Drs. Feucht and Saini say ABB Labs, along with ABB Optical Group’s many other services, makes it easy to wow patients with a great customer experience.
An essential industry partner for a growing practice.
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By Nick Feucht, OD,
and Nikhil Saini, OD
August 28, 2024
When you have a large, multi-location practice with a growing patient base with diverse needs, an industry partner that can fully support you is essential. We found that in ABB Optical Group.
From its ABB Labs services to its contact lens ordering platform, Abby and its analytics software, ABB Analyze, ABB Optical Group is a resource that makes providing the best of care and the best of patient experiences much easier.
Our practice, The Eyes on Group, has four practice locations: Worcester, Mass. (Eyes on Worcester), Randolph, Mass. (Eyes on Randolph), Lincoln, R.I. (Eyes on Lincoln) and Cranston, R.I. (Eyes on Cranston).
In addition, we operate a 49 ft. mobile RV, Eyes on Wheels, which we converted into an office with a full exam lane and 150-frame optical. We take this vehicle to businesses and health fairs in low-income areas to give eye exams.
Labs With Advanced Services & Great Customer Service
We have used ABB Labs since 2018.
ABB Labs enables us to give our patients quality products at competitive prices. They are always willing to work with us on any challenge that arises. Should we have a tough case or challenging patient, ABB always offers us solutions.
For example, when we have progressive non-adaptations, our ABB Labs account manager provides insightful suggestions, and sometimes even makes it easy for the patient to switch back to single-vision glasses.
ABB has a large selection of stock lenses with a wide range of materials and enhancement options that we optimize.
Using stock lenses over surfaced lenses helps us maintain great margins on our products while offering competitive prices for our patients.
ABB has a wonderful and cost-effective progressive lens, G PAL , for entry-level progressive wearers. It is a great-quality product at a low price, that provides us with impressive margins. We get a lot of positive feedback about this product with very few non-adapts.
A Solution-Oriented Team
Working with ABB and their team is a pleasant and refreshing experience. Everyone is kind and professional. We never have any push back for re-dos or remakes. The attitude is always, “What can we do to correct the situation?”
A little over year ago, an ABB Labs account manager came to one of our offices to help us design a newer and simpler lens menu. She gave a presentation to our staff about each lens on our new lens menu. She was kind enough to give advice and pointers on how to up-sell ABB’s products to provide our patients with the best experience possible.
The Contact Lens Resource that Enables Great Patient Care and Profitability
We are a large contact lens practice with about 80 percent of our patients in daily disposables.
Thanks to ABB’s new Abby platform, and its simplicity and free direct shipping, we successfully improved our direct-to-patient sales from 50 percent to about 72 percent. This is a significant time saver for the practice.
Abby sends out automatic text and e-mail reminders to patients when it’s time to re-order. We try hard to encourage our patients to purchase a year supply of contacts at their annual eye exam. We do this mainly so they can take advantage of manufacturer rebates.
However, when patients choose to purchase a three- or six-month supply, we love Abby because the platform automatically messages the patient for them to re-order. This is important because it allows us to keep the patient from ordering elsewhere, keeping the business in-house.
Combining Ease of CL Sales with Ease of Metrics Analysis
We integrated Abby with the Digital Price Monitor, a service from ABB Analyze, which monitors most online retailers’ prices and automatically adjusts our contact lens prices to keep us competitive. We no longer have to go digging and researching what online retailers are charging and painstakingly price every single product we sell. The Digital Price Monitor does the work for us! It’s a time SAVER!
The Abby platform also combined everything into one login, which simplified everything and made it easy for staff. The same login we use for ordering is also the same website we use to look at our Analyze dashboard. This gives us a glimpse of what is going on with each order, its status, type of product ordered, its shipping time frame and order number.
We no longer have to go into each individual patient order. We can now see everything simultaneously and get a real-time view of what’s going on.
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Abby has a great section for reports. It helps us understand what we are ordering, how are we trending in a certain area (good or bad) and our year-to-date revenue. It gives a terrific look into the overall health of the contact lens portion of the business.
Supporting Our Growth into the Future
Our practice goals and core values are the same as they were on day one: deliver excellent patient care through compassion and empathy and serve our community with the upmost passion, integrity and transparency.
ABB and their team are an integral part of our practice, helping us reach our goals and maintain our core values because our business models and values align.
Providing an excellent patient experience is important to us, and we are proud to partner with a business that values our patients just as much as we do.
We want to grow the profitability of each of our locations. The ABB team and solutions like Abby, ABB Labs and ABB Analyze will be an integral part of doing this.
The continual improvement of Abby features, the large variety of stock lenses and the personal guidance of ABB’s consultants allow us to grow financially while still providing quality products at competitive prices.
Nick Feucht, OD, and Nikhil Saini, OD, are partners with the Eyes on Group in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, including: Eyes on Worcester, Eyes on Randolph, Eyes on Lincoln and Eyes on Cranston. To contact him: drfeucht@eyesonworcester.com
This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.
