Lots of clinics don’t have an online enquiry form on their website. After all why do you need an enquiry form when you can just put your phone number on your website? If someone wants more information they can just call you, can’t they? Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong.
In our guide to sales funnels for health clinics we include the online enquiry (form) as a distinct stage. It is a part of the process that brings consumers into the sales funnel proper, so it is not a step that you should consider trying to skip by leaving the form off your website. Here’s why:
24/7. Customers look at your website all the time; on the weekends and in the middle of the night. Will they get a good consumer experience by ringing you at this time? If all you have is an answering machine then the answer is no. Most won’t bother to leave you a message, and you are relying on them to remember to call you again the next day, which they probably won’t. An online enquiry form is available 24/7, and it is easy to set up to meet your customers’ expectations (see moving prospective customers through the sales funnel).
Phone calls can interrupt your normal daily business. An online enquiry form empowers you to use your staff resources as they are needed, and then to have them deal with the online enquiries when they are not so busy.
The form allows you to weed out the time wasters. Many people who call the clinic aren’t really a potential patient at all. It might be that they can’t afford your services, or that they aren’t in your catchment area. By using an online enquiry form you can weed these time wasters out and reply with a polite standard email rather than tying up your staff with another phone call.
Be prepared. An online enquiry form gives you the time to prepare information for the specific query so that when you do actually talk to the patient you can meet their expectations by being able to talk directly to their concerns. A phone call does not give you this opportunity, and you can be forced to terminate the call in order to get further information. This does not give the consumer a good experience.
Capture the patient’s informationreliably. Everyone has had the experience of talking to a potential patient and taking down their contact information incorrectly, or maybe your computer is booting up and you write it on a scrap of paper only for the cleaner to put it in the bin. Now the patient expects you to call back and you never do – how likely do you think it is that they will call back? If they do, what sort of impression have you given of your clinic? Online enquiry forms can solve this problem.
Some people don’t want to talk. Many potential patients who are early in the buying cycle are not prepared to talk on the phone and would rather remain at arm’s length for the time being. If you don’t have an online enquiry form then you are excluding them.
Hopefully you can now see some of the benefits in having a dedicated online enquiry form.
I’ll finish with one final piece of advice – even though we recommend strongly that you use an online enquiry form on your site, our own survey of consumers tells us that your phone number is also in the top five pieces of information that they are looking for on your site. Don’t forget to make it easy to find, in the header or footer of the page, and include it on your enquiry form too.
All online enquiries deserve a personalized email response; however your business processes should also include an automated email that is sent immediately once the online enquiry has been submitted. A well thought out response should include the following five pieces of information:
Confirmation that you have received the enquiry. This reassures the consumer that their enquiry hasn’t fallen into a black hole and your systems are working correctly. An automated email is standard practice on the internet and the consumer expects it. If you don’t send one then you won’t be meeting their expectations and reducing the chance that they will ever visit your practice for treatment.
A time and date when they can expect a personalised response. This allows you to set the consumer’s expectations so that you can then subsequently meet them. If you don’t tell them when they can expect a response then they will create their own expectations, which will probably be unrealistic. If you say in the automated response that you will contact them within the next two days it is critical that you actually do contact them – even if it is only to apologize that there is a delay. If you do delay the response make sure you inform them of when they should expect the new response.
Some further information on the clinic. Give the consumer something to read and to think about. Focus on the best aspects of your clinic such as accreditations, specialities, equipment, training, etc.
Include two of three real testimonials with full names. Credibility is absolutely critical here and if your testimonials have been published on 3rd party sites you should include that fact.
Contact Information. A lot of people use email as a crude tool for organizing their life – when they want to contact you in the future they will remember that you emailed them and will search their email. Putting all of your contact information in this mail will maximise the chance that they will contact you in the future even if they don’t come for treatment immediately.
It is nice to be able to personalize the email response to include the patients name and the treatment that they are looking for. This is not critical but if your technology easily allows it then it is a good idea.
Sample Email
Dear [insert the patients name here]
Thanks for your enquiry regarding [insert treatment here] with [insert your clinic name here]
We are currently reviewing your enquiry and will contact you in the next two days.
Clinic Overview
Describe your doctors or dentists experience, qualifications and specialisations- Take this information from your staff listings and add more detail as you like.
Procedures.
Describe the procedures your clinic performs. You should let them know how long the procedure normally takes, the recovery time and the number of visits required. You can include before and after pictures if you have them.
