By Sherin George, OD
A customer satisfaction survey candidly assesses your work as doctor, your optical’s services and products –and whether your patients are likely to return.
My husband and office management/master optician and I purchased our practice in January 2011 and are in the process of transitioning it to a higher-end office. With all the changes we are making we wanted to find out if patients saw these changes as improvements or changes for the worse. We wanted to find out how we could continue to do better. So, last October we launched an online customer satisfaction survey.
Low-Cost Guide to Improvement
We used a survey tool web site, Zoomerang, to create our survey. You can create a basic survey on Zoomerang for free, or you can create a more complex survey by purchasing one of the site’s premium packages, which are not costly–the most expensive package is $65 per month. The technology professional we employ on a freelance basis to create ($800) and maintain ($50 monthly) our practice web site includes survey development and rollout as part of his routine work, covered by what we are already paying him (that’s how easy it must be), so it cost us nothing extra to roll out our first survey.
Ask Ranking Questions
Our survey, which is featured prominently on our homepage, and which you can view here, asks patients in eight questions to rank levels of satisfaction. We start with the first patient experience, booking an appointment, and take the patient through the office experience, including exam, insurance processing and shopping in the optical. We ask if the patient found our staff courteous when making their appointment, asking them to select from excellent to poor to describe their experience. When we ask how satisfied the patient was with their eye examination, we give them response options ranging from very dissatisfied (1) to very satisfied (5). The questions about our optical also ask patients to rank from 1 to 5, with five the best. We ask about product and service quality, the selection of frames, the perceived value for the price they paid and their overall purchase experience. We also offer a space for open-ended commentary.
Use Feedback to Train Staff
The feedback has been mostly positive, with some minor exceptions I would not have thought of on my own. One patient commented that (ironically for an eyecare practice!) the color scheme on our business cards made them hard to read. On a more serious note, a couple patients said the receptionist who answered their call wasn’t as nice or helpful as they should have been. That feedback allowed me to talk to our staff about the right and wrong way to handle calls for our patients. I re-emphasized to them the kind of customer care I expect them to deliver.
Offer Patient Safe Place to Vent
In the age of review web sites like Yelp which offer public forums for patient rants, it makes sense to offer people a way to vent directly to you. Not only are you assured that the feedback will go directly to your inbox (survey tools enable feedback to be e-mailed directly to you), but you are keeping the feedback in-house rather than having it broadcast publicly. Many of your patients will still want to offer feedback on review sites, but if they know they can submit their input directly to you, that is the outlet many others will choose instead.
Encourage Survey Takers
Even though we have the survey displayed prominently on our practice web site’s home page, we have only had about a dozen people take the survey so far. Our goal is for 60 to 70 percent of our patients to take it. We realize that our approach so far, posting it solely online, is biased toward younger patients. This year we plan to keep a stack of survey print-outs on our front desk for those who prefer to offer their thoughts offline. We haven’t rolled out an incentive yet for taking the survey–such as entry into a raffle or a discount on frames or contact lenses–but we plan to do so this year. Your patients–like you–are busy, so if you want something as valuable as their feedback, you may have to nudge them a little.
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Sherin George, OD,is the owner of Franklin Square Eyecare inFranklin Square, NY. To contact her:sgeorge10@gmail.com.
