How to Improve Your Patients’ Onboarding Process: 7 Simple Steps

In healthcare, private clinics in particular, first impressions are vital. A person’s first encounter with your facility can make or break his/her decision to become your patient.

Sometimes the healthcare services can be extremely personal and often invasive, like plastic or cosmetic surgery, so it’s important to do what you can to put people at ease and lessen their burden—starting with the online onboarding process. 
 

One of the key reasons for patients leaving after that initial contact is a poor onboarding experience.

By automating your onboarding, you will create a sense of loyalty and let the patients know you care about them 24/7. This can improve your overall retention rates.

If you’re doing onboarding right, new patients should quickly get a sense that your clinic offers convenient, timely, and confidential care. 
 

You may already have a few onboarding policies in place. Here are seven key strategies from Wooxy.com, that you should focus on to better onboard your patients. 
 

Step 1: Easy Signup

The onboarding experience starts with the initial contact. Make your sign-up process as simple as possible. You can collect additional information as your relationship with that patients builds. For now, your goal is to get just enough information for further targeting your leads and making this first experience a positive one.

Transforming your onboarding process can save you time and energy so that you can focus on more innovative projects.

Step 2: Automate your email communication

If the patient receives your response for scheduling an appointment manually, only when the patient care coordinator is at his/her desk, it means, that you are losing more than 50% of your potential customers right at your digital doors. 
Usually people spend time on new clinic researches during evening hours, on weekends and holidays.

The efficiently automated patient onboarding, will help you and your staff to focus on patient care, and never miss the leads which contacted you during the out-of-office hours.  

Step 3. Trigger Emails

Trigger emails are designed to be sent automatically, when a user takes a specific action, such as requesting a consultation. A trigger could be as simple as sending out a welcome email when the person shares their email address, or more complex, such as sending embedded calendars with available sports for consultation, allowing them to book their visits right away. 
With Wooxy.com you can make the emails even more specific to the patient’s needs, making  your onboarding experience more successful. 
 

Step 4. Offer Some Incentive

Offer new contacts an incentive to visit your clinic. This may be in the form of a discount, complimentary one time treatment, or a free consultation of some sort. This strategy is very effective in push emails, for example, when the lead signed up for your emails, but hasn’t booked an appointment yet.

Step 5. Add Social Media Links to your emails

More than 81 percent of the U.S. population uses social media today. If you aren’t inviting your new patients to engage with you on social media, you’re missing out on an important element of onboarding. 
 

Step 6. Follow-Up Emails

If you aren’t sending follow-up emails, you’re missing out on another opportunity to engage your patients and build trust and brand loyalty. Emails you need to send once a customer is on board include a thank-you email, special offers and surveys. All these emails play an essential role in showing your patients you not only appreciate their business, but you want their feedback on how to improve. 
 

Step 7. Reward Loyal Patients

Take time to reward your loyal customers/patients. There are any number of ways you can accomplish this during the onboarding process. Figure out what your target audience would most appreciate and then build information about the rewards into the onboarding process. For example, you can offer a loyalty program for referrals.

The onboarding process doesn’t end with that first contact. Continuous onboarding includes offers for current patients, customer service outreach and engaging with those you want to keep as a customer.

With Wooxy.com, your onboarding process will flow smoothly and help your churn rates improve.