How to Grow your Bottom Line With 1 Simple Question
Most clinicians don’t truly understand all of the components that they need to keep a customer.
More importantly, do you know how to apply efforts and methods into your business that leads to results - right now?
Background of the Brain
There are many cognitive biases that affect the way we rationalize, analyze, and process information.
#1 Anchoring Bias
This is when one number or fact anchors the context of a specific point. You see this in ads that say, “normally this sells for $89 but today only it’s $15!” The first price, $89, is used as an anchor.
#2 Availability Bias
This means that if something is readily available to us, we are more likely to let it influence our narrative. For example, if a plane crash is popular on the news, we assign more influence and importance to plane crashes in our thoughts.
#3 Risk Aversion
This is when we use fear of loss as a mode of motivation and we do whatever it takes to avoid a perceived risk.
There are, of course, many other biases that affect our thinking. Critical, rational, logical thinking requires a lot of effort, and our brains frankly don’t like exerting effort. Our perceptions and narratives are not based on rationality, but instead biases that lead us toward simpler, easier decision making.
Our brain is also unreliable when it comes to memories. Our memories can be influenced by stories we hear, emotions we feel, and frames we give it. Clinicians should focus on creating the right client memory, which begins long before the sale is made and continues as the client does business with you.
The Customer Loyalty Loop
The customer loyalty loop looks at the psychology of customer experience and what you can do to influence your customer to continue to do business with you over and over again.
There are four stages of the customer loyalty loop:
Stage 1. Imagination Before Persuasion: The Beginning of the Customer Experience
Categorizing people into new customers and existing ones is a false division because they are the same person, just at different stages of the process. To take your business to the next level, you must understand the psychology of the new customer experience.
If you want to succeed in Stage One, there is nothing more important than truly understanding who your clients are so you can market to them directly. Write a detailed narrative about your ideal customer. Include as many specifics as you can – the car they drive, the foods they eat, the clothes they wear. You can only find good clients if you know exactly what you are looking for.
The customer loyalty loop starts before any sale is made: from the very first time a prospect is exposed to your sales, marketing, and advertising efforts. The secret of Stage One is to learn how to tell your story in a way that implants a positive narrative into the potential customer’s head and maintains their interest in you and your business.
Remember, memories are highly unreliable. Keep this in mind as you learn about the following stages.
Stage 2. Conversion Without Coercion: Actually Getting the Sale
Stage Two is about continuing to build trust with your prospects and converting the prospect into a sale. You can also build on their expectations of the future by delivering an incredible experience every step of the way.
A customer is the single most expensive thing for a business to acquire, and the most important. To be successful, a business needs to treat the sales process as an integral part of the customer experience.
Stage 3. Experience Choreography: Delivery of Product or Service
At this stage, the customer has been influenced to complete the sale and now has an expectation that you’ll deliver on the promises made in the previous stages.
The most powerful thing you can do in this stage is to create distinct memories of doing business with your organization that are remarkable. Remarkable Moments are the moments that leave lasting imprints in your customer’s mind.
The most important thing to create a customer loyalty loop is creating a positive memory.
Stage 4. Happily Ever After: Follow- Up Marketing
A customer that recently finished a positive transaction is more likely to engage in a transaction with you again. And the more frequently a customer engages in a transaction with you, the more likely they are to continue that behaviour. Increase your customer’s frequency and willingness to engage, and you have sent them on a solid path around your customer loyalty loop.
This isn’t a closed loop. It is a circle, meaning that after stage four, the customer begins stage one again and continues through the cycle.
Each stage is important. The customer experience is the sum of the whole experience, and you need to focus on each of the four stages.
Not only is it important to create this loop, but also to MEASURE IT!
The challenge is to understand how clients are feeling and how to create a customer experience that delivers more happiness and less frustration.
Traditional surveys aren't up to the task. There are too many questions, and instead of action, they inspire paralysis by analysis.
Financial reports don't help us either because they don't distinguish between, as Fred Reichheld calls them, "good profits" and "bad profits."
What if you could ask one very simple question, calculate a score and take action to increase your score (and revenue)?
This simple system that we can use to increase customer loyalty is called the Net Promoter System (NPS).
Ask your clients this question:
On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us (or this product/services/brand) to a friend or a colleague?
After asking this question, you sort people into different buckets based on their answers - Promoters, Passives, and Detractors
Now that you have figured out which buckets your customers go in, it's time to calculate your Net Promoter Score.
This calculation is very simple as well:
NPS = % of Promoters - % of Detractors
Implement the NPS in your Clinic
Here's how you can implement the NPS in your clinic right now:
The NPS is a simple satisfaction survey that is validated in the literature and can help you improve your customer service and client experience. Ask your patients the following:
On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us (or this product/services/brand) to a friend or a colleague?
Collecting this information manually is time-consuming, easy to forget, and doesn’t drive actionable change.
Embodia has created a simple set it and forget it system along with analytics calculated for you, which is FREE for all Embodia Members. Here’s how you can easily and quickly implement the NPS into your clinic.