Meeting your customer’s expectations takes sharp listening skills and quick reactions
By Eric Cardin, PT, MS
Outpatient physical therapy is a unique slice of the health care pie. Few, if any, other disciplines have relatively healthy patients who attend so frequently and for treatment sessions that are long in minutes and personal in nature. If you think about it abstractly and say, “I am going to pay to spend a few hours a week at this physical therapy clinic with no guarantee of success,” it seems like a proposition few would take or at least take with a heavy dose of skepticism.
Keep clients close with frequent communication.
By Dale Reckless, PT
Communication and Connection—they go hand in hand when your patient arrives for their initial evaluation. From the first impression at the front office, to your thorough diagnostic testing and treatment skills, the patient experience must be positive and encouraging. Leaving your impressive brand with the patient will help you as an owner, director, and therapist meet the needs of the patient from both a physical and emotional perspective. This is the reason our patients come to see us, correct? Oftentimes, even excellent clinicians overlook the importance of necessary communication and ultimately leave the patient with questions, either from a misunderstanding or a lack of information. Patients may go home with unanswered questions, leading to a poor awareness of their exercises or treatment plan. Or perhaps a patient may complete a treatment plan, only later to find out that they pursued therapy elsewhere even though it appeared that they were happy with their care and had great outcomes. Did a therapist miss an opportunity for connecting? The question then becomes why they went elsewhere? How can the therapist close the loop to keep satisfied clientele coming back when they need additional therapy services?
Create a culture of leadership that aligns and engages your team.
By Emily Bagby*
While many practices identify quality customer service as a strength, few appropriately leverage this strength as a marketing tool to grow their practice. The goal of this article is to outline four steps to systematically create and leverage customer service to grow your practice. These steps include: empowering your staff, creating meaningful relationships, measuring customer service, and leveraging Promoters.
By Ben Montgomery, BuildPT.com*
Few marketing conversations these days are complete without a discussion about search engine optimization, or “SEO” for those in the know. This is for good reason.
Nat Christadoss, PT, DPT, is a PPS member and owner of Physical Therapy of Melissa in Melissa, Texas. He can be reached at nchristadoss@ptofmelissa.com.