Testimonial 1
“I was very pleased with the treatment and also I was very pleased with the way I was looked after on my visit to the clinic.” – Alison Benson, Surrey, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)
Testimonial 2
“Despite having been to the dentist every 6 months all my life, I discovered, when I had my first appointment in Budapest, that none of the caps and facades I’d had put on locally fitted properly and my teeth had been quietly rotting away for years (the dentist gave me a mirror so I could see for myself, and I was horrified to see that the teeth underneath were black). Consequently I needed a lot of work. I’d had an estimate in a local clinic of 8 hours and 1300 Euro for just one tooth. The dentist in Budapest did the preparation work on 19 teeth in six and a half hours and the whole thing, including the most expensive crowns available (which are metal-free and therefore look like real teeth) cost around 5000 Euro. The most impressive thing was that because the dentist was so gentle and sympathetic, six and a half hours in the dentist’s chair really wasn’t that bad. It was tiring though and I felt fragile afterwards so the fact that Access Smile then drove me back to where I was staying (and ferried me back and forth to all subsequent appointments) really made a huge difference.” – Daniel Smith, London, UK (published on RevaHealth.com)
Contact information.
The patient may wish to contact you. Give them email, phone and website information for your clinic. Tell them the hours of business for your clinic and don’t forget to include the time zone – tell them hours before or after GMT.
A lot of sales experts are going to tell you that the goal of any sales process should be to maximise the number of prospects you can move from one level of the sales funnel to the next. At RevaHealth.com we find that this goal can result in clinics using their limited resources inefficiently, and effort being wasted on enquiries that are never going to result in business.
At every stage of the sales funnel you are going to have prospects that are never going to convert into business. This could be for any number of reasons, including: they can’t afford the treatment, they aren’t suitable for the treatment, they are a competitor researching your clinic, they live too far away, etc. A clinic’s business process needs to maximise the number of prospects that can result in business while excluding the prospects that will never result in business.
There are three key ways in which to achieve this:
Exceed or meet the prospect expectations
Provide them with sufficient information to allow them to exclude themselves
Ask questions so that you can exclude unsuitable prospects
Converting Website Visitors into Online Enquiries
Visitors to your website are expecting to be able to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily. They are not expecting site originality or artistic flair, they have come for information; give it to them as quickly as possible without cluttering your site. You should try and follow standard web conventions in the design and structure of your website and make it easy for the visitor to get to the following information:
Phone number and contact form
Opening hours
Address
Map
Prices
Testimonials
Your goal is to give the visitor this information while also building trust. Trust can be built in two ways through a website: transparency and personal information. Transparency can be provided with clear pricing information and candid descriptions of your core specialities. It can also be useful to mention the services you do not provide to avoid any confusion. Personal information can be provided through staff profiles and the use of pictures.
If you meet the visitor’s expectations, the next stage is to channel them into creating an email enquiry. This will typically only ever be a small percentage of your visitors, but hopefully will include a large percentage of the visitors who are actually interesting in purchasing a treatment from your clinic.
A common question we are asked is what percentage of visitors you should expect to create an enquiry. Unfortunately this is an impossible question as the single biggest variable is how ‘qualified’ the visitors to your website are. In this instance ‘qualified’ means how interested your typical visitor is in purchasing one of your treatments.
An example we commonly quote is a clinic in London that has written exceptional descriptions of the health problem they treat. These descriptions attract hundreds of visitors per day, however most of these visitors are just looking for information – they are not interested in getting treatment. This clinic converts under 2% of all visitors into online enquiries.
However, as a general guide, if you are not converting at least 5% of your visitors into online enquiries you should look to your website for potential problems.
Email Enquiries
When consumers submit an online enquiry they expect two things. First of all, they expect an automated response that informs them that you have actually received their enquiry and tells them when they can expect a response. It is a good idea to take advantage of this email to highlight the key benefits of your clinic and include contact information. In this way a consumer will always have easy access to this information even if they can’t find your website again.
Secondly, they expect a personal email that directly addresses their query. This second email should be sent no later than one business day after the initial enquiry was received. If this is not possible then an additional email should be sent explaining the delay.
The email that you send to the customer is your first real chance to start building a relationship with them. The key elements in building that relationship are to personalize the email to the consumer (it is vital that you do not sent a stock email) and to be as transparent and candid as possible.
