Simon Palmer, October 2012 - 4 great reasons why you should regularly survey your patients

Your dental practice doesn’t always offer perfect service.

All businesses have some weaknesses in service levels that are usually a blind spot to the business owners. Frankly, dentists can occasionally upset their patients in a myriad of situations that may not be obvious to them as business owners but in ways that they would not put up with themselves if they were in the patient’s shoes.
Sadly, patients that do have a negative experience at your practice are unlikely to confront you with it. They are much more likely to simply tell others about it and/or to just not come back

The key to maximizing patient satisfaction and retention in your practice is to have quality control measures in place that can quickly identify weaknesses in service levels so that they can be fixed quickly when they present themselves.

An essential part of these quality control measures should be to regularly survey your patients anonymously. Here are four great reasons why:

1.       Anonymous surveys provide insight into the patient experience.

People, in general, hold back on feedback unless service levels have reached a threshold of exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.
If you wanted to get a gauge of how you were going as a business and simply asked a patient what they thought of their experiences in your practice you would be unlikely to get honest feedback as, generally, people don’t like to be the bearer of bad news or be confrontational.

Allowing patients to fill in anonymous surveys about their experience gives you a chance at getting an honest bird’s eye view of the patient’s journey through your practice.
It will give you insight into the weaknesses in your service levels and team and an opportunity to fix these patient service leaks. By working on these we can make our business stronger and allow it to grow unhindered.

2.       Contain negative online reviews

Have you ever heard your friends or family tell you about a terrible service experience they had somewhere? A restaurant that forgot their order, kept them waiting or one that looked dirty and unhygienic? A technician or tradesman that overcharged, turned up late or looked unprofessional?
Even the best businesses have bad days when they may be understaffed or be training up a new recruit and service levels aren’t what they should be.

When consumers have a negative service experience, they rarely keep it to themselves. Horror stories of service are often traded over coffee or dinner with friends or family. For the younger generation, these reviews spill over onto the internet and can be posted at a review site like yelp, womo, truelocal or google reviews, or shared on social media sites such as Facebook. While dinner table horror stories fade in people’s recollection, a negative online review is notoriously difficult if not impossible to remove. The consumer’s experience is online for all to see for years.

So the million dollar question is: if you do have a bad day at the practice and the service your practice provided wasn’t what it should be, how do you stop people posting negative reviews online for your business?

The answer is: You don’t – You channel it!

Studies show that people who post a negative review for a business are very unlikely to do so twice. After a negative experience has been written about once, the consumers ‘itch’ to vent their frustration has been satisfied and they move on. By offering your patients the chance to complete an online review and comment about their experience in your practice you are actually channeling any negative review they might have to your survey before they get the chance to vent online.
Surveying your patients regularly can actually help to contain any negative reviews that you may get.

3.       Give staff objective negative feedback

Giving team members negative feedback can be uncomfortable to say the least.
When there are measurable deliverables that haven’t been met by a staff member (like turning up to work on time or supplies that haven’t been ordered) this feedback is at least objective. Many dentists find it harder to give negative feedback about a team member’s patient service levels as it often surrounds things that can be seen by the recipient as just the dentist’s subjective view of things. While the recipient of the feedback may nod their head when receiving the feedback, the scale of the problem and its impact on the practice is often being questioned.

Being able to show negative results from patient surveys is a much easier conversation because the negative feedback and its impact is seen as objective rather than just ‘your opinion’. It is much easier to give the negative feedback from the survey because it is the patients’ negative feedback not yours.

4.       Give staff objective positive feedback.

Patient experience surveys don’t just tell businesses where they are going wrong they also highlight parts of the business that are working and praise-worthy.
The positive feedback that the practices are getting from patient surveys have found some ‘unsung heroes’ of the practice and the results have injected a lot of recognition and energy into the team when they go through the results in team meetings.

Where to get patient surveys

Patient surveys can be not too complicated for a practice to set up on paper or email and send out. However third party solutions (like www.dentalpatientsurveys.com) usually offer considerable advantages such as:

• Greater response ratios (surveys completed as a ratio of those sent out) and honesty in feedback as they are seen as offering an enhanced level of confidentiality over those sent by the practice itself.
• Improves response rates allowing patients to answer by i-Pad or tablet immediately post-appointment.
• Enhanced services like the ability to breakdown results by time period or clinician in a practice, the ability to benchmark practices against each other, social media integration etc

Dental Patient Surveys is a new service launched by Prime Practice and Dentist Job Search to help improve the patient experience. Visit the website at www.dentalpatientsurveys.com to arrange a free trial today.