Good and Bad First Impressions: 6 Pillars of a New Fertility Patient Concierge Team

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

1. Practice Goals

2. Team Outcomes

3. Team Profile

4. Education/Coaching

5. Recognition/Evaluation

6. 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.

1. Patient satisfaction

2. New patient visits

3. Specific provider volume increase

4. 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):

1. New patient appointments scheduled

   • Total

   • By team member

   • Relative to goal

   • Year over year

   • Month over month

2. Conversion to appointment

3. 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:

1. Tally Board

2. Practice-wide email

3. 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.

4. 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:

1. Connect to one of the desired outcomes whether it’s for the team or an individual

2. Review and recognize weekly

3. Reward monthly or quarterly

4. 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.

Brand vs Reputation: 4 Competitive Disadvantages for Fertility Business Owners

By Griffin Jones

“Our reputation speaks for itself,”

Does it?

Young, massively funded companies are entering the reproductive health space and developing widely recognizable brands to a population that had been generally unfamiliar with the field.

Established fertility companies often attempt to counter these branding advantages with their reputation. 

Reputation is extremely valuable for all of us business owners in the reproductive health space, but especially for fertility specialists. Even when process complaints and negative outcomes make an REI’s rating less than five stars, you still have a proud reputation. You’ve dedicated your career--one which very few other people can do--to help people have families. Your reputation deserves respect.

Still, reproductive health companies that make little distinction between brand and reputation are at a competitive disadvantage.

Brand and reputation overlap. They can work with or against each other. But they are not the same.

In the absence of the intentional formula ‘reputation plus brand’, a fertility business suffers from the default equations of ‘reputation minus brand’ or ‘brand minus reputation’.

“Brand is about relevance and differentiation. Reputation is about legitimacy” 

“A strong brand helps communicate that the company and its offerings are relevant and uniquely able to meet customer needs. A solid reputation is desirable because all businesses ultimately depend (either directly or indirectly) on the goodwill of the governments and communities in which they operate”. From 'Don’t Confuse Reputation With Brand' by Richard Ettenson and Jonathan Knowles

In the case of your fertility practice or reproductive health company, your reputation amounts to what is said about you by these five groups

1. Patients/clients

2. Peers

3. Employees

4. People you do business with

5. Media
   

Patients

On social media, on online review sites like Google and FertilityIQ, in patient support groups like RESOLVE and Fertility Matters. Through patient satisfaction feedback platforms like Press Gainey or Net Promoter Score.

Peers

If you are a physician this includes colleagues in the field, but also includes aspiring providers, referring providers, and competitors. At ASRM and other conferences. In private conversation

Employees: 

On LinkedIn and sites like Glassdoor. At networking events and your own office.

People you do business with: Your vendors, expert advisors. How you treat them and pay them gets around, too.

Media: 

The coverage that you do or don’t have from reporting outlets.

Reputation isn’t always fair. It is what it is. It doesn’t matter if one negative story in the press is a stain on your search results. It doesn’t matter if competitors drag your name through the mud, if a few former employees have an ax to grind, or if some former IVF patients take a negative outcome out on you. A sterling reputation is hard to come by.

A strong reputation is not necessarily equatable to a strong brand, either. And vise versa.

BRAND IS WHAT YOU SHOW OF YOURSELF

While reputation is what your five constituencies perceive and say about you, brand is what you give them to recognize you and associate with you (or not). Reputation is sometimes reactive. Brand is meant to be proactive.

Brand does at least four things that reputation does not do. It 

1. Multiplies 

2. Differentiates

3. Expresses, and

4. Promises
   

1. Multiplies
   The simplest definition of brand is simply, a mark. No; logos, slogans, taglines, and ambassadors are not in and of themselves, a brand. Nowhere close. Still, these symbols allow companies to scale their message and perception to a magnitude and readiness that reputation cannot.
   “Brand functions as a multiplier” -Mark Di Somma, Brand Strategy Insider.
   

2. Differentiates
   The purest form of differentiation is recognition. A successful brand allows each of the aforementioned groups  to recognize an organization’s position and differentiate it from its competitors instantly. An artisan coffee shop may have a wonderful reputation, but you recall Starbucks’ mocha lattes, the way they name the sizes of their drinks, and how they write your name on the cup just by seeing their logo.
   

3. Expresses
   We’ve chosen to split the concept of brand identification into the two concepts of differentiation and expression because differentiation allows consumers to identify you out of a crowd, while expression allows them to use you as part of how they identify themselves.
   
   There is an abundance of research, including this study from Elsevier, that shows how “consumers seek new ways in which they can express their personal identity through brands”. The more our field serves and works with newer generations, the more they use brands to express themselves. 
   
   “The core of Gen Z is the idea of manifesting individual identity. Consumption therefore becomes a means of self-expression.” - (From McKinsey & Company,  ‘True Gen’: Generation Z and its implications for companies’  byTracy Francis and Fernanda Hoefel
   

4. Promises
   Reputation is the judgment of your promise. Brand is the promise. Patients and clients set their own expectations in the absence, and sometimes in spite, of a clear promise. The more strongly your brand reinforces your promise, the more you are able to impact the measure by which you are judged.

REPUTATION PLUS BRAND

When fertility companies fail to distinguish the difference between brand and reputation, they are at a competitive disadvantage because of how reputation and brand bolster or undermine one another. 

Reputation and brand overlap because they are both born of positioning and culture, but they are not equally synonymous.

In the absence of the intentional formula ‘reputation plus brand’, fertility business owners are left with the results of ‘reputation minus brand’ or ‘brand minus reputation’.

Consider the four advantages that a robust brand is meant to secure for your company. The last two, expression and promise, are particular vulnerabilities for reproductive health companies.

If you would like to further explore the brand and reputation potential of your fertility business, we address that in our Goal and Competitive Diagnostic.