven’t gotten any extra (traditional) media or press attention out of it yet, and in terms of extra traffic, we’ve only had around 150 visits to the site or the blog originating from the articles that were written about us (excluding any mentions on Twitter).

We did however get two things that were invaluable to us. Honest feedback, and links to the site.

The feedback was largely positive, but a few people did either run into problems using the site or didn’t like the way some of it worked. This was great to hear, especially because they gave real examples of what their problems or dislikes were. Some of the problems were new to us, others were ongoing issues. We have fixed or are planning to fix all of them. The dislikes were more varied, and often design related (not our strongest area by any stretch of the imagination!). We’ve taken them all on board and we hope that we will get to address as many of these as possible over time.

The push has definitely introduced us to more members of the community than we knew beforehand, which is great, and has also increased awareness of RevaHealth.com and our blog within the community itself, which can only be a good thing.

Links-wise, here are the numbers:

Those numbers might not look very big to some people, but ultimately those links are going to help us get better positions in Google and the other search engines. The links come from 15 different sites, many of which have never linked to us before. Also of interest to us was the number of people who mentioned and linked to our blog. We’re really pleased that people are finding it useful and we’re going to continue writing for it as often as we can.

Being the subject of the Tuesday Push has definitely been a very positive experience for RevaHealth.com. If you have the time to spare to give an upcoming Tuesday Push company a little feedback and a link, they will hopefully learn from it as much as we have and appreciate it as much as we do.

What can we do to help improve the Tuesday Push? First up, tell people you know about it and ask them to take part. Secondly, try and get some media to mention it regularly. Newstalk radio and Innovation in the Irish Times spring to mind.

Maps

Previously when you looked at the map page in our search results you were presented with just the clinics from the search result. While this made some sense, it wasn’t particularly useful as we had to make the maps static in order to keep page load times down.

Ideally, we wanted the maps to be another way for people to search for clinics, which meant making them interactive again. To do this, and not impact on our page load time, we split each map off onto it’s own page, which has the added benefit of giving them their own URL so we can SEO the map pages separately from the search results pages.

Map of Doctors (GPs) in Cork City

Our map pages are now active. For example, take a look at our map of doctors in Cork city. If you’re from Cork, or in Cork, you should be able to tell at a glance if there’s a doctor near where you are. Where we have the information, we’ve added the price of a general consultation to the map. You can click through to the contact form for each clinic or view their full listing directly from the map too.

As with all new features, we’ll be looking closely at how our visitors use the map to see what we can do to improve it over time, but for now we’re happy to provide what we hope will be another useful service for the public.

Two New Levels of Membership for Health Clinics

We have received a tremendous amount of interest from single professional clinics, such as physiotherapists and general practitioners. They want more than just our Free Listing but don’t have the demand to justify a Pro Listing, and to date we haven’t had a listing to match their requirements. Our new Solo Listing will hopefully be of some interest to these clinics. We have also introduced an Ultimate Listing for large clinics demanding the highest levels of promotion.

Solo Listing

Solo Listings are available to clinics with a single health practitioner treating patients outside of the fields of dentistry and cosmetic surgery. The benefits of a Solo Listing include larger search results, unlimited email enquires and the removal of external advertising from the clinic’s brochure. Solo Listings cost €20 per month or €200 per year.

Ultimate Listing

The Ultimate Listing gives clinics much more than Pro membership. Search results are larger and the clinic is promoted on the front page of RevaHealth.com. In addition to the normal search listing the clinic is also advertised on the right of the page for all relevant search results. Ultimate Listings are available from €750 a month or €7,500 annually.

Our new sign-up page (May 2009)

Clinics that would like to avail of these new types of listing can sign-up directly on RevaHealth.com.