It is easy to enter into an email dialog with the customer at this stage but remember that the goal of this stage in the sales funnel is to get the customer to the next stage. You should always try and progress the email dialog into a phone call. The purpose of this stage is to give the customer sufficient information and trust in your clinic to move them to that stage. At the same time it gives you the opportunity to weed out the time wasters.
If the customer will not engage with you on the phone then there is very little chance that they will visit your clinic. Only in a rare case is it worth expending significant effort on a potential patient that will not schedule a phone conversation. Typically this means that they are not prepared to commit to the next level of relationship.
This could be for any number of reasons – perhaps they were just comparing prices, perhaps they can’t afford it, etc. All personal emails sent to a customer should either be asking for a suitable time to call or setting a time for when you will call.
A Note On Having The Consumer Phone You Directly
A common question that we are asked is: if the goal of an email enquiry is to get the customer to talk to us on the phone, why don’t we skip the email enquiry step and just publish our phone number on our website?
First of all, it is important to put your phone number on the website in case the visitor actually wants to call you. However, it is also vital that you have a contact form and we argue that this is the desired route that you want to encourage your visitors to follow.
The reason for this is that if a consumer calls you they have a reasonable expectation that they will talk to an informed person who will be able to answer their questions. However, the person best qualified to talk to the consumer may well be busy when they call. It is better that you agree a time with the consumer when the right person can speak to them.
In some cases the consumer will get an answering machine (don’t forget your visitors will be on your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). A contact form is always available. It allows you time to research the consumer’s query and be properly prepared to directly address their concerns in a way that exceeds their expectations.
Phone Call
The consumer expects you to call at the specified time, or if they are calling you they expect that the relevant person will be available. They expect the person that they talk to will be able to speak specifically to their personal enquiry. They do not necessarily expect that person to have all the answers, but they do expect them to be knowledgeable, friendly, polite, understanding and non-judgmental.
Once you have succeeded in getting someone to talk to you, you have a real opportunity to start building a relationship. While you might have spent a lot of effort on your website and with the email dialog, all that did was to get the customer on the phone. So, no matter how good your website is, if you don’t manage to build a relationship with them on the phone then they are simply not going to purchase treatment from your clinic.
Face to Face
This is now getting back to your core business. You have brought the potential customer from the online world to the physical world and it is now up to your normal business processes to close the sale.
However, like all of the previous stages of your pipeline, once you have got the person to this stage everything that went before matters very little. Even if you have exceeded the customer’s expectation in all of the previous stages, you must at least meet their expectations at this stage.
Repeat and Referral Business
This is the ultimate goal that you should have for ever visitor to your website. Nothing is more profitable for your business than having a customer return for future treatment. You have already built the relationship with them and do not have to bring them through the sales pipeline again.
Managing your finances is critical to every business and I think accountancy should be an effective tool for managing a business. However, for all too many SMEs accountancy is all about compliance, simply ensuring that accounts are filed correctly and taxes paid.
Now I’m not an accountant, however I have always been of the opinion that anyone in business has to be able to understand the finances of the business. So about a year ago I went and looked for the accountancy tools that would help me (a non-accountant) to manage my business. Eventually I settled on Xero, for its simplicity and because it was online giving me access no matter where in the world I was.
At that time Ulster Bank Anytime Banking supported the OFX format which was readily support by Xero, allowing me to easily import my bank statements each month. However about 2 months ago Ulster Bank stopped supporting Anytime Banking and move their customers to a new system called Bankline. Despite repeated reassurances from Ulster Bank that all features of Anytime would be supported in Bankline they dropped support for OFX and only supported CSV.
This was a disaster for Ulster Bank user who used the Xero system as it made reconciliation of your bank account slow and error prone. Last week, at the end of July 09 Xero started to support the import of CSV formatted bank statements. This post looks at the tweaks that you need to make in order to get your Ulster Bank statement into Xero.
Exporting your Ulster Bank Bankline CSV statement
Log into your Ulster Bank Bankline account as normal and navigate to the statement of the account that you want to import.
At the top of the page select the date range that you want to statement to be for and press the go button to the right of the date fields.
Click the ‘export statement’ link at the bottom of the page. This will save the statement onto your computer in CSV format. The fields in this file are different to the ones required by Xero, however the file is easily editable to make it compatible.
Open the file in Excel or Open Office.
