How to Surprise and Delight Your Members on the Day of an Appointment
We’ve talked a lot about the patient journey and how so much of the foundation for an amazing experience is done before the appointment. Here, we’ll focus more closely on activities on and around the big day.
Creating a world-class patient experience is about more than welcoming patients when they walk through the door. Delivering on the promise of an excellent patient experience consistently requires a level of planning and process implementation you might not expect. Clarifying and codifying your processes that foster the patient experience sets your team up for success in three primary ways, or in the Three Es:
- Empowerment
- Efficiency
- Empathy
Empowerment saves everyone time, efficiency saves the practice money, and empathy supplies emotional fulfillment, for both your members and your staff.
An empowered, efficient, empathetic staff creates a healthcare experience patients can buy into, and it also creates a practice culture staff can buy into. You need buy-in on both sides to succeed.
Why Getting This Piece Right Matters
The pre-appointment activities we discussed previously — everything from marketing to your first interaction to onboarding — set the patient’s expectations for their first appointment and their relationship with your practice. Now that they’ve become a member, it’s time to deliver on those expectations.
How do you meet those expectations? More importantly, how do you meet them consistently? The secret is processes.
Though some of the activities below may seem simple enough that you wouldn’t need training or process to accomplish them, don’t be fooled. Not everyone has the same skill sets or understanding of customer service, and it’s easy for seemingly simple things to fall through the cracks.
Take empathy, for example. Not everyone is born with a high degree of innate empathy, which means training and processes around this quality are crucial. When staff are not only encouraged but trained to be empathetic, patients notice. They’re reassured about their investment AND your staff feels more fulfilled about the service they’re providing.
Below, we’ll discuss seven key best practices to incorporate into your processes to ensure you surprise and delight your patients with world-class service from their very first appointment.
Key #1: Confirm the Appointment
This first point might seem obvious, but we have a couple twists on the traditional method. Here is a simple one: It’s best to confirm an appointment with patients 24 hours ahead of time.
Many practices today use electronic means of confirming appointments, such as text messaging or email. This is certainly better than not confirming, and it may be the only means practices with smaller staffs can manage confirmations.
Practices with the resources, however, can go beyond those impersonal methods and make an actual phone call to confirm a patient’s appointment.
A phone call not only confirms the appointment but also affords you the opportunity to learn about the patient’s state of mind. Are they nervous? Anxious? Excited? Calm? Do they have a new symptom or specific questions? This insight better prepares your office to receive and care for them.
So while this doesn’t mean no one should send text or email confirmations — which are convenient and effective — it does mean that a phone call delivers a personal touch that takes the patient experience from average to impressive.
If you do use electronic confirmations, one way to elevate them is to include directions and arrival instructions. It’s also best to attach confirmations to your emails rather than typing them into the body, which allows the confirmation to live somewhere independently, separate from the email. This facilitates better record-keeping and accessibility for your staff.
Key #2: Discover Who Your Patient Will Be Bringing With Them
The pre-appointment call is also an opportunity to find out who your patient plans to bring with them to their appointment. Is it their 13-year-old son, a spouse, or someone to help them get from their car to their wheelchair? Knowing this helps your team prepare ahead of time.
If the person your patient plans to bring isn’t one of your patients, ask for their name. Then your staff can greet not only your patient but also their guest by name as soon as they arrive. That level of personalization really shows patients your level of interest in and care for them as people.
Key #3: Use a Professional Greeting
On the topic of names and personalization, it’s always good to address patients with a more professional greeting, such as Mr., Mrs., or Miss. There will be exceptions, of course; some patients may repeatedly ask you to call them by their first name. However, starting with a professional address is a good default.
It’s a subtle sign of respect your office can show patients, whether on the phone or in the office. It also creates a healthy, professional boundary between patients and staff.
It’s also helpful to train staff to greet patients with a welcoming “good morning” or “good afternoon.” This may seem insignificant, but it’s actually very effective at setting the tone for an entire interaction.
With just a few extra seconds and care, a proper greeting can turn a bad day around. A patient who comes in after fighting through traffic is disarmed with a simple “Good morning, Mr. Smith. How are you today?” You show him you care and maybe even let him vent a little.
