Turn your Patients into Loyal Long Term Fans and Send your Profits Soaring with this Winning Follow Up Protocol
We all love it when we have patient visits for body contouring treatments, but we’re sometimes guilty of not getting overly excited about follow up visits, right? All of us. Have you ever heard your team making comments like, “it’s just a follow up” or “I don’t really have much today, just follow up visits.” Or have you ever been guilty of looking at the schedule and thinking those things?
We absolutely cringe at those kind of remarks and thoughts because follow up visits are so extremely important, maybe more important than the treatment itself. That’s because your patient’s judgement and opinion of you and your facility will be based in large part on her perception of how good her results are – in her opinion, that’s proves success of the treatment.
That’s how she’ll ultimately decide
- whether you really are a body contouring expert… or not
- whether she’ll have good things to say about you… or not
and
- whether she will continue coming to see you for future services…or not.
Pretty important, right?
So how do we get our team fired up about the importance of follow up visits? How do we get them to see how follow up visits benefit the patient, how the follow up visits benefit the practice and how the benefits to the patients and the practice ultimately benefits them, the team? How do we get them to take the right steps? We do it with team education and a sound follow up protocol.
If you want to learn how to develop a follow up protocol that’ll turn your patients into long term loyal fans, you’re in the right place. In today’s episode, we’re going to give you a winning follow up protocol. So listen closely as we break down the follow up visit from one 30 minute visit to 7 much smaller components that’ll make your patients love you and want to come back for more.
Here are the 7 components
- Start off with discovery about the patient’s feelings regarding her results, or Subjective Results
- Get the patient’s post-treatment weight
- Take great “after” photos, from which you will make Objective findings
- Keep the patient busy while you
- Create your follow up treatment plan
6. Have a ‘sit down’ review and conversation about the patient’s results
7. Make recommendations, i.e. other treatments, products,
supplements, another follow up visit & makes sure the patient has a
return appointment at your office
Let’s elaborate just a bit on these components.
Subjective Results
These describe how the patient feels about her results. Does she see a change? Is she happy or excited? Or is she bummed out or behaving negatively? You need this information going in. It’s important data to use when you’re formulating your plan.
Post-Treatment Weight
Did the patient gain, lose or maintain weight? This tells you what kind of lifestyle she has been leading after you last treated her. And weight gain will definitely adversely affect her reduction.
“After” Photos
Make sure to get your after photos at the same distance, in the same lighting, in the same garments and using the same poses. All of these factors affect the quality of the before/after photos.
Keep the patient busy + while you formulate a plan
You will be working on the patient’s photos, reviewing her chart, considering her subjective opinion and formulate your treatment plan. You don’t want her sitting around and thinking. You want to keep her busy with a positive activity. At our medical spa, we encourage the patient to use our vibration platform after getting dressed. The 5 minutes of dressing and the 10 minute program on the vibration platform provides the perfect amount of time for our treatment specialists. If you don’t have a vibration platform, just come up with a 10 minute activity that works in your office instead.
Your ‘sit down’ review and conversation with the patient
Next, in a private room, you review the photos with the patient. Point out all the areas you see improvement. Stay very positive, even if the patient is not positive. Be encouraging. Give her advice for getting even better results or further reduction.
Some patients will be super happy, even ecstatic. That’s great! It’s the prime time to ask for a review or a testimonial. Her excitement will wane and she will be less likely to provide these things on a later date.
Not all patients will be happy and some may even be unreasonable. But you stick to your protocol. Be encouraging. Give advice on how to improve upon her results. There will be times when your treatment specialist won’t be able to make her happy, so you will need conflict resolution protocol to implement for that rare occasion when you have a totally unreasonable patient. Want to know what we use? We discussed our conflict resolution protocol in episode #020. If you missed that episode, check it out.
Make recommendations and return appointments
Your treatment specialist will need to customize her recommendation to fit the patient’s needs, goals and results to date. She may recommend lymphatic assist treatments like Press Away Therapy, medical treatments like SculpSure, topical products, nutritional supplements, and an appropriate return appointment. Your patient should never leave your office without a return appointment and if she does, you will need a system to calendar a next contact with her to follow up and try to get her in.
The bottom line. You want to shoot for a 100% show rate on your follow ups. No-shows cost your practice, not only in non-productive time but what if your patient didn’t show because she already thought she had no results and formed a bad opinion of you and your practice.
You need to know if they don’t show. And you need to follow up with them if they don’t show. You must have a system to do this.
Be thankful for every patient who returns. That’s your opportunity to create a long term, loyal patient. One who has good things to say about you and who keeps buying from you. That’s practice growth with your current patients.
That brings us to your action step for today.
Action Step: Grow your practice with your current patients. Be sure you are known as a provider who delivers great results. Use what you learned today and create your Follow Up Protocol.
That’s it for today’s episode. Stay tuned to learn more.