Xero expects the following columns which are not in your CSV file – Cheque number, Transaction amount. Add these two columns into the spreadsheet.
Copy the amounts from the Debit and Credit columns into the transaction amount column. The transaction amount column should now be a solid list of numbers, positive numbers for Credits and negative numbers for Debits.
Save your spreadsheet ensuring you save it as a CSV file.
Bankline puts the cheque number into the Narrative #1 field. Whenever the type = ‘CHQ’ copy the number from the Narrative #1 field into the respective cell in the new Cheque number field.
Log into Xero as follows and from the account of the relevant bank account menu select ‘Import a statement’.
Click the ‘choose file’ button and select your CSV file and click the ‘Import’ button.
Mapping your CSV column to Xero
You are now presented with a page in Xero that allows you to map columns from the CSV file to Xero. Make the following mappings:
‘Date’ in the CSV to ‘Transaction Date’ in Xero
‘Narrative #1’ in the CSV to ‘Description’ in Xero
‘Narrative #2’ in the CSV to ‘Payee’ in Xero
‘Type’ in the CSV to ‘Transaction Type’ in Xero
‘Cheque Number’ in the CSV to ‘Cheque No.’ In Xero
‘Transaction Amount’ in the CSV to ‘Transaction Amount’ in Xero
Press the save button and you’re done. Xero will remember these mappings so you won’t have to do them again for subsequent imports.
The internet is changing the way healthcare providers deal with customers. As the internet increasingly becomes the first point of contact with new customers, healthcare providers need a process for turning website visitors into bookings.
In this first post in our series on winning healthcare customers online, we discuss online contact methods and the customer funnel.
Online Contact Methods
The essential part of your online strategy is how easily customers can contact you. There are two basic contact methods that every healthcare provider needs to emphasize online, an enquiry form and your phone number.
Some people believe this can be accomplished by simply putting your phone number and email on a website or directory, and letting interested people call you directly. While doing this is an important first step, this alone is not an effective method for winning new business online.
A phone number is an essential but only partial solution for being accessible online. Firstly interested people will be on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However your clinic may only be open during normal business hours of say 09:00-18:00. The difficulty with only being contactable during normal business hours is that your customers are also at work and the last thing they want is to have a phone conversation about private health treatments amidst their colleagues in the office. For the most part, people will not leave private matters on your voicemail, also because of privacy concerns. Even if people are looking at your website during normal business hours, they may be more comfortable writing to you via an online enquiry form. This is often the case for private procedures like cosmetic or fertility treatment.
With an online enquiry form, interested visitors can contact you directly whenever they want to. The beauty of the internet is its 24/7 always-on accessibility. Therefore to get the most from your internet presence, your clinic also needs to be always-on. Also from the clinic’s perspective, written enquiries allows you to keep a record of the customer’s initial enquiry. For these reasons, we would advise you put the emphasis on the online enquiry form over the phone number on your website. Why an online enquiry form and not simply an email address? The online enquiry form makes life easier for the customer. With an email the question arises of “what do I write?” With an online enquiry form, you tell your customer what information you need.
Congratulations, with your online enquiry form and your phone number, your contact methods are now internet friendly! However, having the right contact methods in place is the easy part. If you are planning on to win new healthcare customers online you need to ensure that you have a customer management process in place to convert your website visitors to customers. The key to this is the customer funnel.
The Customer Funnel
The customer funnel is simple way of managing new customers. The funnel is broken into 6 key areas. Visitors are people who see your website, some of whom may be interested in purchasing your services, many other will not. The best your website can do is to convert those that are interested into written enquiries. From your email enquiries you hope to convert a sizable percentage to phone calls. The next stage is a face to face meeting and onto treatment. Once you have invested in this relationship it is important to maintain it to achieve repeat business and personal referrals.
The metaphor of the funnel is used because people drop away at each stage of a long enquiry process: For example, many of the people who send you written enquiries may have existing providers with whom they are very satisfied. On other words they are just testing the waters. Others may have requirements which other healthcare providers are better placed to treat. Still others may want to come for treatment, but not have the money to afford the treatment.
The image of the customer funnel is a visual representation of the step-by-step nature of a long enquiry process with this drop away in prospects at each stage.
Your goal at any stage of the funnel is to get the interested person to the next stage. For example when someone is visiting your website, the goal of your website is to get them to submit an online enquiry or to phone you directly.
