The patient acquisition cycle begins at the moment the patient has the first contact with you, your clinic, or office, and continues with quality care that aims to achieve their retention as loyal customers. These, in turn, recommend your business, which continues to attract even more customers through referrals.

To provide an exceptional patient experience, it is first necessary to understand the expectations of your patients and to know how to stand out from them. You will also need to promote yourself to increase trust and security among your existing patients so that it also helps to bring in more recommendations and new patients.

Check below the 5 fundamental steps that will help to bring more patients to your clinic, so that they can always return and recommend your work.

Understand patients' expectations and needs

To begin, you must first understand the points for improvement as a provider. For this, it is necessary to know the expectations and needs of their patients. And who, besides your patients, could tell you better about it?

Ask the patient to answer satisfaction surveys or simply review the results of surveys you may have already done. Such action is necessary so that you can understand what bothers your patients regarding the quality of the consultations and the customer service provided by your team. Also, check out what your patients are saying about you on review sites.

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Identify your target audience based on demographics

It is important to take note of the target audience for each area based on their demographics such as age, gender, location, etc. This will help in the creation and execution of more specific marketing campaigns and also in the optimization of your online marketing activities.

On the Ninsaúde Apolo home screen, you can obtain demographic data about the clients of your business based on gender, in addition to the services and agreements that generate more care in the clinic. Other graphs can help you in this matter, such as the heat map, for example. To find out how it works, check out our article "How to know if your clinic is well located".

Conduct satisfaction surveys

It’s important to get involved in discussions focused on topics related to diagnosis, treatment, team communication, and hospitality with your patients, be it face to face asking questions about their opinions (as they go through their treatment procedure), or in social media chats and patient portals.

By showing empathy for your patients and their concerns, you can understand your emotions in a more friendly and accurate way. Although you can speak directly to your patients for better understanding, it is also important to understand and keep a record of each of your responses and do an analysis on them. Furthermore, it is not very likely that your patients will openly share all emotions with you, not least because there will not always be enough time to discuss this with each of your patients.

With software-operated surveys, in addition to understanding your patients ’opinions much better, you will also be able to keep a report of them, all done with a complete analysis of how your patients feel and the intensity of their emotions. In the Ninsaúde Apolo software, for example, it is possible to create such surveys and ask the patient to respond at the reception or home, sending them by e-mail. Find out more about it in our article: "How to create an effective satisfaction survey for your clinic".

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Create referral programs for patients

Creating referral programs means conducting internal marketing practices in your clinic, logically focusing on increasing patient referrals. What does that mean? By engaging your patients in an interactive conversation and empathizing with their concerns, you can, for example, show short, informative commercials in simple language (during waiting times) about ways to help other patients in practice. If you use Ninsaúde Apolo, you can insert these commercials on screen through the call panel functionality.

Another effective practice is to ask your patients to leave comments on social media or your website, helping to improve your online reputation. Make it easy by sending a link to post an assessment right after they leave the office, this practice also helps to get more patients on the Internet route. An example of this is Google My Business, where your patients can comment on the experience in your clinic, and leave a public assessment. If you don't know how this tool works, check out our article "How to attract patients through digital content".

You can also try some more proactive measures, like making calls to each of your birthday patients at the end of the day, to show empathy and compassion, sending birthday cards, or using the email marketing module (available at Ninsaúde Apolo), where you can send personalized messages to your patients without leaving the system.

Build strong ties with professionals and reference offices

Building strong, mutually beneficial relationships with referral practices will help bring more patients to your clinic. By ensuring optimal communication from professional to professional, and privileged care for patients referred by them, you can easily ensure a strong and lasting relationship with these partners.

An important aspect of ideal communication also involves the transfer of relevant clinical information, in both directions (referral from a doctor to referred doctor). To provide privileged care to your referred patients, arrange with the front desk staff to promptly serve the referred patients, provide a quick consultation for them, and don't let them wait too long.

It is important to remember that when providing privileged care to referred patients, it does not mean that you should fail to provide quality care to your regular patients. After all, you must promote internal referrals through all types of patients.

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For more tips like this, keep following our blog. If you still don't use management software in your clinic or office, get to know Ninsaúde Apolo. Get in touch with our sales team and ask all your questions. Go to the Apolo. app website.