Undisciplined communication can kill any business, especially businesses that help people heal. Patients may love the care they receive from one member of the team, yet are routinely less thrilled with the poor communications skills of other clinic members. This imbalance may be enough to push the patient to find a new healthcare provider.
Patients often point their fingers at junior members of the team, blaming them for prioritizing their upcoming coffee break over their need for service; you may have done this yourself in the past. Not only is this assumption unfair but it ignores more serious underlying problems with many physiotherapy clinics.
The evil twins of poor communication
Twin one: left hand / right hand. Someone who experiences a company’s disjointed operations often says the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. When it comes to poor communications, often the left doesn’t know what the right is saying. But your clients will clearly see and hear communications misfires.
Twin two: freelancing. In the absence of controlled communications, employees often engage in the other communications killer known as “freelancing,” or answering questions with an official sounding best guess. Since the answer is made up on the spot, freelancing often omits critical details or is contradictory, uses jargon and almost always fails to convey care and concern.
Uncontrolled communications in the physiotherapy world drives customers away, disengages employees and disrupts optimal clinic operations, all costing you money. Where patient care is involved, a lack of discipline can result in a regulatory complaint.
Tackling the twins
Whether you’re a clinic manager or owner, you must gain control of your clinic’s communications to empower patients and improve employee morale. Here are a few quick ways:
Identify your “evergreens.”
We all know what an evergreen tree is – a tree that stays green and fresh-smelling all year round. In the world of business, an evergreen is something that happens with regularity, whether hourly, daily, weekly or seasonally. Your clinic has daily evergreens too – they are questions clinic visitors frequently ask and other interactions your team has with people. Aside from prices and hours and whether their claim is covered by benefits or insurance, your patients want to know other important information, such as how long until they feel better or how many treatments they will need. Evergreen interactions include the decision to use a skeleton or diagram to explain a patient’s injury and front desk conversations such as billing and scheduling appointments.
Allowing delicate conversations to go unscripted or without emphasizing the patient’s diligence in performing their exercises can result in less-than optimal care.
You’re probably already ahead of the game if you’ve posted an FAQ, or frequently asked questions list, on your website. This is a good start, but ask yourself two key questions;
- is my team even aware of this important information? and;
- how well do they actually answer these questions?
If your team isn’t aware of the FAQ (and in my experience, the vast majority of employees at any given company have no idea what’s written on their website), you have a left hand/right hand problem. If your team knows of the FAQ but the answers are lacking, you have a freelancing challenge.
Play detective.
Take a few minutes each day or week to find out what questions people asked and how your employees responded. Determine how well other interactions proceeded. Write it all down. Determine as best you can if those responses and interactions satisfied your patients. But proceed with caution; don’t be hard on team members whose communication style clearly needs help, since until this point, they haven’t been given adequate communications support.
Refine your material.
Now that you have a few sentences down on paper, determine if your answers are truly the best they can be. Remember, your patients come from all walks of life; they have various levels of education, language and learning challenges as well as different ways of processing new information. What makes sense for you, the specialist with years of rigourous education, may not work for someone just learning what their ACL does. Simplify your language.
Be challenged.
For your information to truly meet the needs of others, people need to be involved in the editing process. Ask them to review your material, instructing them to be as ruthless, but kind, as possible. Refine your words until all involved agree your responses are simple enough for most adults to understand, provide clarity and show empathy. As a final check, read your answers aloud; you’ll be amazed at the mistakes your mouth catches and your eyes missed.
Pro tip: Want to turn committed clients into walking, talking advertisements for your clinic? Make a select few feel like an insiders by asking them to review your material. Tell them their valuable feedback as loyal clients will go a long way in strengthening the delivery of care to other clients. In addition, provide a small thank you, perhaps a store gift card. Not only do insiders keep appointments and generally stick to their rehabilitation plan, they are likely to want to spread the word of your clinic’s patient-centred focus. Try finding a better source of advertisement with a better return on investment.
Share and share alike.
Once you feel you have perfected your messages, circulate the final document to all members of your team. Make this document priority reading; after all, your secondary goal with this work is to ease the freelancing burden on your team. Remember, the goal is that they internalize the messages, not memorize.
Welcoming a new team member? Nothing shows you care about their success more than a cheat sheet with answers to some of the more challenging customer questions. Plus, it relieves experienced team members of some of the heavy lifting of training new hires.
Whether you call them your clinic’s FAQs or Q&A, treat this material as a “living document,” meaning it is supposed to be routinely questioned, challenged and rewritten. Procedures and regulations change, as do client needs and expectations. Sometimes, a fresh set of eyes brings new clarity to an existing situation.
Often overlooked, improving communication discipline among all members of your team is a simple exercise that pays dividends.
Ted Flitton is the principal of Base Reputation Management, a communications and marketing firm that helps physiotherapy practices boost sales and loyalty by improving customer experience and employee engagement. Visit his website at www.baserep.com.
Have a pressing public relations or marketing issue? Get help. Connect with Ted by email at ted@baserep.com