The more efficient your customer management process is at each individual stage of the funnel the greater a percentage of the interested people will be brought to the next stage. With constant refinement and effort, a simple online presence can be converted to becoming the main source of new patients for a clinic.
As part of contacting a clinic we ask consumers to enter their mobile number, this allows us to text the phone number of the clinic to them. As noted by Tim in an earlier post, phone numbers are problematic and we strive to handle any format that the user might throw at us. Never-the-less a huge number of these number fail for a variety of reasons including:
1. The user has entered a land line and not a mobile number. This is perfectly valid and doesn’t represent an error state, however it does mean that we can’t give these users the same experience as those that enter the right number
2. The user has decided to leave the field blank. Once again this is a valid input and is the users prerogative.
3. The user has entered a deliberately distorted number – i.e. a string of 9 zeros.
I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics. In the first two weeks of July we attempted to send out text messages to 5,296 users. Of which:
• 3,660 had valid mobile number
• 2,884 responded with an automatic sms receipt. We expect that the remaining valid number has SMS receipt turned off on their phone or on their network
• 1,534 failed
Of the 1,534 that failed
• 414 had no phone number
• 1013 have what looks like a valid land line number
• 107 had a deliberately distorted input
Following on from my ramble about addresses (see Return To Sender) I’m going to complain in general about some blocks of information on the web.
Say you work as a professional, and your professional body sends around a form for you to fill out. They tell you it will be published on the web, say to help people find their nearest qualified aerospace engineer, of which you are one of course. Now, if you fill in an email address on the form and it gets published you will get emails. It is surprising how many people think this will not happen.
Which brings me to what my real point is: a whole load of data that gets thrown out there on the web is published without considering either its intention or its purpose.
If you make your phone number public, is it decipherable? The bottom line is that I don’t want phone numbers like (0)-555/767.768/9 appearing anywhere. [OK, below is a long post-amble about what I think a well formed number might be. Read it to see how finikity (which may or may not be a word, making it all the more embiggening) I am.]
If you write your number like this people will probably still be able to reach you, but you’re making it hard for them, and if you’re inputting the number on the web somewhere, you’re probably caused a few people to scratch their heads and wonder if they should bother coding solutions for numbers of such opacity. (They should not.)
In case you’re getting angry at coders at this stage, the flip-side is the dumb entry field that insists you enter your number in some bizarre format chosen by a coder through ignorance/laziness. (Yes Bord Gáis a + is valid in a telephone number, in fact it is the single best starting character for a number to have, but enough about that… )
Where was all this going?
Oh yes, why is all this information going on the web in the first place?
A lot of official data now seems to find a place on the web in PDF format. The motivations behind this may be laudable; the original may be a Microsoft Word document and PDF is a more open format. However, PDFs tend to be designed for human rather that machine legibility and lack the semantic structures that are increasingly available (if underused) in html/xml formats.
If the official Canadian list of area dialling codes is in a PDF that lacks a readable table structure then someone (or worse still, more than one person) will create unofficial lists using wikis or web pages. These will only maintain some level of compatibility with each other and the original source, so any further sources of information that verify themselves against these pages become less and less reliable. This is all a long way from Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a semantic web.
If governments are responsible for making data they hold accessible, and this is good in any number of ways, then they also have a responsibility for the level of accessibility. A locked filing cabinet in a basement that is accessible by asking the staff member responsible, available the first Monday of the month, between 9:00 and 9:30am, is a level of accessibility…
This is not a purely esoteric complaint. Somebody pays for that list of dialling codes, and those emergency service numbers and a whole host of data that has been decreed web worthy, but very little thought seems to go into how much of that information appears to the web or how its value could be maximized.
ISO, the International Organisation for Standards publish a lot of information on the web. Take their currency pages for example, which have nice tables of data. Well, their HTML is invalid; the doctype does not match the data contained. Their entity names are arbitrarily chosen forms of country names, even though they themselves define unique identifiers for countries, so the table must be interpreted for it to have value. I guess if ISO can’t get this right there is little hope for other folks.
Is there a point to all this? Well the ISO pages are better than a PDF, and PDFs are better than MS Word documents, and all are better than no information at all. There is at least a chance that something like linked data will be widely used and provide a more useful web, but, in the meantime, just a little thought about the quality of information and reasons for it to be placed on the web will make me a lot happier…
What does a dash (-) in a phone number mean, why was it put there? Probably it was just put in to separate the number into human digestible chunks 555-767-768. Whitespace would have been as good but no problems so far.
