By Kathy Houser and Griffin Jones
“You only get one chance to make a first impression”
Think about how important it is to a fertility practice. You can invest everything you want in branding, advertising, and a nice building. But if your prospective patient's first interaction with your team betrays that first impression, the result may be even worse.
First impressions not only get people in the door, they set the expectations for the process in which fertility patients need to trust you all but implicitly. In order for the first points of contact with your clinic to be the gold standard of concierge service, their goals must be aligned with those of the practice and the patient.
That’s why we’re using the broad term of New Fertility Patient Concierge Team instead of separate terms like call center, digital chat team, or new patient navigators.
In other resources, we’ll talk about the structures of those roles, but in this article, we’re giving you the six pillars for aligning this team with the measured growth and improvement of your IVF center.
They are
Practice Goals
Team Outcomes
Team Profile
Education/Coaching
Recognition/Evaluation
Incentives
1. PRACTICE GOALS:
New patient concierges aren’t just people that answer your phone. They positively or negatively impact at least four major business goals of any fertility center.
Patient satisfaction
New patient visits
Specific provider volume increase
Targeted region/office volume increase
When the roles aren’t aligned with specific practice business goals, the systems for how they are evaluated, incentivized, and hired become expensive and counterproductive.
2. TEAM OUTCOMES
The New Patient Concierge Team doesn’t have total control over the business goals, but you can measure their impact by these key performance indicators (KPI):
New patient appointments scheduled
Total
By team member
Relative to goal
Year over year
Month over month
Conversion to appointment
Cancellations rescheduled
3. TEAM PROFILE
To put the right person in a concierge seat, we are looking for someone who is lower (but not too low) in competitive drive and high in empathy and compassion. They take pride in being a resource.
To find the right candidate who does not mind repetitive actions and thrives on helping others
1. Use a personality assessment
Such as The Caliper Profile. For empathy, this test screens for “a combination of traits that can help you see how well a person reads a room” and “Are they flexible or rigid?” That’s extremely insightful when hiring someone who has to be responsive to customers or in our case, patients. Once an applicant or employee takes the Caliper Profile their results are measured against one or more validated job models. For this role, the candidate needs to score high in critical competencies such as “relationship building” and “composure and resilience”.
In Meyer Briggs for example, the perfect fit might be a Discoverer Advocate. The obligatory disclaimer on personality tests: They are a useful tool for seeing how likely someone is to be a good fit for their seat. One’s tested personality type does not universally qualify or disqualify them from a role.
2. Promote the mission
Promote the sense of pride of providing people struggling with infertility with hope.The life changing and highly personal service they provide is a motivator, for the right people in these seats.
3. Pay above customer service industry average
The cost of living index varies across markets, but the range for a concierge customer service person is between $20-$27 per hour.
If the range seems higher than what you would pay for someone who isn’t exceptionally money-motivated, consider two things. The first is the rate of inflation and the increase of resignations and wage expectations in 2022. The Great Resignation is occurring amid rising inflation, and as employers face the tightest labor market in recent history. The latest inflation reading from the Consumer Price Index (published 12/10/21) came in at 6.8%, the highest year-over-year increase since 1982.
The second is the outcomes for which these personnel are responsible for achieving. When their alignment with growth in business goals is measured by the aforementioned KPIs, they’re clearly worth the investment. We will further detail how to outline their incentives with the goals of the fertility practice.
4. EDUCATION/COACHING:
Your call center and new patient navigators must be experts in particular topics about the clinic and infertility. There can be no concierge level service without mastery of the material.
There are at least twelve elements in the syllabus that every call center and new patient concierge must know cold. If you’d like Fertility Bridge’s curriculum for new patient concierges, we provide full guidance for this in our Lead Conversion System.
Lastly, in the bucket of education and coaching, if you find that a particular team member is not performing to the level of the others, it is necessary to “coach up” or move them out of that role, as a negative attitude or lack of skill set frustrates and demotivates the rest.
5. RECOGNITION:
Methods of recognition create an atmosphere of team and individual accomplishment. They reinforce that all team members are striving for the same goals and success.
It is important to systemize recognition above other incentives to support the natural personality motivators of the concierge team.
Here are four ways of motivating your concierge team using their own internal drivers:
Tally Board
Practice-wide email
Thank You Board
In which anyone can post a thank you to anyone else in the office.
Where staff and potentially patients can see it. Keeping it in staff only areas such as the kitchen won’t allow patients to appreciate your amazing culture of internal support.
Patient Compliment Repository
From social media, online reviews, patient satisfaction surveys
6. INCENTIVES:
You’ve intentionally selected people who are motivated by helping others and you’ve established a system of recognition to ensure they perceive that benefit of the job.
Because the tasks of an ongoing new patient welcome team are on-going, every day, endeavors, we have to be careful about additional incentives. We don’t want to book new patient visits at all costs. Hiring someone who is too high on competitive drive and gearing their compensation plan too much toward booked appointments is a recipe for pressuring new patients. We don’t want that.
We do want to help people who are struggling to build their family to be able to get expertise from a fertility specialist.
Using incentives for reaching goals should be limited and attainable, otherwise, you will do more harm than good.The incentives should:
Connect to one of the desired outcomes whether it’s for the team or an individual
Review and recognize weekly
Reward monthly or quarterly
Reference core values
Rewards for Achieving Goals
Gift cards
Customized gift baskets
Event tickets
Team lunch
Use of desirable parking spot for a week if employees are on site
Align Your New Patient Concierges’ Goals with Those of Practice and Patients
The folks you hire to answer your phones are so much more than just that. They are the first point of contact for potential patients, they set the tone and convey confidence and knowledge from the first interaction. Employ the six pillars to set your concierge team up for success. Use personality assessment tools, hire well, train and invest in the people who greet and attend to callers into your practice and you will see the benefits over and over again.
Fertility Bridge has a proven system and dedicated staff for improving and empowering new fertility patient concierge teams. If you’d like our help, enroll in the Goal Diagnostic here and we will be happy to discuss the framework with you.
