Do you gather real-time feedback to inform your day-to-day business decisions? If not, you are likely to be negatively affecting patient loyalty. Loyal clients grow the business quicker than any marketing and sales work. Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products, spending 31% more than new customers overall.¹ Businesses can grow revenues between 4% and 8% above their market when prioritising better customer (patient) service experiences.² 

Take this concept a little further and consider the Practitioner experience. I have recently had two retirement age GPs lament to me the loss of their doctor-patient relationships built up over their 40+ year careers. These Practitioners obviously received a high level of professional satisfaction because of patient loyalty. This ultimately led to both practitioners in question remaining in the workforce beyond their intended retirement age. 

Increasingly, patients are placing high values on experience. In a fast-changing and litigious world, organisations must move to be more responsive to meet patient demands and expectations. Patient experience is an outcome of healthcare and reflects the interpersonal aspects of quality of care received, meaning that it is “respectful of and responsive to individual preferences, needs, and values”. 

So how can you improve patient experience? One of the most common barriers to accelerating a change is the lack of a common understanding of what the necessary change is! ASK for feedback - your patients will collectively tell you what their priorities are for change in your practice. Collecting feedback about patient experiences needs to be rigorous, so that actions based on patient feedback can lead to meaningful quality improvement. There is no value in just hearing the user feedback and storing it in a vast database. It is necessary to convert the input into a positive user experience and close the patient feedback loop. 

What is a Patient Feedback Loop?

A feedback loop is a useful diagram in considering feedback as a continuous process involving several steps which are repeated systematically. 

‍

Other benefits of collecting (and acting on) patient feedback:

• Make better business decisions.
• Improve your products and services.
• Improving the performance of the support team.
• Identify business risks before they become issues. 

‍

References:
1. https://www.semrush.com/blog/customer-retention-stats/

2. https://media.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_Five_disciplines_of_customer_experience_leaders.pdf

‍