A consultant once asked me “What is the purpose of your business?”

Have you ever asked yourself this question? Pause a second before you actually answer.

My response to her question was, “Keeping customers satisfied.” And I think that this would apply to you as well – regardless of your specialty.

A colleague of mine didn’t particularly like my answer. “Customers? Don’t you mean ‘patients’?”

Now, perhaps if you are in an academic environment where all of your patients are by referral only, your schedule is always full, and your bedside manner has no bearing on your practice…perhaps then your patients are merely patients.

But, for the rest of us, patients are more than just patients. They are also customers. And like the customers of any other type of business – retail, restaurant, service, etc. – they can take their business elsewhere, if they’re not satisfied with your business.

Patients have a certain expectation when they go to see a doctor, but it is their experience with that doctor which determines whether or not they will continue as a patient. Ira Blumenthal , an expert on personal branding, describes this in a formula

PROMISE + EXPERIENCE = RELATIONSHIP

Have you thought about what your patients experience when they come to your practice?

Shag carpet and wood paneling from the 1970s? A rude, inattentive front desk person? Extremely long waits before seeing the doctor? By the way, these are what John Pinto, a practice management consultant, refers to as ‘coffee stains.’ They make a patient have second thoughts about their choice of medical practice.

It is something you must be ever vigilant about. One of our partners pointed out that we had a sign with the name of a doctor who left our practice more than six months ago. He also discovered that one of the waiting rooms didn’t have any current magazines – apparently the subscription service stopped doing an automatic renewal without informing us and nobody caught the mistake.

Business experts say that, in the future, the customer experience is what will separate the winners from the losers. So, take a good look at what a person would experience visiting your practice from the perspective of a patient, especially a new patient. Is there any way this can be improved? You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how your practice can benefit from this exercise.

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