Key #4: Give Clear Instructions for Canceling or Rescheduling (Beyond Voicemail)
Another way to elevate the patient experience is to provide patients with clear instructions on how to cancel or reschedule an appointment, beyond leaving a voicemail.
Nobody likes a cancellation. It wastes time, especially if it’s last minute and you can’t fill the slot. But cancellations happen, and you can take steps to reduce the frustration — for both practice and patient — as much as possible.
On the patient side, voicemail isn’t a great experience. If something last-minute comes up and they have to cancel by voicemail the night before, they don’t really know if anyone received their message. They may feel obligated to call again in the morning, and at the very least they’ll have to call again to reschedule.
You can save patients the anxiety and inconvenience by ensuring they’re always able to reach a human being. Providing access to an after-hours number or answering service assures them their message will get through.
On the practice side, having a clear and active process for receiving cancellations will help avoid the unfilled time-slots that can occur when your staff doesn’t hear a voicemail until it’s too late to reschedule the physician’s valuable time.
Finally, be sure to communicate your cancellation policy (if you have one) to patients in writing ahead of time. This will help avoid confusion and surprises.
Key #5: Walk Them Through the Appointment Process
Another small but impactful step you can take is having your staff use two minutes to walk patients through the appointment process during their pre-appointment phone call. The conversation might look something like this:
Walk them through the arrival process, the payment process, who will check them in when they arrive, and who will see them off when they leave. And let them know everything in between — which doctor they will meet with, which nurse will draw blood if applicable, etc.
Lay it all out so they have a clear idea of what to expect to put them at ease.
Key #6: Print a List of Their Questions
In the pre-appointment call, the hope is that your staff will discover any questions the patient has for their physician. On the day of the appointment, those questions should be printed out and made available to both the patient and the physician.
Printing out the patient’s questions provides everyone with a tangible list and saves patients from having to rely on their memory when they’re perhaps nervous or distracted. It makes patients feel heard and cared for, and it highlights your practice’s attention to detail.
Key #7: Highlight Special Occasions
A fun way to surprise and delight patients is to highlight special occasions with them.
For example, a welcome gift makes first-time patients feel valued and special. A gift or special acknowledgment of your members’ anniversaries with your practice or for their birthdays can also go a long way.
These occasions provide extra opportunities to make your patients feel appreciated. The type of gift will vary from practice to practice, and they don’t have to be anything extravagant. Something as simple as a branded notebook can work well.
If you know something personal about a patient like they love to travel and have an upcoming trip, a travel guide could be a nice touch. Or perhaps you share one of your favorite health and wellness books so your patient can benefit from its insights.
Your staff could even bring in a birthday cake and sing happy birthday. One extra benefit of these kinds of fun, human touches is the opportunity to engage your staff. When staff members who feel their job isn’t that significant start to celebrate patients’ real-life occasions, they get the opportunity to provide a level of care beyond pushing paper and making appointments. It infuses their job with more meaning than they realized was possible.
Final Thoughts
Many of these little touches may seem insignificant when compared to a person’s health, but they can make all the difference in the world in how a patient perceives their healthcare experience.
To weave these into patient care, it’s crucial to develop reliable processes — simple though they’ll be. Over time, you’ll see these processes empower your staff, increase efficiency in your operations, and raise the level of empathy your staff experiences toward your patients. The result is more than a collection of good processes; it’s a culture that employees enjoy participating in and that delivers a consistently stellar experience for patients.
Frank Hernandez serves as the Chief Executive Officer at ROAMD, where membership-based, concierge, DPC and private medicine, all come together to transform the traditional healthcare industry as we know it. Frank’s experience in world-class luxury hospitality and network-based organizations gives him a unique perspective that he is passionate about in sharing with the world. Prior to ROAMD, Frank worked as Chef Concierge at renowned Halekulani in the heart of Honolulu for over 20 years. He studied humanities at California State University Monterey Bay, and Hospitality Management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is a former board member, and current professional affiliate of Les Clefs d’Or USA, the country’s number one organization for the most elite hotel concierges.
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