Continued from here.
Let me take a step back and pose a question that I see often:
“What are some strategies you use to keep clients returning until treatment goals are met? At my group practice, we see too many clients coming in for just 1-3 sessions, not enough to build rapport, much less work a treatment plan, especially for issues that have persisted for a long time.”
Most practices can relate to this question, whether it’s a practice issue as a whole or a general issue with a few practitioners. What I’ve learned is that it isn’t just an issue for new career psychologists. So, before you count on your experience and write off the rest of this article, stick with it, please.
Once we have acquired the client, what are the strategies to ensure that the client completes treatment? Or with a bare minimum has a good clinical outcome. With barriers on the mental health system like the GP’s stating the service is “free” and Medicare only subsidising 10 sessions, so clients with persistent presenting issues feeling as though they can be “fixed” in 10 sessions the clinicians have a number of barriers to overcome before they can even speak to the clients about clinical outcomes. Lastly, we’re providing a free tool to see approximately how much you’re spending to acquire new client bookings.
The journey
When we think about the client journey in reference to how much it costs us for each client, we generally only have enough information to review the data after the client makes a booking. This leaves us with a significant deficit to understand how many enquires we are receiving, but not converting. Due to the lack of solid knowledge within practices, I’m going to start the client journey after the client books their first appointment. This does not include if the client reschedules or cancels multiple times (our statistics show that when your reception team are not properly trained upwards of 40-50% of clients will cancel or reschedule their first scheduled booking, adding cost to your acquisition). The pathway that client’s find us are not really that varied. We have word of mouth, GP referral, a list provided by a referral agency or Google / SEO / Website. In order to ensure the client who is booked in completes therapy a number of things have to happen, but the most important being that the client actually meets with the clinician. Once this happens and commitment to therapy can be established, the cost of acquisition decreases. Remember: Clients who attend their agreed upon appointments have better clinical outcomes and the practice spends less money on obtaining new clients.
Tip 1: Ensure your reception team are skilled enough to understand if a client is committed to attending therapy. When reception is only focussed on booking clients in the practitioner’s diary, the conversion of booked to attended is about 50-60%. Train reception to focus on helping the practice ensure that clients attend their first session.
Tip 2: Marketing plays a huge part in helping the entire practice with attended clients. If your marketing is advertising for everything under the sun you may be getting enquires, but your reception team will not be able to book those enquiries. If they can convert the enquiry to the booking the client’s commitment to attending may not be there either, so this will result in the client attending 1-3 sessions.
Tip 3: Understand what an ideal client journey looks like. For example, regardless of client presenting issue, it is important for the client to attend their sessions. What does the end look like? Is it okay for the client to cancel their last appointment? Discussing this within the first three sessions gives the client a solid understanding of the expectations of how to act in therapy.
Active Client Follow Up
When we talk about client acquisition we generally stop once the client has made a booking. Ideally, that cost can be lowered by understanding how long the client stays on their journey. Retention is a way to understand some of that cost. However, due to the complexity of the client’s presenting issues along with the clinician’s modality of treatment, I urge practices to steer clear of using this as a standalone business analytic. Ideally, we should be focussing on attendance. If the practitioner and the client agree they should be attending therapy and the client makes the booking and the practitioner accepts the booking, the focus is on did the client attend? Therefore, before discussing retention, I focus our practices to look at attendance first. Retention is a by-product of client attendance.
Tip 4: Understand ways to get better engagement with ensuring that clients who should be receiving therapy, do receive therapy.
Tip 5: If we discuss that we will actively follow up the client if and when they fall from their path, they will understand why they get a call from you “out of the blue” at the end of the year asking them how they’re doing.
There are so much minutia that goes into private practice. How can we stay excited about the art of the design? Well, to start, we accept that we are always learning.