What does a slash (/, virgule) mean in a phone number? In a sentence it might have a dash type meaning but I would usually use it to designate a substitution or a logical OR type statement. I would avoid using a – for OR and also avoid using a / for a join.
The number 555-767-768/9 then means that either 555-767-768 or 555-767-769 will get you through.
The number 555/767/768-9 would be ambiguous to me: it could mean the same as above but I might try 555767768 wait then press 9, or some such.
The use of a full-stop as a visual separator seems dubious; it has other meanings both in number sequences and in textual contexts.
We’ve talked before about the advantages of using a long tail strategy to bring traffic to our site, but in digging into what’s been happening in the last month, some of the disadvantages of the strategy became apparent too. The pros far outweigh the cons, but it’s worth taking a little time to discuss them nonetheless.
With just short of 80,000 pages from RevaHealth.com in Google’s active index there are an awful lot of ways that visitors can find pages on our site. Looking at the keywords they searched for before arriving on the site should be an easy way to gain an insight into what our visitors want, but the sheer volume of unique keywords arising from a long tail strategy makes this much harder.
For example, in May 2009 there were 83,153 unique keywords that brought people to RevaHealth.com, and the average number of words (fragments) in each keyword was 3.88. Compare this to the 2008 global average of 2.2 words per query and you start to see how different our traffic is. The graph below helps illustrate the problem – there were 13,097 fragments that were searched for just once in May, while there was one word that was searched for 17,130 times!
Keyword fragment usage rates May 2009
So what was this most searched for fragment? Not surprisingly for a site organised by locations, it was “in”. Also unsurprisingly for RevaHealth.com, numbers 2 and 3 were “dentist” (12,837 times) and “dental” (10,041 times) respectively. The difficulty however comes with how quickly these numbers drop off. For instance, our hundredth most popular keyword fragment was “leicester”, with just 379 searches in May. In fact, you may have noticed that the above graph’s vertical axis uses a logarithmic scale just so you can see any detail!
The point of all this is that using a long tail strategy to attract traffic does make it harder to spot the underlying trends by mining your keywords. Some tips I would suggest are:
splitting keywords into fragments and aggregating – this at least helps to point out the most repeated individual words
create groups of keyword fragments under different themes or meanings and measure their collective popularity – this can help to identify broader trends i.e. which is more important to your visitors – price or quality?
watch out for rising trends by looking for unexpected keyword fragments appearing high on your list – these can help to identify timely sales opportunities
I’d also be interested in hearing how you go about analysing your keywords to identify important SEO terms, visitor trends and sales opportunities, so leave a comment and let us know.
At RevaHealth.com we help patients from all over the world to contact health clinics. These enquiries are then used by the clinics to generate business. In sales speak, every enquiry is a new lead.
In our experience, some clinics are very good at turning enquiries into paying patients, while others let good business slip away by making simple mistakes. This guide was originally written by Owen Cooney (ocooney@revahealth.com) specifically for health clinics, but it is relevant to any booking business that receives customer enquiries through email or form capture on the web.
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Do you feel that the enquiries you receive through the internet do not produce actual customers? Do you feel that the customer is just shopping around and that dealing with these enquiries is just an extra burden that produces no results? If the answer is yes, this guide is for you.
I will share a proven process for successfully converting online enquiries into paying customers. Innovative sales professionals who are successful in converting online enquiries into actual paying customers do this on a daily basis.
The reward for learning this process is immense. More and more customers are beginning their relationships with their service providers online, and the sales process has definitely entered the internet age.
Online is different
Online patient enquiries require a different approach than dealing with traditional enquiries. We all know how to deal with customers who turn up at our business, or call us to book something.
The difference with online enquiries is that now the initial conversation begins by email instead of face to face or via the phone.
Because the customer has contacted you online and has not talked or interacted with you, they have no real relationship with you yet. This carries a very real risk. If they break an appointment with you or stop answering your calls, this is no big deal for them because they don’t know you.
The Secret
The secret to successfully converting customers who send you online enquiries into paid bookings is to build a relationship with the enquirer. Building this relationship requires discipline.
Successful sales professionals tend to follow a similar process for building a relationship with the customer from that first enquiry through to the paid appointment.
