Retention shows how well you are at maintaining patients over a period of time. The inverse of “churn rate”, it is a long term indicator of how well your clinic is at encouraging patients to return for further treatments.
How it’s Calculated:
The number of patients that visited your clinic in say that last 12 months, who had visited your clinic previously. For instance, if you had 100 patients one year ago and during that year 60 of them returned, your retention rate would be 60%.
Useful for:
- Measure of customer satisfaction – Retention is a key indicator of how satisfied your patients are with your service – do they want to come back? For some treatments, such as fat reduction treatments you won’t be expecting patients to return within 12 months. But for other treatments, such as anti-ageing, a more frequent attendance is expected.
Further Insight:
- Cross Selling – How effective is your clinic at cross-selling from one-off treatments to treatments requiring regular visits? Consider using questionnaires that tease out all the concerns your patients have, so you can then provide treatments for them.
- Treatment Plans – Make use of Treatment plans to encourage repeat visits and get patients fully committed to a course of treatments for prolonged benefits.
- Waiting List – If patients can’t come to see you when they want to see you, they’ll go elsewhere. Use Waiting Lists to match available appointment times with the patients that want them.
- Patient Application – Encourage your patients to download and install the Patient Application, so they are reminded of your clinic and can view and learn about the treatments you offer. This reduces your advertising spend and increases the chances of the patient returning to you and not a competitor.
- Marketing to Lapsed Patients – An advertising campaign specifically aimed at patients that have absent for a significant amount of time.
Questions to ask yourself: