Are you looking for ways to engage with your patients and collect feedback about your dental practice?

A good place to start is to build a plan to get direct feedback from your patients about their experience with your practice, good or bad. The insights you will get may surprise you and it’s a great way to engage with your patients to see what they really think about the service you are providing. 

Patient satisfaction should be a top priority since patients are the lifeblood of your business. A great way to collect responses is through automated thank you emails that include a link to your patients satisfaction survey.

Read on to learn more about what satisfaction surveys are and how they can benefit your practice.

Why Satisfaction Surveys Matter

Patient satisfaction surveys are questionnaires that give you insight into what your patients like (and don’t like) about their experience at your practice. The answers can give you a general idea of what your patients really think about your staff, as well as highlight areas that may need improvement. For example, knowing how many of your patients are dissatisfied with wait times or are confused about discharge instructions can allow you to make changes and improve. If you don’t know where the problems lie, how can you take steps to rectify them?

How to Get More Survey Responses

Once you’ve determined that a satisfaction survey is right for your practice, you can begin to design one. Let your patients know that their feedback will be helping others as they are in their decision making process, and that their answers will inform you about how best to improve your practice. Automatically send texts and/or emails that include a direct link to take a survey after a patient has completed their visit. You’ll find many patients will complete your survey if you simply and sincerely ask.

Satisfaction Survey Questions to Ask Your Patients

1. How would you rate your level of satisfaction during your most recent visit?

This question can help you understand your patients’ more recent experience with your practice, which can help you pinpoint what you’re doing well or what your practice should work on. Maybe you implemented a new policy or procedure and want to know if it’s actually working and what your patients think about it. Try to determine what issues are plaguing your patients based on their responses to this question then go to work on fixing them.

2. Can you tell us about your experience?

With this question, you can dive a little deeper into what the patients experienced during their recent interaction with your practice. Rather than a rating, you can get a unique, detailed description of what was good about their experience and what wasn’t. With that information, you can start thinking about ways to prevent a bad experience from occurring again or look for more ways to create exceptional experiences.

3. How likely are you to recommend us?

This question can help you determine whether your patients are advocates of your practice or not. If they are, you can look forward to word-of-mouth advertising, which is always great for business. If they’re not, you’ve got some work to do. If you’re receiving high ratings from your patients, don’t be afraid to encourage them to let their friends and colleagues know about your practice, or ask them if they already have.

4. How would you rate the quality of service you received?

This is straightforward and lets you know exactly what patients think of your service. If you’re getting generally high ratings, you know you’re doing something right. But if your ratings aren’t as high as you expected, you might want to consider examining how each of your team members interact with patients. For instance, have you trained your staff to be friendly, courteous, and helpful both on the phone and in person? Are your patients’ being attended to quickly and efficiently? Are there any other areas where you’re falling short?

5. How can we help make your experience with our office better in the future?

This question gives your patients the opportunity to provide solutions they think will help you improve your practice. Take their answers into consideration when you’re coming up with solutions. While not all of them will be helpful, it can give you an idea of where to begin when it comes to addressing common complaints and they may even recommend something you’ve never thought of before.

6. Is there any additional information you’d like to add?

Add this question as one of the last in your survey to make sure the patient can express any concerns you might not have covered in the previous questions. Create a text box large enough to allow them to write as much as they need to and make sure to make it optional so there’s no obligation to write something.

You can also ask questions such as:

• What other options did you consider before choosing our practice?
• How likely are you to return to us?
• How did you find our practice?
• What would you say to someone who asked about us?
• Which of the following words would you use to describe our practice (giving a list of options)?
• How well did we meet your needs and expectations?
• How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns?

Once you’ve finished gathering all of the questions you need to complete your survey, make sure to include follow-up questions. If someone rates your business lower than a three out of five, you are going to want to know why.  It helps to have built-in follow-up questions based on responses from your patients so that you know exactly why they rated you the way they did. It can be as simple as an email saying “Thanks for your response. Please tell us more about why you gave us this rating.”

Once you’ve got your survey results, you can start analyzing them to determine where you should make improvements. Start with the most common and work your way down the list. Also, be sure to proofread your survey so there are no errors like misspelled words or repeat questions, which can look unprofessional.

Now that you know the importance of patient satisfaction surveys, you can start crafting one of your own! Be sure to focus on the questions that matter most to your practice and closely align with your goals. Once you’re aware of the tweaks you need to make, start implementing them as soon as possible. Patient satisfaction and service are the most important aspects of your business because, without patients, you don’t have a practice.

No doubt a lot of work, breathe easy as there are options that help streamline and automate all patient communication, including satisfaction surveys. To learn more visit Demandforce at henryscheinone.com/demandforce/ or call 833.429.1132 to speak with a Practice Marketing expert.