By Griffin Jones and Stephanie Linder
“Marketing throws the ball, but the practice has to catch it,”--Rita Gruber.
Digital marketing and physician referrals lead prospective fertility patients to contact you. Then what?
They move into the second phase of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey, Leads (New Patient Inquiries) to Initial Consult. And just because prospective patients have submitted a web form or called the clinic, doesn’t mean they actually book. Let’s look at how to fix that.
You may use the term new patient inquiry instead of lead. They are the same thing. A lead is any phone call, web form, fax or chat requesting a new appointment or seeking information prior to scheduling.
The way in which your staff responds to the first prospective patient interaction, determines the conversion to initial consultation. If you don’t have the right processes and properly trained people, you lose new patients before they even schedule.
And the point isn’t just to get them in the door, either.
Positive and negative patient experiences start at the first point of contact - often a phone call or the response to a web form/chat. Expectations and rapport are built and broken from the very beginning.
Fertility Bridge estimates that as many as 20% of negative fertility center reviews come from people who haven't yet had a consult. Patient dissatisfaction is often a result of unmet expectations that weren’t set early in the process.
MEASURING CONVERSION % FROM FERTILITY PATIENT INQUIRY TO INITIAL CONSULTATION
Two key performance indicators (KPI) measure how well your fertility center converts leads.
1) Total # New Patient Appointment
2). Lead conversion %
Lead Conversion % = New Patient Appointment / Total Leads
One individual must be accountable for these KPIs.
The Lead Conversion System
At least 50% of your leads should be converted to appointments. If it’s less than 50%, you must analyze and revise your system immediately. This is the system to increase that percentage.
Dedicate a new patient line
Have a specialized new patient scheduling team
Unify scheduling across offices and providers
Answer the Phone
Offer the appointment
Book shortest wait list
Respond to voicemails and web forms within specified time
Record Lead Interaction
Clearly identify next steps
1) Dedicate New Patient Line and Form
Current fertility patients and prospective fertility patients have different needs. Having a phone line and an online request appointment form that separates new patient inquiries from current patient call backs allows your staff to better manage both patient types.
2) Specialized New Patient Scheduling Team
Multi-tasking is detrimental to both lead conversion and patient satisfaction. It can cause frustration when a front desk person has to schedule a new patient call, fetch a medical record, and check in a consult simultaneously.
A dedicated role or team also decreases voicemails, unanswered phone calls and hangups. It reduces the time required for your staff to play phone tag and increases new appointments booked.
3) Unify Scheduling across offices and providers
When prospective patients have to be transferred from (or worse, hang up and call) one office to another, they often do call…another fertility center. Your new patient call center is responsible for booking every office equally based on availability without preference to an assigned office or doctor.
4) Answer The Phone
Missed calls are a great source of new patient appointments...for another fertility center. They are also as good for your patient’s experience as your cable company’s phone tree is for you. Make a plan to hire the adequate number of staff and use data to ensure coverage during the busiest days/hours.
5) Offer the appointment
When prospective patients call with questions, most staff members answer the question at face value and go no further. In order to increase conversion, mandate your staff “ask for the appointment” at least once with every prospective patient, regardless of the question being asked. Consistently offering and asking for the appointment makes an immediate impact on your KPIs, costs $0, and is a process that can be implemented today.
6) Book Shortest Waitlist
The longer the wait, the higher the risk of lost appointments, cancellations, and no-shows.
In a multi-physician group, when your waitlist is longer than 4 weeks it is the role of the call center to suggest a doctor with a shorter waitlist.
Your call center won’t offer earlier slots with a different physician than requested without your blessing. Some docs cringe at this idea. Make sure your staff knows it’s OK and that the most important part is that the patient stay in your clinic ecosystem. Do you want to be a single provider or do you want to be a practice owner?
7) Respond to all voicemails and digital inquiries
Avoid being nailed by a negative review that comes from people who’ve never even seen you for a consultation. Set specific expectations of call back time on your online contact forms’ thank you pages and voicemail. The sooner you respond the better, but you must be able to exceed the expectation. It’s far better for their perception of you to say “you will hear back from us in 72 hours” and get back to them in 48 than to say “you will hear back from us in 24 hours” and get back to them in 36.
You should always follow up more than once, but the cadence of lead nurturing is a topic for another article.
8) Record Lead Interaction
Document your interactions in a customer relationship management software (CRM). Using this data will help you identify drop off, automate follow up, and nurture prospective patients with helpful information.
9) Clearly Identify Next Steps
Before ending the interaction, your new patient team should set three clear expectations about what happens between now and the appointment:
Welcome Sequence Correspondence
Medical records and patient portal
Appt time, correct patient info and acknowledgment of next steps
CONVERT MORE INQUIRIES TO NEW PATIENTS
We’ve given you an actionable process for converting new fertility patient inquiries to new consultations, but we didn’t talk much about what your team needs to deliver concierge service. How your team responds to these patients is likely even more important than when they do it.
If you would like Fertility Bridge’s help in improving your fertility center’s lead to new appointment percentage, or how to implement the steps listed above - book a Goal and Competitive Diagnostic meeting below.