The Process
Fast response to the customers’ email enquiries giving all relevant information on the product or service requested.
Follow up with a phone call within 24 hours of sending the email. In this phone call:
ensure that the customer has received your email
answer any immediate questions the customer has
ask the customer for more information about their needs
ask the customer to make some form of follow up commitment, even if it’s just another phone call
The idea here is twofold; first, to get a better idea about how serious the customer is, and second, to help cement the budding relationship.
This commitment helps establish trust between you and the customer. If they are not willing to make any further commitment, this may indicate that trust has not yet been established. Without trust, it is unlikely that this customer is ready to buy from you.
If the customer needs more time to make a decision, arrange another phone call at a specified time and date. Call at exactly this time and date and try to move things forward again, e.g. confirm a time for a consultation, make a booking etc.
If the customer is unsure, repeat step 3. Research shows that if you give up after the initial contact that you will lose more than 50% of your potential customers.
Once you have some initial commitment, you still have to close the sale. As the old saying goes, “Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched”. For clinics using RevaHealth.com we suggest the following checks:
A week before the patient is coming for treatment, call them to confirm that the dates are still suitable.
24 hours before the treatment, call them again to confirm that everything is fine.
Remember: It takes time and persistence for enquiries to turn into sales. For clinics, if you follow the process above, a good rule of thumb is that for every successful conversion from enquiry to booking that you get within 2 months of the enquiry, you will get a further conversion from enquiry to appointment within 2-6 months.
I was recently asked about our experiences in taking online payments, and in particular in taking regular subscription payments. The company we chose to handle our payments is called Realex, and we’re very happy with them.
However, thinking back over everything that we’ve done since we started, there were plenty of things that we did that made our lives difficult after the fact, especially when it came to reconciling accounts and processing refunds. Hopefully sharing our missteps and mistakes might help save you a bit of time if you plan on taking payments yourself.
The first mistake we made was to be too worried about what would happen if our payment processor’s API took a long time to respond. We coded a lot of safety nets around this, recording all the details of the transaction in case something went wrong so we could redo it at a later time if necessary.
As it turns out, we’ve never experienced a timeout or overly long delay, so all that safety net coding was a waste of time. I wouldn’t bother with it now if I was starting again. You could just log timeouts or send an email alert and deal with them by hand should it ever happen to you.
The next thing we did that made our life difficult was to store the credit transactions in one DB table, and the calls and responses to the payment processor in another. This meant that when we came to reconcile the credit transactions without bank statements, we were missing some vital information.
Our payment processor batches payments together and we couldn’t easily work out which payment belonged to which batch without a lot of complicated work after the fact. Now we store the payment processor’s transaction and batch IDs with our own record of payment and it makes it very easy to reconcile our accounts whenever we need to. I really wish we’d done this from the start!
Another thing to bear in mind is that inevitably people make mistakes, and at some point you are going to have to process refunds of one sort or another. Doing the refunds themselves isn’t difficult. In our case Realex has simple online tools to handle them. However, you will want to design your system to handle refunds in such a way that you can reconcile your accounts afterwards. Just deleting or altering your own record of the payment will make this very difficult. You’d be surprised at how quickly you forget what the heck went on.
By way of example, if you take a payment and then have to refund it two weeks later, you could just delete the original transaction from your system and the books will balance, but you will be out of sync with your payment processor in two places – the original transaction and the refund. If each of these happened in different accounting months it can lead to real headaches. Ultimately, even if you don’t handle refunds directly through your transaction system, you will need to setup your code to handle refunds transactions that you enter by hand.
New credit card details can also cause problems. People get issued new cards for all sorts of reasons, so the details you have today are not necessarily the details you will have tomorrow. If you ignore this and just let people overwrite their current credit card details, it can make looking back at old transactions next to impossible. You should code for multiple cards, so a new card is added rather than overwriting the current card’s details.
Finally, if and when a customer complains about a transaction to you, stop and listen. As soon as they go to their bank and ask for the transaction to be reversed, you will be punished with higher fees and a permanent flag against your account. The banks have made this very easy to do in recent times, so it is in your best interest to avoid any dispute as quickly as you can. If in any doubt, refund the transaction. Even if you are proved to be right in the long run, your account will still be flagged because you haven’t done enough quickly enough to avoid the dispute.
Hopefully the advice above is of some use to you. We’d love to hear your stories of setting up to receive online transactions too, so leave a comment.
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