Management

How We Deliver a WOW Experience–and Measure It

By Laurie L. Sorrenson, OD, FAAO

Practice owners who succeed in creating a profitable practice don’t just meet patient expectations, they exceed them. That’s what I set out to do when going into practice.

I’ve found that the right mission statement, to wow the patient, backed up with materials, like video, to make your point to patients, is a key to flourishing, along with measuring patient satisfaction.

Most of my career, when I would run into someone who said “Oh, I just went to your office,” I wouldn’t actually “cringe,” but I always had a little bit of “holding my breath” hoping they would tell me they had a good experience. They usually did, but not always.

Recently, I realized that I don’t do that anymore! It is like I know they had a good experience. I know that my staff are consistently friendly, we are consistently on time, and that we do everything we can to ensure patients leave more than satisfied with their experience.

So I started thinking…What’s different?

After analyzing and thinking about it, I decided it was mostly two things:

Our Mission Statement
Our mission statement is simple: “To be the Best for Austin by “WOW”ing our patients and loving what we do.”
Great, right? Kinda scary too…We don’t want to be good…we want to WOW you! That is a really high standard isn’t it?

But we had that mission statement for a while before I noticed the change. But about three years ago, my husband decided to design our “Friday T-Shirts,” and he put a big “WOW” on the front of our shirts. So, now we are advertising the fact that our mission is to “WOW” our patients. Because the “WOW” became front and center on our shirts, it became an integral part of our culture.

I hear statements from my staff, like “We can’t do that because that wouldn’t WOW our patient” or “If we do that, I know that will WOW our patients,” “That sure wasn’t a WOW” or “How can we make this a WOW?” It is part of our everyday vernacular. The staff had to embrace it and does.

Creating WOW Accountability
The second part of changing the way we serve patients was creating accountability for delivering “Wow.” We say in our marketing materials we are going to WOW you…and then we send a survey to every patient asking if we did. So, every staff person knows that the patient has an opportunity to say they were or were not WOWed.

Our Wow system might sound like an oversimplification…but I like simple, especially when it’s true–and it works.

>>Click HERE to check out our 30-second “WOW” video on our web site.<<

 

Laurie Sorrenson, OD, FAAO, is president of Lakeline Vision Source in Cedar Park, Texas. To contact her: lsorrenson@gmail.com.

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