Improving the Patient Experience - Retention

Explore how brand differentiation enhances patient and staff retention in fertility practices by establishing a clear position, values, and cohesive patient journey.

Never seen a guy in mouse ears and a three-piece suit before? Sounds like a you problem. Who brought their kids with them this week? Just a couple? Just one? Are we going to an amusement park this week? Just the beach? Well, for those of you that don't, that have brought your kids here before, if I show up in my three-piece suit and my mouse ears beyond what that is on the optics and say, okay, we're going to an amusement park and they're excited and we get in the van. Don't worry, you're getting in the van too.

We're all going to the amusement park and then we show up at Adventureland in Irvine. What's your kid going to say? Adventureland is a great amusement park. It's $25 and not $120.

The parking is free. There's no lines. If I show up to your kid's friend's party and say we're going to an amusement park in Orange County with ears on and we go to an entirely different amusement park, what's the reaction going to be like? What I want to give you here is that it has nothing to do with the shape of the ears or the design of the logo.

It's what that means, like the flag of a country. And that flag helps you to orient your team to recruit them, to retain them, and also to do the same for patients. So the concepts that I'm giving you today are using messaging to retain patients and staff.

And as physicians, will the physicians in the crowd raise their hands? Even the DOs? About almost half of you. This concept will be offensive if we don't get this principle correct, which is that brand is not the same thing as reputation. They're two different circuits, like how agreeableness and conscientiousness are not the same circuit.

You can be high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness. You can be high in strength and high in agility. They're two different circuits.

And very often when I speak about brand, physicians tend to think of it as a contrary end of the same circuit as reputation. They're not the same thing. They're two very different things.

They're both rooted in positioning, so they overlap. But to be clear, reputation is what somebody says about you. That's the five-star review on Adventure Landing.

We loved this roller coaster. Brand is what's communicated to the external world. I didn't tell you what amusement park or what brand this is, but you knew what I was referring to, because brand does four things that reputation doesn't.

Your reputation is what judges your brand. It's the promise that you make in your brand. But what brand does, the reputation does, at first it multiplies.

I can't just say Adventureland is great, Adventureland is great, Adventureland is great at a scale, but I can hold up these ears and you know exactly what brand I'm referring to. It differentiates. It expresses and it promises.

I want to talk about the first, I want to talk about the middle two for the rest of this talk, of what brand does. Differentiates and expresses. Differentiate meaning hold up the ears, you know who I'm talking about, but expresses is that there's nothing, there's no Adventureland t-shirt that your five-year-old niece can wear that says, I do this cool thing by going to Adventureland or I've done this cool ride in the same way that they just put on these ears to express themselves.

The way someone wears Patagonia to express I care about the environment. I wear Lululemon to express that I'm into self-care. And for those of you that think, those are all consumer brands, what does that have to do with the fertility field? It's here for at least two reasons that I can see that are not divorced from each other.

They're a feedback loop, so I can't really say which cause the other, other than that they are both in the same feedback loop. And the first is incoming patient expectations caused by what's happened in the rest of the market. Seven out of ten patients, according to Omnitech, expect their healthcare experience to be the same level of easiness as it is with other brands.

That means they're comparing you to Lyft, to Uber, to Instacart, to Airbnb, when there's no basis for that expectation of you being able to complete that in the delivery of art. So you have what people have gotten used to in the rest of the marketplace and bringing those expectations in. You also have a generational shift that happens every 8 to 16 years and it seems to be accelerated by technological change.

When many of you started your practices in the 90s, for example, who was the average generation IVF patient? The baby boomers were the median generation of IVF patients. Who were the donors in 1998? Which generation? The 80s generation, Gen X. The folks retiring were the silent generation. Those were the people that were that were kids during World War II and the Korean War.

Those were the doctors that were retiring in 98. The baby boomers were the new partners and REI fellows were also Gen X. Contrast that with today. Now Gen X is at the older end of our patient demographic.

Millennials are the median age. Gen Z are our donors and fellows aren't even Gen X anymore. They're Millennials.

The new partners buying in are Gen X and the older Millennials and the baby boomers are retiring. So we have a shift that's happening that's creating more of a brand expectation where we don't have the brand infrastructure to be able to meet that. And that's to say nothing of the people that are starting to do that in the space.

Think Kind Body, Modern Fertility, the first consumer brands. They could be a lifestyle app or a fitness designer clothing line but they're brands that are in the fertility field. Now we have that.

So as you start to counter position to that type of branding I want to give you the phases at which to do that. First thing is you have to set up your positioning. That's your core values.

Every practice has to have their core values. You don't need to be the mouse ears. You just can't be Adventure Landing and have no answer to the mouse ears.

You need a flag the same way that the brands coming into the space have a flag that make it easy for patients to say that's who they are and what they're about. I'm either about that, I'm what I'm not or I'm not. You need that answer and the first comes in your positioning which is your values, your differentiators, your tenure target and your three-year picture of where you want to be.

The next comes in your voice. You're gonna take a little bit of time writing out who you are, your mission statements, your slogans, your taglines, how you sound. The next is your image.

You're gonna work on your fonts, your colors, your image style guide because you're building your bible before you ever start to go out and preach it. You're building a canonical authority that anybody who is creating anything for your brand is using a central source of truth so that there's not this type of people talking in this way and this type of people creating images that look nothing like what the company is doing over here. Then you have your assets where you start to apply a your new logo, your brand story and your templates together once you have that brand guide assembled.

And as you start to think of how you're going to apply it to patient retention, you have to think of the patient journey in four different phases, not just the first one. Very often people think of the first phase of the patient journey when they think of marketing. That's your organic social media, your online reviews, the ads that you put out, your website, your content, the materials you bring to referring providers.

That's just the first stage. That's strangers to new patient inquiries. But your second phase is new patient inquiries to initial consult.

It's how you answer the phone. It's how you respond to people from your contact form. It's how you follow back up with the referring providers that have referred to you.

It's how you engage new patients in the welcome sequence. And your branding belongs in every piece of this and your messaging should be cogent with the messaging that you're using in the first phase to attract patients to the practice to begin with. Your third phase is initial consults to treatment.

You are bringing that same level of branding in the follow-up between your initial consult and treatment. Reaching back out to patients, the patient support groups you offer, any informational events that you have for existing patients that help retain them as opposed to them dropping off and help them to make a decision so they convert to treatment. And then fourth is the phase that ties it all back together where you're delighting the patients that you've served and giving positive messages to those that haven't had successful outcome with the same messaging so that they become part of the messaging for for new patients.

That's on the patient side. On the employee side, I'm going to give you three options. The first is harder than ever, second's the same, third is easier than before.

When you have a cogent brand, you make that into the values of the company that you're also using as part of your human resources recruitment and retention. So you have the values of Disney, creativity, hospitality, innovation. Let's take those three values.

When you have your cogent brand, you use a people analyzer to analyze each person on each of your brand values. There are a plus or a minus on each of the values and your examples of their performance are recorded against each of those values because the people that are working for Apple aren't working for less money than the Microsoft people and applying at higher rates than the Microsoft people because of the little Apple logo. It's what the little Apple logo means as the flag of the country that they're all signing up for.

Now that these brands are here, you don't need to be the Mouse Ears. You don't need to be Disney, but the Disney moment has arrived in the fertility field and you have to have an answer for it by knowing that position and reputation are not the same. They're two different circuits.

Investing in brand first by starting with your positioning and then third, applying that position across the patient journey, not just the first phase of patient acquisition and then finally applying that to how you recruit and how you retain and reward your current employees. Thank you all very much.