Blog #37 - How do you evaluate the client experience your graduate is deli

Once a graduate enters the 4 walls of the cubicle, we put much trust in them to look after our clients and provide them with the experience and effective treatments that are aligned with the culture of our business.

You have a number of ways to evaluate how your graduate is performing and if your clients are happy with their service. It is recommended to implement these monitoring systems early in their careers to provide an immediate feedback loop from someone other than you the boss, but an external party.

If the consensus from majority of clients is that they are not happy, than not all clients can be wrong and a graduate needs to hear this sooner rather than later to have adequate training and mentoring in the areas they are not delivering on client experience.

You can monitor graduates client experience in a number of ways and here is some to consider:

1. Client Experience Survey with New Practitioner

Kindly ask your clients with the new graduate therapist to fill in a very quick survey post session to gauge their satisfaction with their experience in your clinic.

We should all conduct these survey's in- house now and then to give our client's the opportunity to anonymously tell us how they feel about a clinician and the clinic experience in general.

Questions should include surveying the therapist's performance and also the clinic experience, as it may be a rude receptionist that is putting patients on the back foot prior to seeing a therapist.

Want a template of a quick survey for physiotherapy private practice to implement today. Click Here

2. KPI's

If your graduate is struggling to deliver value driven services and treatment to your client's, this will be reflected in the numbers. Particularly, an increase in DNA's, UTA's, Cancelled and not Rescheduled.

The numbers don't lie. As soon as you recognise a pattern in the numbers, have a discussion with your graduate to explain what the numbers mean. It is not sufficient enough to send them an email or put the numbers on their desk to look at.

They don't understand KPI's and they will not know how and what to modify to have consequential change in the numbers.

3. Word of Mouth

Ask your patients, ask your reception staff. Often patients will open up to reception staff about their experiences with a physiotherapist.

They will be reluctant to tell the therapist themselves and may be reluctant to tell you as the business owner for fear of getting the therapist in trouble.

I had the Exercise Physiologist in our clinic tell me when we started a graduate, how all the clients loved the new grad and felt he provided excellent treatments. This is exactly what you want to hear, that positive word of mouth experiences from your clients. They will be likely telling others the same information.

Keep in mind when feedback is positive, the world is a beautiful place for a clinic owner, but when the word on the street is negative, you can bet your bottom dollar they have told double the amount of people how bad the experience was. The odds are not in our favour.

To summarise this post, graduates need to hear how they are performing not only from us, but it is far more powerful to come from an external source such as our patients, fellow staff members and spreadsheets to feel real enough for them to change and to support and develop them for success. You don't want to feel like negative feedback is coming from all sources, but it needs to be addressed and fast.