The best way to ensure growth for your healthcare franchise is to focus on the customer experience. One method to tracking this is through a Net Promoter Score, which helps determine who many of your customers are satisfied with their experience at your business.
Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help inform you how you need to improve the customer experience. It provides a measure of your customers’ overall perception of your healthcare franchise, and sheds light on every aspect of their journey.
If you don’t place importance on the customer experience, it doesn’t matter if you’re providing the best medical care in the area. If a patient doesn’t have a positive experience at your clinic, either with your receptionist, the doctor, or even with the waiting room, they won’t recommend your office. Your business should thrive on referrals and word of mouth, so if you’re not encouraging that behavior, something needs to change.
In order to obtain this Net Promoter Score, it starts with a one-question survey that should be sent to every customer as soon as they exit your clinic. Try sending the survey via text, as the response rate is 15-40 percent higher than emails. And if they’re sent right away, you’ll get a timely response that allows you to react in real time to a less-than-stellar rating.
The question that’s proven to get the most helpful results is:
“Using a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend [your clinic here] to a friend or colleague?”
This will elicit a gut-reaction of how much they enjoyed the service they received at your healthcare franchise. From there, you can categorize the responses as follows:
- Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will return and tell others about you, helping you grow.
- Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic patients who may consider your competitors.
- Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy patients who can hurt your business and growth through negative word-of-mouth.
Now that you have these numbers, you can calculate the NPS. Count the percentage of promoters and detractors, then subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The score could be anywhere from -100 if you have all Detractors, or 100 if all Promoters.
Your NPS score will quickly help you determine if you are providing a positive customer experience. This feedback is invaluable, and will show you how you need to improve your healthcare franchise.
Compare your score against industry benchmarks and compare your clinic to other growing companies. Make changes based on feedback to improve your business and your score. You should send this survey to every single patient to continue gathering data and track your customer feedback.