How to Instill Patient Loyalty at Your Holistic Practice
Your holistic practice exists to deliver quality care to your community; no matter what specialty you offer, it’s crucial that your patients recognize, value, and return to your practice. After all, you won’t last long if you don’t attract patients!
But how can you go beyond simply making your patients aware of your practice and foster a long-term, genuine connection between you, your practice, and your community? How can you instill patient loyalty in a manner that is sincere and beneficial to the future of your practice?
Patient loyalty is a key component of your healthcare revenue cycle and this article strives to provide you with the context and measures to take in order to grow and nurture it within your practice. Keep reading to learn more!
How Does Patient Loyalty Impact Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle?
Let’s look at a few key statistics regarding customer loyalty that can apply to your holistic practice:
- 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition
- 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers
- Increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%
As with any business venture, minimizing churn and turnover results in a more stabilized, consistent revenue stream. It’s cheaper to keep the customer you already have than to attract a new customer to replace them.
This directly applies to your holistic practice and your overall healthcare revenue cycle! Putting in the effort and developing an enduring, profitable relationship with your patients leads to a better revenue cycle and empowers you to scale your business as more patients come your way. But how can you achieve genuine patient loyalty?
How to Instill Patient Loyalty in Your Holistic Practice
Patient loyalty can be nurtured in a variety of manners in addition to providing excellent holistic services! Consider these tips to further solidify the relationship between your practice, your patients, and your community:
Create and Maintain a Comfortable, Clean Environment
Nobody wants to enter a place of business that is disorganized, dusty, or cluttered—particularly not in a holistic environment where wellness, healing, and good energy are synonyms with your business. From the steps leading up to your practice to the waiting room, bathroom, and everything along the way, make an effort to reflect your holistic values in the environment of your practice.
This might include:
- Dusting shelves, decorations, ledges, etc once a week
- Burning incense
- Softly playing relaxing music
- Sanitizing high-touch points
- Keeping your waiting room clean and organized without making it crowded with furniture or other objects
- Maintaining a clean, sanitary bathroom for patients
- And more!
Setting the tone for your patients’ experience and delivering a fantastic first and lasting impression is a surefire way to get patients returning to your office again and again.
Be Professionally and Administratively Organized
Scrambling to find a patient’s misplaced file or having a desk littered with sticky notes doesn’t bode well for appearing to run your practice smoothly and efficiently. Your patients want to see that your office is professional and organized, meaning they can trust you to deliver a great experience in terms of treatment and administration.
From answering the phone in a clear, consistent manner to handling scheduling conflicts and following up with patients about any billing issues, your holistic practice needs to be on its game to demonstrate trust and loyalty.
Build Rapport with Your Patients and Create an Individualized Treatment Plan For Each of Them
If you and any team members appear cold or indifferent to a patient, that can leave a negative impression. Instead, make an effort to engage the patient in conversation and use their name in communication. Deploying active listening skills and exhibiting you have an interest in your patient—not their pocketbook—can help build patient loyalty, engagement, and overall satisfaction.
Taking this even further means creating an individualized treatment plan for each of your patients and maintaining a dialogue with them about it. While this might sound like common sense, and that’s great if it does, making the effort to inform each patient about their treatment plan, check in with them over time, and encourage questions are all great ways to nurture patient loyalty.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media platforms can be the ace up your sleeve if you leverage them appropriately for your holistic practice. Use your accounts to post about:
- Upcoming events, like open houses or charity events
- Holidays or moments in history related to your practice’s specialty
- Polls to get patient feedback, such as which composer to play in the office next
- Encourage honest reviews
- Some personal, yet professional, information about you and your practice—for example, showing off your beloved pet so that patients can get to know you a little better
Social media doesn’t have to be overwhelming or feel superfluous if you build and facilitate engagement with your patients!
Leave Your Medical Billing Stress to the Experts at HBS!
Want to deepen the relationship between you, your practice, and your community but feel overwhelmed with the medical coding and billing process? Find yourself frequently fielding questions from patients regarding the status of their claims? Unsure if you should accept insurance, how to bill Medicare, and have other important questions relating to your healthcare revenue cycle?
Turn to the experts at Holistic Billing Services to effectively handle your medical billing and coding so that you can get back to what matters most: your patients. Our team of friendly professionals has experience in your expertise and we’re eager to help your practice thrive so you remain a cornerstone in your community!
